Like Professional Orchestration, with the Instant Composer: Counterpoint by Fux, you can study at home at your own pace, or you can join the Mentor Program where your work is reviewed and critiqued by a qualified instructor.
With The Instant Composer: Counterpoint by Fux, you learn how to practically apply the principles of counterpoint to creating effective, singable melodies, bass lines, counterlines, reharmonizations, and improvisating in each mode; first in two-part writing, then three-part writing, then four-part writing, then with advanced techniques.
These programs are based on a newly commissioned translation of the original Fux book which Lorenz Mizler, a student of J.S. Bach, translated, with Bach's supervision, from Latin into German.
BACKGROUND
Originally published at the expense of the royal crown in 1725 as Gradus ad Parnassum, Fux’s book was a major best seller and was distributed throughout the known music world of its time. It’s the book that trained Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and many other distinguished, successful composers. In 1742, just a year after Fux’s death, Lorenz Mizler, a student of Bach, translated the original from Latin into German directly under the eye of Bach, so Bach biographer Phillip Spitta noted. The Alexander edition was created from a new commissioned translation in 1990 of the 1745 Mizler edition.
With Gradus ad Parnassum, Johann Joseph Fux created a self-directed method for the young person wanting to learn music, but who couldn’t afford music lessons. The original book is basically in three sections. The first would correspond to a music basics class today. The second section would be two-voice through four-voice counterpoint. The remaining section covers imitation, fugue, motets and other common vocal forms of the day. Compositionally, Fux’s training goal was to teach the student how to write in each mode. He accomplished this instruction by giving examples in each mode along with specific cadential endings. By the end of three-part counterpoint, the student has actually learned to reharmonize in each mode. It’s from these cadential ending studies and the use of the raised leading tone that leads the student to an intuitive approach (to use a widely misquoted computer software term) to understanding secondary dominants (which Schoenberg noted in his Structural Functions of Harmony). With modes (chord scales) matched to specific chord positions (dorian on ii minor, etc.), we now discover that Fux in 1725 set forth the “modern” chord scale approach to composition.