Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.

Wagner’s early compositional training is seldom examined, perhaps because of his unambiguous claim in 1851 to be an autodidact, taught only by ‘life, art and myself’. Yet Wagner’s work with Christian Müller and particularly with Theodor Weilig on early works and in abstract skills (notably counterpoint) reveal various dependencies. Wanger’s shifting attitude towards this period of training sits alongside his choice of more public mentors, in Beethoven and Weber, whose works he studied and arranged.

The rapidly changing political landscape of the Neapolitan Viceregno had a significant impact on the professional path of artists and musicians. Driven by a growing awareness of their central place in artistic culture, the Neapolitan string virtuosi became in many cases cultural agents who played an active role in endorsing and shaping the political and cultural programs of dynastic powers. The career of violinist Angelo Ragazzi is emblematic of the close cultural and artistic networks established between the Neapolitan and Viennese courts and illustrates the musicians’ negotiations with political powers. Ragazzi’s sonatas offer a privileged viewpoint from which to investigate the blending of “old” contrapuntal and “modern” concertante styles. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the proliferation in Naples of sonatas for three violins and continuo, characterized by marked contrapuntal language, derives in part from the influence of the Viennese contrapuntal style. The sonatas for three violins published by Giuseppe Antonio Avitrano appears as a unique case of printed instrumental music in Naples, realized thanks to influential aristocratic patronage, in a market that suffered from the absence of a significant middle-class amateur performers.

It was inevitable that Igor Stravinsky would experiment with serialism, given his penchant for interval-based composition, even making a comment to Milton Babbitt that he had always composed with intervals. Stravinsky’s intrigue with intervallic patterns is significant in some of his earlier works – particularly the motivic networks supporting the narratives of Firebird (1910) and Perséphone (1934). In fact, examining the interval ordering in the motives from these works, Stravinsky, perhaps unwittingly, retains the exact order of intervals while producing twelve different pitch classes. In retrospect, this seems to have foreshadowed the development of his own brand of serialism in his later years, beginning with Cantata in 1952, and maturing over the fourteen years through works such as Septet, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Canticum Sacrum, Threni, Agon, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, Variations: Aldous Huxley in memoriam, Abraham and Isaac, Elegy for J.F.K., Introitus: T.S. Eliot in memoriam, and his last major work, Requiem Canticles, in 1966.

Charlie Parker is the focus of this account of Dizzy Gillespie's band in California in 1945-6. Shipton talks to survivors of the sextet – Milt Jackson, Sten Levey and Ray Brown, as well as those who heard the band there such as Clora Bryant, Teddy Edwards and Roy Porter. He traces the development of bebop back to New York, discussing this music with pianist Sir Charles Thompson, a lifelong friend of Buck Clayton who brought Buck, Parker and Dexter Gordon together for a record in 1945. Bassist Jimmy Woode recalls working with Parker in Boston, and Teddy Edwards brings the Los Angeles scene to life.

In her “Étude comparée des langages harmoniques de Fauré et de Debussy,” Françoise Gervais contends that “melody does not have an independent existence in Fauré’s music. It is born of the harmony and remains inseparable from it.”1 Moreover, not a single chapter of this book, which has stood now for more than forty years as a musicological summa on Fauréan harmony, is dedicated to melody.

This chapter is the first of three that set out the basic building blocks of musical syntax in Renaissance music, beginning with those connected to pitch. The first section sets out the key concepts of music theory dating back to the time of Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, whose pertinence endures into the Renaissance (thus, the gamut, mode, the species of fourth and fifth, the so-called Guidonian Hand, and the hexachord). The next section lays out the complex (and at time fraught) relationship between these concepts and composed polyphony, laying bare in particular the tension between modes (which were initially adapted from Greek theory to classify plainchant) and polyphony. This is seen most obviously in the functioning of the most fundamental element of counterpoint, the cadence. The chapter concludes by considering other key elements of pitch-treatment, including musica ficta, dissonance treamtment, and enhanced or expanded chromatic practice.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

Brahms never studied at a music conservatory, nor did he ever teach at one. However, in private, individually negotiated settings, he was active as a teacher throughout his musical life in many ways. From his youth onwards, he gave piano lessons and sporadic theory lessons [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]; later, he acted as occasional adviser to younger composers on many occasions, and even took on some regular students.

The young Brahms studied piano with Otto Cossel from 1840, changing to Eduard Marxsen in 1843, who also subsequently gave him composition lessons. At the age of fourteen at the latest, he began to give piano lessons himself, initially for free as a favour but soon in order to earn an income [see Ch. 8 ‘Finances’]. The few surviving statements of four of his students reveal that in these years he neither enjoyed teaching, nor was he particularly good at it.