DOI: 10.36871 / hon.202203005
Authors
O. А. Galkin
Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts
Institute for Advanced Training and Retraining of Personnel, Minsk, 220007, Republic of Belarus
Abstract
The following article is devoted to the scientific heritage of the Swiss musicologist of the first
half of the XXth century, Ernst Kurth, whose name is closely associated with the formation of
the so-called energy concept of music, with the substantiation of the psychological nature of
music and, thus, with the emergence of a new research area in the development of systematic
musicology — musical psychology.
The article focuses on the concept of counterpoint, which is explored in context of the main
thesis of the energy concept of Ernst Kurth. The work formulates the most important principles
that reflect the psychological approach to music. The author analyzes the phenomena
of polyphony and homophony, their essential principles, and immanent features within the
framework of the energy concept. The co-reliance between the "counterpoint" and "polyphony"
is considered as such. A brief overview of the methods of teaching counterpoint from
the point of view of different approaches to it is given. It is primarily about Kurth's criticism
of the educational and practical system of the Austrian musicologist of the late XVIth — first
half of the XVIIth century Johann Joseph Fux (famous "five-grade" methodology), which was
raised to the dogma of "theory" and developed in the direction of harmonic substantiation of
counterpoint. Such an approach, according to Kurth, contradicted the idea of a horizontal interpretation
of counterpoint and led to a distortion of its musical essence and the phenomenon
of polyphony as a polyphonic melodic writing.
Keywords
energy concept of music, psychological approach to musical phenomena, counterpoint, linear counterpoint, polyphony, homophony, methods of teaching counterpoint