Our August Read: Contrapuntal Order
Our featured guest will be Micah Hendler of the YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus
Welcome to our Tiny Book Club! I was hoping to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50–100 readers at launch, and I’m delighted to have just over 250 of you ready to read together.
Since this is our first time, some ground rules:
You can always decide, month to month, which articles you want to engage with. There’s no “falling behind” in an episodic book club.
There’s no minimum level of participation required. The comments will be open for discussion, with a few prompts from me to get started. But you’re welcome to be a lurker or to ignore the comments entirely.
Keep comments on the topic of our readings—the comments aren’t a place for general discussion.
Follow the comments conduct code you expect me to eventually write. I’m starting with a rules-light approach, since I think many of you came here specifically in order to have a more thoughtful discussion than is possible elsewhere. I’m sure there will be questions and more formal guidelines in time. But, for now, be on your honor, and ping me if you spot a problem.
Our month’s discussion will follow this schedule:
First of the month (right now!): Announcement of our reading, you can send in suggested questions for our guest.
Third week of the month: I post my dialogue with our guest. You add your thoughts.
Last week of the month: I share some of the highlights of your comment threads.
With that out of the way, let me introduce our first article and our first guest.
“Contrapuntal Order” by John Ahern, First Things (April 2020)
For now, let me just give you one of my favorite paragraphs from this essay on music and societal difference without division:
Very often, “harmony” serves as a synonym for perfect agreement: A harmonious marriage or society is one in which all members are in perfect accord. But the contrapuntal idea of harmony implies a different vision of social concord, one in which the various parts retain autonomy but find their fullness in relation to each other and to a certain order that arises from their life in common. “Implicit in the term contrapuntal,” says Walter Piston, “is the idea of disagreement. The interplay of agreement and disagreement between the various factors of the musical texture constitutes the contrapuntal element in music.” This account mirrors the almost mystical formulation of Franchino Gaffurio, the fifteenth-century music theorist, for whom harmony could be defined as discordia concors, “agreeing disagreement” or “concordant discord.” Contrapuntal harmony is an almost miraculous occurrence, a sonic solution to the problem of the one and the many.
And our guest will be Micah Hendler. Micah is a friend from college, where I knew him as a talented singer and a kind person. He relied on both skills when he founded the Jerusalem Youth Chorus, which brings together Israeli and Palestinian teens to blend their voices in song and dialogues with each other. He drew inspiration from his experience with the Seeds of Peace International Camp for Coexistence. You can read a bit more about Micah here.
I’m very glad to have Micah as our guest to discuss how difference can be channeled into “concordant discord.”
The comments are open for you to suggest questions for me and Micah to tackle in our dialogue, based on the article. There are more of you than I expected, so I may post some rolling intro threads later on.
Finally, Ivan Plis has sent in an excellent complement to our readings: a visual rendering of a motet. It’s a big help for people (like me!) who sometimes hear complex music as a wall of sound.
I also really enjoyed Rob Kapilow’s Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim on this front. There are songs I love, that I’ve heard or sung dozens of times, without any sense of why they work so well. Kapilow has a youtube page to go with the book, where he works through musical theater songs and alters them, diminishing the brilliance of the composition, so you can compare and contrast the expected choice and the flash of genius. I recommend it.
I’ll be back to you in two weeks with my dialogue with Micah. In the meantime, get reading! Forward this email to any of your friends you’d like to be reading with. And, finally, please do share some of your own observations and questions in the comments. I’ll bring some of them up in the dialogue.
Ex libris,
Leah Libresco Sargeant
I was bound to love this article, because I’ve been singing Renaissance polyphony for years. When new acquaintances ask me about the repertoire that I sing, and I tell them, often I have the pleasure of explaining to them what polyphony is—which is also a great challenge, because I think it’s impossible to help people imagine how polyphony sounds simply by describing it to them. They must hear an actual performance of it. Sometimes they ask me to sing a piece for them, but it’s impossible for me to do that because there is no “melody.”
A question on which I would be interested to hear your and Micah’s thoughts: How might an appreciation of counterpoint shape writers’ approaches to journalism and commentary? Many outlets (and individuals retweeting things on Twitter) focus on eye-catching phenomena even if they aren’t representative of the whole community or country. For example, we hear a lot about anti-maskers, but survey data suggest that most Americans are in favor of masking and that Americans wear masks at higher rates than do people in several other large developed countries. How does one give the “right” amount of coverage to anti-maskers—within a given article, or across a given outlet’s coverage—while also balancing their voices with those of others? Could we argue that reporters have a responsibility to shine a light on “the concord of different sounds controlled in due proportion,” to the extent that it exists in a polity?
And another area for questions: education. Precisely because polyphony is not “melody accompanied by accompaniment,” it is *much* harder to sight-sing than homophony is, if one has not had substantial training in reading music. Therefore, if we want our children to be able to participate in contrapuntal order, we need to teach them to read music. Leah, what are your plans for the musical education of your child? And Micah, how would you rate the American primary and secondary education system when it comes to music? Are there ways it could improve?
I’ll leave you with a related article and a quotation.
“How Communal Singing Disappeared from American Life” — https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/how-communal-singing-disappeared-from-american-life/255094/
“No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear; but the music that I don’t know at all, and have no notion about, delights me—affects me. How stupid the world is that it does not make more use of such a pleasure within its reach!”
— Tertius Lydgate, when asked by Rosamond Vincy if he has studied music, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
This excellent article recalls for me a long ago conversation on the Trinity. My conversation partner, and eventual husband, dwelt on the human tendency to collapse tension. If we can't conceive of threeness and oneness simultaneously, we flatten the more complex aspect to resemble the limits of our understanding, and the tension is thereby removed. In this way, perhaps inadvertently, we recreate the world in our own image. Although I perceive beauty in both the modern and older conceptions of harmony so aptly described in this article, I think I share with the author a sense of loss that one concept has replaced the other. It is a collapsing of tension, and with that recreation in our own smaller image, we lose much of our perception of the character, even the worth, of melodies not our own.