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.
“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.
In today's Office of Readings for the feast of St. Maximillian Kolbe, there is an excerpt from one of his letters:
"Look, then, at the high dignity that by God’s mercy belongs to our state in life. Obedience raises us beyond the limits of our littleness and puts us in harmony with God’s will. In boundless wisdom and care, his will guides us to act rightly. Holding fast to that will, which no creature can thwart, we are filled with unsurpassable strength."
Which certainly seemed relevant to our discussion of harmony as both constraint and freedom to do more than we could alone.
Oh golly. This article has been in my to-read stack since it was published. I'm so glad you gave me the opportunity to read it! I've got a raft of thoughts.
I begin with a minor quibble leading to fundamental agreement: I think the author has mis-read That Hideous Strength --- as I read it, the two people engaging in flights of rhetoric are Cecil Dimble and Arthur Denniston ("Denniston and her" i.e. *Mother Dimble's* "husband.") However, I think he's right to point out that sort of relationship as one we ought to look to between husband and wife, whether or not Lewis actually put in those terms. It puts me in mind of the Psalms: Robert Alter points out that one characteristic of Hebrew poetry is that it begins with an idea in the first half of the line which is taken up in a new form somehow in the second half of the line ("The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want"). The first half is like the dux, and the second is like the comes.
But as a political philosophy student, I'm *fascinated* by the implications of this understanding for political order. It's right there in the Latin: the leader in the counterpoint is the "dux" , who goes first like a general of old but must also bear in mind how his actions will harmonize with what the follower is doing. It puts an interesting limit on innovation, too: the leader can only be "novel" or new in a way that is consonant with what he has already set his people up to do [boy, does this have parenting implications or what?].
Finally, I just have to say I love the reading of Gaudy Night. No non-inspired book has been as formative as that one in my life.
(I haven't done much writing since undergrad, so forgive the "undisciplined section reading response" tone of this.)
What I most appreciated about this piece was the way it confronted the reader with the insufficiency of his intuition. It seems obvious that, barring edge cases like perfect pitch or deafness, all human senses have functioned the same way since the emergence of the species, so that when someone listens to Bach in 2020 he is having more or less the same experience as someone doing so in the eighteenth century. By gesturing toward why that is unlikely to be the case, Ahern helps us move beyond this sort of biological reductionism.
I don't find helpful his elision of "modern harmony" and "accompaniment." Even millennials with little formal training could articulate a difference in relationship between the three voices in classic bluegrass to one another, and the guitar's relationship to any one of them. Hell, I think Glee was so popular because a certain kind of person is helplessly captivated by a capella vocal arrangements, in which a cluster of voices seem to grow into something lusher than the stack of their notes.
The other day I was rereading a sort of intro text to Orthodox Christianity called Bread & Water, Wine & Oil. In it the author, Archimandrite Meletios Webber, tries to summarize the patristic teaching on the progression from thought to passion: a thought seeks one's attention, one considers the possibilities of the thought, one consents to the thought, one is held captive by the thought, and finally one is in the throes of sinful passion. The relevant part for our discussion here is this:
"The ascetic authors often seem to talk about thoughts as if they arrived one at a time. However, we also experience undifferentiated streams of thought that follow the progression noted above, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and often with many competing or even contradictory thoughts arising at any given moment. It is possible that this is a condition that has been experienced only in modern times."
When I first read this I was very skeptical, and I'm still not convinced--but just allowing for the possibility of a completely different mode of interior monologue feels daring and even dangerous. If we can train our ears back to the eighteenth century and hear Bach as intended, can we work to discipline the voice of our consciousness itself? (I think this is what meditation in yoga is trying to achieve.) And what are the implications if variation in the fundamental human ways of being is much broader than commonly assumed? Perhaps projecting modern intuitions about love, sex, and art back onto historical figures is a fool's game. One might even call it the reduction of all human experience to a shallow "harmony"--flattened and cropped to underscore the best melodies of the 80s, 90s, and today.
Thank you for sharing this piece. It's a powerful metaphor and now I can't help interpreting everything as a form of counterpoint (especially as a parent and teacher!). It also reminded me of a popular description of "social peace" I encountered a while back. Instead of being a form of arrested development or stasis, Peace is a state of being that would resemble something like a beehive--where everyone is working toward their own good and the good of their community. That image of peace and this article have drastically helped me rethink what it looks like for a community to be at peace while also still struggling through moments that seem discordant. The difficulty, it seems, always emerges in determining when disagreement is detrimental and when it's beneficial.
Also, I recently learned that the pianist Leon Fleischer passed away when someone shared this video of him playing "The Sheep May Safely Graze" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVVd-gjR8Qk). It's been a perfect companion piece as I've continued to think about counterpoint as a metaphor.
I have only belatedly discovered this newsletter and was delighted to see that this article was the first topic, as I wrote my own reflection on how it illuminated my viewing of the Netflix limited series UNORTHODOX: https://chadcomello.com/an-unorthodox-harmony/
I'm coming in to the conversation late because I got distracted, but I read Busman's Honeymoon this month and Gaudy Night earlier this year and I'm loving the insight into the scene in Gaudy Night that I think I read past far too quickly-- not having any musical background, musical talk tends to go right over my head.
In Busman's Honeymoon you see Harriet and Peter continue to work through the implications of that Bach scene in Gaudy Night where Harriet recognizes that with Peter there is a possibility that two intellectually independent people can have a harmonious marriage, hearts and minds independent and equal, separate and inseparable. But, as they begin to navigate married life, that sort of harmony isn't automatic. It's a skill that must be learned-- and it's not easy to learn, not at all. And this is why Busman's Honeymoon is one of my favorite literary depictions of matrimony.
The crisis in the novel tests whether Peter and Harriet can truly be "each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.” They both are so entrenched in the habit of suffering alone and must learn, among other things, to suffer together. Peter has what we'd call PTSD but they refer to as nerves or shell-shock. And when he came back from the war (WWI) he was so traumatized by the experience of sending people to their deaths that he could not give even the simplest order for tea. And every time he is responsible for catching a murderer and must live through the moment of execution, the old trauma returns as once again he feels responsible for a death, even though he is certain the murderer is guilty.
So the first great test of their marriage is will Peter be able to share with Harriet not only his joy, but also his trauma. Will she be given a place in his suffering and allowed to suffer with him. As they live through the three weeks between the sentence and the execution Harriet recognizes that although he is courteous and cheerful, it is a facade. He is withdrawing from her behind interior fortifications. And even his moments of passion are somewhat impersonal "almost any woman would have done."
Harriet's moment of triumph comes in part because she realizes she has to put aside her desire to take the lead and to allow him to be the dux, to decide to come to her: "She could think only one thing, and that over and over again. I must not go to him; he must come to me. If he does not want me, I have failed altogether, and that failure will be with us all our lives. But the decision must be his and not mine. I have got to accept it. I have got to be patient. Whatever happens, I must not go to him."
And that triumph is realized when he finally does come to her instead of running away or remaining in his solitude. He comes to her and acknowledges his nerves, admits that he's been trying to bear it all on his own, and then he realizes that she is suffering too. She graciously acknowledges that she also has the same instinct, to go hide in a corner, the same experience of having to bear her suffering alone. And he says now that she is his corner and he has come to hide. The ultimate moment of union is when they suffer together, not the same pain, but together, each bearing their own burdens, but holding on to each other as a refuge. The novel's final moments have Peter breaking down and finally crying, allowing Harriet to see his tears. It's a delightful moment in which they learn how to harmonize.
Thanks for highlighting Ahern's essay. While I have read First Things for many years, this could have been something I "would get to later" and then never read. It is a treasure. My favorite line is "Contrapuntal harmony is an almost miraculous occurrence, a sonic solution to the problem of the one and the many." While Ahern used contrapuntal harmony to illuminate happy marriages, I found myself thinking of the harmony (or lack of it) at a family dinner table.
I'm not sure if it's a true example of counterpoint, but I was reminded while reading this article of the medieval melody and counter-melody now used for the hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fMja12dVdQ) What struck me the first time I heard the secondary melody is how it stands on its own while adding a beautiful interplay with the main melody. Now that I know it, I get the secondary tune stuck in my head just as often as (if not more than!) the main. (Although, to be fair, I've got plenty of modern alto lines in the memory bank for which this is the case too.)
It also called to mind the first story in "The Silmarillion," in which the Ainur "fashion[ed] the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony," overflowing to fill the Void. The music stemming from Melkor's discord in contrast was described as having "little harmony," being a "clamorous unison of many trumpets braying upon a few notes," and "drown[ing] the other music by the violence of its voice."
A wonderful article! As someone who regularly sings the kind of counterpoint Ahern describes (shout out to The Suspicious Cheese Lords), the discussion resonated (heh) with me deeply. Performing counterpoint well requires a singer to recognize that his line is a melody, yet must wax and wane in light of how it relates to the lines around it (e.g., as "dux" or "comes"). Maybe this helps explain why singing ensembles often foment deep friendships.
The line that struck me the most, though, was this: "Too much dissonance, and the melodies have ceased to notice each other, and they live in worlds of their own. It may be egalitarian, but it is not social." Does this not describe how the radically different conceptions of the human person informing the different sides of the culture wars have led to such virulent hatred and mutual lack of empathy? It's as if there were a choir of nothing but selfish soloists. They all think their line is the only and best. When other lines seek to come out, the selfish soloist tries to cow the other lines into submission by blasting his own line at fortissimo. And between takes, he throws haughty looks and comments about the lack of talent around him (or the inability of others to recognize his own superior talent). It's deeply anti-social, and only egalitarian in that everyone is equally convinced of the necessity of his starring role.
“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.” This quote brought to mind the relationship between the gas and break pedals in a car. The gas and brake pedals play off one another the to get to destination safely similar to the way melody and harmony play off one another to produce beautiful music.
I had no idea about counterpoint as a musical term, so I learned a lot in this article! I only knew the word in Spanish, contrapunteo, where it means something different (if you're not studying classical music, that is). Contrapunteo is basically like a rap battle, where two musicians sing improvised verses back and forth. I first learned this term from Fernando Ortiz's 1940 essay (Contrapunteo cubano / Cuban Counterpoint), which imagines Cuban history as a contrapunteo between tobacco and sugar. Long story short, contrapunteo makes me think less of "two balanced voices," and more of "two voices constructing something new in a dialectic where the discord is what makes it interesting." After all a rap battle where both people sound the same is just a duet. This comment isn't going anywhere, sorry, I didn't really understand the essay, I just love Fernando Ortiz and rap battles and wanted to share. Lol!
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.
In today's Office of Readings for the feast of St. Maximillian Kolbe, there is an excerpt from one of his letters:
"Look, then, at the high dignity that by God’s mercy belongs to our state in life. Obedience raises us beyond the limits of our littleness and puts us in harmony with God’s will. In boundless wisdom and care, his will guides us to act rightly. Holding fast to that will, which no creature can thwart, we are filled with unsurpassable strength."
Which certainly seemed relevant to our discussion of harmony as both constraint and freedom to do more than we could alone.
Oh golly. This article has been in my to-read stack since it was published. I'm so glad you gave me the opportunity to read it! I've got a raft of thoughts.
I begin with a minor quibble leading to fundamental agreement: I think the author has mis-read That Hideous Strength --- as I read it, the two people engaging in flights of rhetoric are Cecil Dimble and Arthur Denniston ("Denniston and her" i.e. *Mother Dimble's* "husband.") However, I think he's right to point out that sort of relationship as one we ought to look to between husband and wife, whether or not Lewis actually put in those terms. It puts me in mind of the Psalms: Robert Alter points out that one characteristic of Hebrew poetry is that it begins with an idea in the first half of the line which is taken up in a new form somehow in the second half of the line ("The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want"). The first half is like the dux, and the second is like the comes.
But as a political philosophy student, I'm *fascinated* by the implications of this understanding for political order. It's right there in the Latin: the leader in the counterpoint is the "dux" , who goes first like a general of old but must also bear in mind how his actions will harmonize with what the follower is doing. It puts an interesting limit on innovation, too: the leader can only be "novel" or new in a way that is consonant with what he has already set his people up to do [boy, does this have parenting implications or what?].
Finally, I just have to say I love the reading of Gaudy Night. No non-inspired book has been as formative as that one in my life.
(I haven't done much writing since undergrad, so forgive the "undisciplined section reading response" tone of this.)
What I most appreciated about this piece was the way it confronted the reader with the insufficiency of his intuition. It seems obvious that, barring edge cases like perfect pitch or deafness, all human senses have functioned the same way since the emergence of the species, so that when someone listens to Bach in 2020 he is having more or less the same experience as someone doing so in the eighteenth century. By gesturing toward why that is unlikely to be the case, Ahern helps us move beyond this sort of biological reductionism.
I don't find helpful his elision of "modern harmony" and "accompaniment." Even millennials with little formal training could articulate a difference in relationship between the three voices in classic bluegrass to one another, and the guitar's relationship to any one of them. Hell, I think Glee was so popular because a certain kind of person is helplessly captivated by a capella vocal arrangements, in which a cluster of voices seem to grow into something lusher than the stack of their notes.
The other day I was rereading a sort of intro text to Orthodox Christianity called Bread & Water, Wine & Oil. In it the author, Archimandrite Meletios Webber, tries to summarize the patristic teaching on the progression from thought to passion: a thought seeks one's attention, one considers the possibilities of the thought, one consents to the thought, one is held captive by the thought, and finally one is in the throes of sinful passion. The relevant part for our discussion here is this:
"The ascetic authors often seem to talk about thoughts as if they arrived one at a time. However, we also experience undifferentiated streams of thought that follow the progression noted above, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and often with many competing or even contradictory thoughts arising at any given moment. It is possible that this is a condition that has been experienced only in modern times."
When I first read this I was very skeptical, and I'm still not convinced--but just allowing for the possibility of a completely different mode of interior monologue feels daring and even dangerous. If we can train our ears back to the eighteenth century and hear Bach as intended, can we work to discipline the voice of our consciousness itself? (I think this is what meditation in yoga is trying to achieve.) And what are the implications if variation in the fundamental human ways of being is much broader than commonly assumed? Perhaps projecting modern intuitions about love, sex, and art back onto historical figures is a fool's game. One might even call it the reduction of all human experience to a shallow "harmony"--flattened and cropped to underscore the best melodies of the 80s, 90s, and today.
Thank you for sharing this piece. It's a powerful metaphor and now I can't help interpreting everything as a form of counterpoint (especially as a parent and teacher!). It also reminded me of a popular description of "social peace" I encountered a while back. Instead of being a form of arrested development or stasis, Peace is a state of being that would resemble something like a beehive--where everyone is working toward their own good and the good of their community. That image of peace and this article have drastically helped me rethink what it looks like for a community to be at peace while also still struggling through moments that seem discordant. The difficulty, it seems, always emerges in determining when disagreement is detrimental and when it's beneficial.
Also, I recently learned that the pianist Leon Fleischer passed away when someone shared this video of him playing "The Sheep May Safely Graze" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVVd-gjR8Qk). It's been a perfect companion piece as I've continued to think about counterpoint as a metaphor.
I have only belatedly discovered this newsletter and was delighted to see that this article was the first topic, as I wrote my own reflection on how it illuminated my viewing of the Netflix limited series UNORTHODOX: https://chadcomello.com/an-unorthodox-harmony/
I'm coming in to the conversation late because I got distracted, but I read Busman's Honeymoon this month and Gaudy Night earlier this year and I'm loving the insight into the scene in Gaudy Night that I think I read past far too quickly-- not having any musical background, musical talk tends to go right over my head.
In Busman's Honeymoon you see Harriet and Peter continue to work through the implications of that Bach scene in Gaudy Night where Harriet recognizes that with Peter there is a possibility that two intellectually independent people can have a harmonious marriage, hearts and minds independent and equal, separate and inseparable. But, as they begin to navigate married life, that sort of harmony isn't automatic. It's a skill that must be learned-- and it's not easy to learn, not at all. And this is why Busman's Honeymoon is one of my favorite literary depictions of matrimony.
The crisis in the novel tests whether Peter and Harriet can truly be "each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together.” They both are so entrenched in the habit of suffering alone and must learn, among other things, to suffer together. Peter has what we'd call PTSD but they refer to as nerves or shell-shock. And when he came back from the war (WWI) he was so traumatized by the experience of sending people to their deaths that he could not give even the simplest order for tea. And every time he is responsible for catching a murderer and must live through the moment of execution, the old trauma returns as once again he feels responsible for a death, even though he is certain the murderer is guilty.
So the first great test of their marriage is will Peter be able to share with Harriet not only his joy, but also his trauma. Will she be given a place in his suffering and allowed to suffer with him. As they live through the three weeks between the sentence and the execution Harriet recognizes that although he is courteous and cheerful, it is a facade. He is withdrawing from her behind interior fortifications. And even his moments of passion are somewhat impersonal "almost any woman would have done."
Harriet's moment of triumph comes in part because she realizes she has to put aside her desire to take the lead and to allow him to be the dux, to decide to come to her: "She could think only one thing, and that over and over again. I must not go to him; he must come to me. If he does not want me, I have failed altogether, and that failure will be with us all our lives. But the decision must be his and not mine. I have got to accept it. I have got to be patient. Whatever happens, I must not go to him."
And that triumph is realized when he finally does come to her instead of running away or remaining in his solitude. He comes to her and acknowledges his nerves, admits that he's been trying to bear it all on his own, and then he realizes that she is suffering too. She graciously acknowledges that she also has the same instinct, to go hide in a corner, the same experience of having to bear her suffering alone. And he says now that she is his corner and he has come to hide. The ultimate moment of union is when they suffer together, not the same pain, but together, each bearing their own burdens, but holding on to each other as a refuge. The novel's final moments have Peter breaking down and finally crying, allowing Harriet to see his tears. It's a delightful moment in which they learn how to harmonize.
Thanks for highlighting Ahern's essay. While I have read First Things for many years, this could have been something I "would get to later" and then never read. It is a treasure. My favorite line is "Contrapuntal harmony is an almost miraculous occurrence, a sonic solution to the problem of the one and the many." While Ahern used contrapuntal harmony to illuminate happy marriages, I found myself thinking of the harmony (or lack of it) at a family dinner table.
I'm not sure if it's a true example of counterpoint, but I was reminded while reading this article of the medieval melody and counter-melody now used for the hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fMja12dVdQ) What struck me the first time I heard the secondary melody is how it stands on its own while adding a beautiful interplay with the main melody. Now that I know it, I get the secondary tune stuck in my head just as often as (if not more than!) the main. (Although, to be fair, I've got plenty of modern alto lines in the memory bank for which this is the case too.)
It also called to mind the first story in "The Silmarillion," in which the Ainur "fashion[ed] the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony," overflowing to fill the Void. The music stemming from Melkor's discord in contrast was described as having "little harmony," being a "clamorous unison of many trumpets braying upon a few notes," and "drown[ing] the other music by the violence of its voice."
A wonderful article! As someone who regularly sings the kind of counterpoint Ahern describes (shout out to The Suspicious Cheese Lords), the discussion resonated (heh) with me deeply. Performing counterpoint well requires a singer to recognize that his line is a melody, yet must wax and wane in light of how it relates to the lines around it (e.g., as "dux" or "comes"). Maybe this helps explain why singing ensembles often foment deep friendships.
The line that struck me the most, though, was this: "Too much dissonance, and the melodies have ceased to notice each other, and they live in worlds of their own. It may be egalitarian, but it is not social." Does this not describe how the radically different conceptions of the human person informing the different sides of the culture wars have led to such virulent hatred and mutual lack of empathy? It's as if there were a choir of nothing but selfish soloists. They all think their line is the only and best. When other lines seek to come out, the selfish soloist tries to cow the other lines into submission by blasting his own line at fortissimo. And between takes, he throws haughty looks and comments about the lack of talent around him (or the inability of others to recognize his own superior talent). It's deeply anti-social, and only egalitarian in that everyone is equally convinced of the necessity of his starring role.
“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.” This quote brought to mind the relationship between the gas and break pedals in a car. The gas and brake pedals play off one another the to get to destination safely similar to the way melody and harmony play off one another to produce beautiful music.
I had no idea about counterpoint as a musical term, so I learned a lot in this article! I only knew the word in Spanish, contrapunteo, where it means something different (if you're not studying classical music, that is). Contrapunteo is basically like a rap battle, where two musicians sing improvised verses back and forth. I first learned this term from Fernando Ortiz's 1940 essay (Contrapunteo cubano / Cuban Counterpoint), which imagines Cuban history as a contrapunteo between tobacco and sugar. Long story short, contrapunteo makes me think less of "two balanced voices," and more of "two voices constructing something new in a dialectic where the discord is what makes it interesting." After all a rap battle where both people sound the same is just a duet. This comment isn't going anywhere, sorry, I didn't really understand the essay, I just love Fernando Ortiz and rap battles and wanted to share. Lol!