Where does counterpoint collide?

The art of combining two or more melodic lines that keep their own shape yet sound well together, so the music has several voices at once rather than one tune over chords. Fux's 1725 Gradus ad Parnassum, still taught through Mann's translation, set out the graded species rules for how such voices may move against each other, note against note, while staying consonant and independent. Later work, such as Huron's 2001 study, has tried to ground those rules in what the ear actually hears. This referent is a concrete technique for writing music, and it is not a way of reading books or a way of joining a film's sound to its picture, even though both of those borrowed its name.[1][2]

Unit

A texture of two or more independent voices sounding at once

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Checked against species-counterpoint rules for consonance, direction of motion, and the independence of each voice

A way of interpreting a work by holding it together with the history it depends on but keeps offstage, so the comfortable world of a novel is read alongside the colonial labour and territory that made it possible. Said's 1993 Culture and Imperialism named this method contrapuntal reading and openly took the word from music, asking the reader to hear the metropolitan story and the colonial one as two lines at the same time. This referent is a method of criticism, an act of interpretation, not a rule for composing music or a principle for cutting film, and it borrows the musical image only to describe reading two histories at once.[3]

Unit

One paired reading that sets a text against the history it presupposes but omits

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Practised by juxtaposing a canonical text with the imperial experience it assumes yet keeps silent

A principle for editing sound film in which the sound track is deliberately placed in tension with the picture rather than merely matching or explaining it, so that meaning arises from the friction between what is heard and what is seen. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov's 1928 statement on sound, reprinted in Eisenstein's Film Form, argued for exactly this contrapuntal use of sound and warned against sound that only doubles the image. This referent is a working idea in film aesthetics about the relation of sound to picture, and it is a separate thing from a technique for writing music or a method for reading books, sharing with them only the musical word.[4]

Unit

A sound track held in tension with the picture instead of matching it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by whether sound runs against the image to create meaning rather than serving as naturalistic accompaniment