Harmony & Counterpoint

Line before chord — this is the music beneath the music

Harmony is the grammar of tonal music — the system of tension and release, expectation and surprise, that gives every phrase its meaning. Counterpoint is older still: the art of independent lines moving together, each voice singing its own song while obeying the deeper logic of the whole.

At The Global Conservatory, we teach both as inseparable disciplines. You cannot write a convincing harmonic progression without understanding voice leading. You cannot construct a fugue without internalizing the rules of dissonance and resolution that govern every note.

This program traces the full arc of Western harmonic practice — from the simplest I–V–I cadence through chromatic modulation, Neapolitan chords, augmented sixths, extended tonality, Impressionism, jazz harmony, and the dissolution of tonality itself in the 20th century.

Harmony is not color. It is grammar. And counterpoint is the architecture that holds grammar in place.

Six courses in the art of independent lines

Counterpoint is the discipline of making multiple voices sing independently while obeying a shared harmonic logic. It predates harmony as we know it — Palestrina wrote counterpoint a century before the concept of “chord progressions” existed.

This sequence moves from the strict species exercises that train voice-leading reflexes, through the modal counterpoint of the Renaissance, the tonal counterpoint of Bach, the construction of fugue, and into the linear thinking of 20th-century masters.

CP 101 — Species Counterpoint I

Note-against-note, 2:1, 4:1, suspensions. Emphasis on control, voice direction, and the discipline of writing within strict constraints.

CP 102 — Species Counterpoint II

Imitative textures, chromatic motion, advanced dissonance treatment. Moving toward free counterpoint.

CP 103 — 16th-Century Counterpoint

Modal counterpoint in the style of Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin. Cadential structure, modal frameworks, and the aesthetic of Renaissance polyphony.

CP 104 — 18th-Century Counterpoint

Two-voice inventions, canons, invertible counterpoint. The contrapuntal logic of Bach and the Baroque.

CP 105 — Fugue Construction

Subject, countersubject, episode, stretto, augmentation, diminution. The most demanding form in all of music — and the ultimate test of compositional discipline.

CP 106 — Counterpoint in the 20th Century

Hindemith, Bartók, Schoenberg. Linear logic in post-tonal language — how counterpoint survived the death of common-practice tonality.