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