Covering modal music from Gregorian chant through the seventeenth-century, The Principles and Practice of Modal Counterpoint is a comprehensive textbook combining stylistic composition, theory and analysis, music history, and performance. By supplementing a modified species approach with a wealth of complete musical examples and historical information, this textbook thoroughly joins principle with practice, providing a truly immersive experience in the study of modal counterpoint and familiarizing students with modal repertoire.

The Principles and Practice of Tonal Counterpoint is a comprehensive textbook that combines practical, "how-to" guidance in 18th-century techniques with extensive historical examination of contrapuntal works and genres. Beginning with an introductory grounding in species counterpoint, tonal harmony, and figured bass, students progress through the study of chorale preludes, invertible counterpoint, and canonic and fugal writing. This textbook thoroughly joins principle with practice, providing a truly immersive experience in the study of tonal counterpoint and familiarizing students with contrapuntal styles from the Baroque period to the 21st century. Also available is a companion volume, The Principles and Practice of Modal Counterpoint, which focuses on 16th-century techniques and covers modal music from Gregorian chant through the 17th century.

The only species counterpoint text that draws directly on Renaissance treatises, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style, Second Edition, provides a conceptual framework to guide students through composition and analysis as it teaches them general structural principles. It distinguishes between technical requirements ("hard" rules) and stylistic guidelines ("soft" rules), and includes coordinated exercises that allow students to develop their skills systematically. The second edition integrates improvisation activities and new repertoire examples into many chapters; revises the chapter on three-part writing (Chapter 14) so that it pays more attention to rules and strategies; reworks the chapters on cadences (Chapter 10) and on writing two parts in mixed values (Chapter 11) to make them more accessible to students; incorporates clarified instructions throughout; and includes a summary of rules.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The most celebrated book on counterpoint is Fux's great theoretical work GRADUS AD PARNASSUM. Since its appearance in 1725, it has been used by and has directly influenced the work of many of the great composers, including J.S. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven. Originally written in Latin, this work has been translated in to the principal European languages. The present translation by Alfred Mann is the first faithful rendering in English, presenting the essence of Fux's teachings.

"The purpose of this paper is to present the subject matter in concentrated form for the use of teachers and students who can devote only a limited amount of time to the study of modal counterpoint. Observance of the rules in this manual will produce a style close enough to the compositional procedures of Palestrina as to make it possible for the student to achieve, even in his elementary exercises, some of the flavor of living great music. Exclusive purity of style being neither possible nor desirable, a few details of the compositional style of this outline may correspond to the more relaxed practice of composers like Orlando di Lasso and Tomás Luis de Victoria rather than to the strictness of Palestrina. Special emphasis is placed on the development of the student's sense for freely articulated melody (hence the absence of barlines from our examples). Since the traditional training in the 'five species' tends to counteract this attainment rather than to further it, this discipline has been omitted from the present outline. In order to make the student acquainted with this method, its principles are briefly explained in the appendix."--Preface.