Improvised counterpoint

This site presents the recordings and open research datasets associated with Vicente Parrilla’s doctoral research at KU Leuven. 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 principles. Once regarded as an essential musical skill, it required technical precision, ingenuity, and refined aural control.

Re-examining this practice today offers insight into how historical musicians thought, listened, and created, while also addressing the challenges faced by present-day performers seeking to engage with historically grounded contrapuntal techniques. This research explores how embodied musical knowledge transmitted through historical pedagogy can inform contemporary performance and training.

Alongside the audio corpus, the project produces a series of open research datasets, published on Zenodo, including modern digital editions of sixteenth-century contrapuntal sources and analytical materials designed to support research, teaching, and performance.

1. The Project

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

The project investigates the principles and practices of Renaissance improvised counterpoint through combined aural, practical, and scholarly approaches, with particular attention to historically grounded methods of training and real-time musical decision-making.

2. Research Infrastructure

A central outcome of the project is the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples (CRCE), a multi-volume research audio corpus comprising 420 historically informed instrumental recordings of 276 counterpoint examples transmitted in sources by Mateo de Aranda, Melchor de Torres, and Vicente Lusitano.

To contextualise the audio materials and facilitate access to them, this main site is complemented by dedicated companion platforms presenting individual Renaissance treatises. Together, these sites form an interconnected research environment centred on improvisedcounterpoint.com, which provides unified access to recordings, datasets, and documentation.

The open research datasets are archived on Zenodo within the Improvised Counterpoint Sources and Corpora community, while their source files and editorial documentation are maintained in public GitHub repositories to support transparency, reuse, and further development.

3. Companion Sites

Dedicated sites presenting individual treatises can be accessed via the navigation menu or through the following links:

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

Each site provides modern transcriptions of musical examples prepared for this project, including analytical interval labelling. Together with embedded recordings, these resources aim to help restore the aural dimension of Renaissance contrapuntal pedagogy.

4. Open Access

All materials—texts, editions, transcriptions, and recordings—are freely available for study, teaching, and performance. Further information on individual datasets, including archival DOI records and associated GitHub repositories, is provided on the Datasets page.

5. Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) (Project no. 11A9922N). Thanks to Kirby for providing a free licence, and to Daniel Guillan for his longstanding guidance on web development.