Johann Joseph Fux. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
No textbook, in any discipline, can boast a career like it: Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, Vienna 1725, is still today, directly or filtered, the basis of how counterpoint is taught in half the world. Three hundred years of uninterrupted service, for a book written in Latin by an imperial Kapellmeister who apologised in his preface for publishing, old and ill, what he had taught all his life.
The secret of its longevity lies in two teaching inventions. The first is the form: a dialogue between a pupil, Josephus, that is, Fux himself, and a master, Aloysius, who is Palestrina in person, the patron saint of polyphony who had closed the age of the sound hunters. The pupil errs, asks, protests; the master corrects with infinite patience. It is a manual written like a scene from a play, and it is easier to study because someone inside the book is already making our mistakes for us. The second invention is the method of species: counterpoint taken apart in five progressive steps, note against note, two against one, four against one, syncopations, and finally the florid species that mixes them all. A graduated gym, where each exercise adds a single problem at a time: modern pedagogy, two and a half centuries early.
The roster of users is the history of music. Haydn, who could not afford teachers, taught himself counterpoint by wearing out his copy of the Gradus, and on that basis later taught Beethoven; Leopold used it with Wolfgang; the adult Mozart used it with his own pupils, and the exercise books of his student Attwood, corrected in Mozart’s hand according to Fux’s method, still exist. In the twentieth century, when every avant-garde threw its fathers overboard, the Gradus stayed afloat: even those who composed with the twelve tones demanded the old species from their pupils, because they teach something no aesthetic wears out, the control of two lines moving together without treading on each other’s toes.
The Melos library’s copy, a reproduction of the Viennese edition, sits on the shelf of treatises next to the Rameau that appeared three years earlier: the two books that divided up the eighteenth century, French harmony and imperial counterpoint. Rameau explained how chords are built; Fux how voices are led. Those two questions are still the questions, and the old Kapellmeister still answers.