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Improvised counterpoint

Welcome

This project site presents the sonic part of Vicente Parrilla’s doctoral research at Leuven University. Improvised counterpoint refers to the Renaissance practice of adding one or more unwritten parts to a pre-existing melody in real time, following established contrapuntal rules. Once regarded as an essential musical skill, it demanded ingenuity, technical precision, and acute aural control.

Re-examining this art today reveals how historical musicians thought, listened, and created—and how such embodied knowledge can inform modern performance and pedagogy. At the same time, it brings to light the divergences in training between historical practitioners and present-day performers, whose most fundamental challenges my research has sought to address, with the aim of opening new paths for historically informed performance on today’s concert stages.

1. The Project

This site forms part of the doctoral project Renaissance Improvised Counterpoint: Rethinking Concept, Cognition, and Aural Foundations (working title, FWO Project no. 11A9922N), conducted by Vicente Parrilla at KU Leuven, LUCA School of Arts, and docARTES.

The project investigates how the principles and practices of Renaissance improvised counterpoint—once a core performance skill—can be re-engaged today through combined aural, practical, and scholarly approaches.

2. Project Sites

One of the project’s central aims is to transform historical sources into practical tools for modern study and performance. To this end, one of its major outcomes is the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples—in its current form, a six-volume collection comprising 276 recorded tracks that brings Renaissance counterpoint examples to life as practical, audible resources.

To contextualise the audio materials and facilitate access to them, two companion websites have so far been created to host two of the three Renaissance treatises represented in the corpus. Centred on this main platform—improvisedcounterpoint.com—which serves to centralise access to them and to future additions, they form an interconnected set of sites dedicated to the study and practice of Renaissance improvised counterpoint. They can be accessed through the top navigation menu of this main site as well as through the following direct links:

  1. aranda.improvisedcounterpoint.com (forthcoming) — Mateo de Aranda, Tractado de canto llano y contrapunto (1535)
  2. lusitano.improvisedcounterpoint.com (forthcoming) — Vicente Lusitano, [Trattado grande de musica pratica] (F‑Pn Esp. 219, ca. 1550)

The web-based format provides an ideal platform for integrating the visual, textual, and aural dimensions of these sources. Presenting text, transcription, and sound side by side enhances both accessibility and understanding, allowing users to experience the examples not only visually or analytically, but also through sound.

Each site presents one specific treatise and includes modern transcriptions of its musical examples, newly prepared for this project, in which all vertical intervals are labelled using a three-colour system: red for perfect consonances, blue for imperfect consonances, and green for dissonances. These annotations elucidate the intricate network of contrapuntal relations found in the examples. Together with embedded recordings that restore the aural dimension of the material, the sites function as open-access pedagogical resources for musicians and scholars of Renaissance counterpoint.

Finally, by offering accessible—and, in Lusitano’s case, multilingual—editions of two remarkable sixteenth-century sources, this project contributes to the broader dissemination and appreciation of this repertory.

3. Open Access

All materials—texts, transcriptions, and recordings—are freely available for study, teaching, and performance.—VP.

Thanks to Kirby for supporting this project with a free license and to Daniel Guillan for his invaluable guidance on all things web-related, generously shared over many years.