The dissolution of common-practice tonality in the early 20th century did not end contrapuntal writing. Bartók, Hindemith, and Shostakovich all extended species counterpoint principles into new harmonic languages, creating a 20th-century contrapuntal tradition.
Counterpoint After Tonality
The early 20th century witnessed the dissolution of common-practice tonality — the harmonic system that had governed Western music from approximately 1600 to 1900. With the collapse of tonal hierarchy came new freedoms and new difficulties for contrapuntal writing. The species counterpoint rules — which define consonance and dissonance relative to a tonal centre — become problematic in music without a stable tonal centre. What is a "dissonance" when there is no tonic? What is a "passing tone" when there is no triad to pass between?
Composers addressed this challenge in different ways. Schoenberg and Webern adopted atonality and then twelve-tone serialism, finding new ways to create coherence through pitch-class sets and transformations. Bartók developed a synthesis of folk music and modernism that retained tonal reference points while using dissonance freely. Hindemith derived a new theory of counterpoint from the overtone series itself, independent of key. Shostakovich maintained tonal syntax while pushing it to extremes of harmonic tension. Stravinsky moved through neoclassicism into serialism, with each phase including significant contrapuntal works. The 20th century did not destroy counterpoint — it forced composers to rethink it from the ground up.
Bartók's Chromatic Counterpoint
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) brought together three streams: Hungarian and Romanian folk music, the Baroque contrapuntal tradition (especially Bach), and early 20th-century modernism. His Mikrokosmos (1926-1939) — 153 piano pieces in progressive order of difficulty — includes numerous counterpoint studies, culminating in pieces that use strict imitation and canon in a chromatic harmonic language. The Mikrokosmos was intended as both a piano method and a compositional textbook, and several pieces are explicitly labelled as canons, inversions, or fugal studies.
His Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) opens with a strict fugue whose subject is chromatic but whose fugal structure is rigorously traditional. The subject enters in successive voices in the violas, then second violins, then first violins and cellos, eventually saturating the texture with overlapping entries. The fugue builds to a fortissimo climax and then unwinds through inversion of the subject in the latter half of the movement — a structural symmetry that recalls Bach's Art of Fugue. The harmonic language is chromatic and dissonant, but the contrapuntal architecture is purely traditional.
Bartók's other major contrapuntal works include the String Quartets (especially the Fourth and Fifth Quartets), the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943). All demonstrate the same combination: free chromatic harmony with rigorous polyphonic structure.
Hindemith's Craft of Musical Composition
Paul Hindemith's Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition, 1937) proposed a new theory of harmonic tension derived from the overtone series, ranking all intervals by their degree of consonance from the octave (most consonant) to the tritone (most dissonant). The Craft of Musical Composition (Unterweisung im Tonsatz, 1937-) applied these principles to voice leading; his separate Traditional Harmony (1943) is a harmony primer.
The Hindemith system has several distinctive features:
- Intervals are ranked from most to least consonant: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, minor sixth, minor third, major sixth, major second, minor seventh, minor second, major seventh, tritone.
- "Tonal centre" is defined by the lowest, most consonant note in any given chord — not by traditional triadic harmony.
- Voice leading should move from less consonant to more consonant intervals to create the sense of resolution.
- Strict counterpoint rules (no parallel perfect consonances, careful dissonance treatment) are preserved but expanded to encompass a chromatic harmonic palette.
Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis (1942) is a 20th-century counterpart to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: a set of preludes, fugues, and interludes that systematically traverse all twelve pitch centres. The fugues are rigorous in technique and characteristic of Hindemith's vigorous, slightly austere musical personality.
Shostakovich's Fugal Mastery
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) composed his 24 Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 (1950-1951) as a direct tribute to Bach and the Well-Tempered Clavier. The work was inspired by Shostakovich's attendance at the Leipzig Bach Festival in 1950, where he heard Tatiana Nikolayeva play the WTC and was so moved that he decided to compose his own 24 preludes and fugues in all keys. Each fugue is in a different key and mode, and each demonstrates a different aspect of fugal technique: stretto, augmentation, diminution, inversion, double subjects.
The fugues are in a 20th-century harmonic language — modal, sometimes bitonal, with Shostakovich's characteristic acerbic edge — but the technique is strictly Bachian. The C major fugue (No. 1) is calm and contemplative; the A minor fugue (No. 2) is energetic; the final D minor fugue (No. 24) is a massive double fugue with extensive stretto, comparable in scope to the great late Bach fugues. The cycle was largely ignored at its premiere (Soviet authorities considered it "formalist") but is now recognised as one of the great fugal collections of the 20th century.
Stravinsky's Polyphonic Phases
Igor Stravinsky's three creative phases — Russian, neoclassical, and serial — all included significant contrapuntal works. The Symphony of Psalms (1930) has a double fugue of Bachian rigour as its second movement. The Symphony in Three Movements (1945) uses fugal procedures throughout. His late serial works, including the Canticum Sacrum (1955) and Threni (1958), employ strict canon and serial counterpoint. Across all three phases, Stravinsky considered counterpoint essential — "in fact the only path to genuine compositional invention," as he stated in conversations with Robert Craft.
Webern and Serial Counterpoint
Anton Webern (1883-1945) brought the most rigorous contrapuntal sensibility to twelve-tone serialism. His String Quartet Op. 28 (1938) is structured as a canon in which the twelve-tone row is treated like a fugal subject, with strict imitation and transformation throughout. His Variations for Piano Op. 27 and Variations for Orchestra Op. 30 use canonic mirror structures derived directly from the Art of Fugue. Webern's compositional ethos was explicitly that twelve-tone counterpoint should be as rigorous as Renaissance counterpoint — and his music delivers on this aspiration.
Sources and Further Reading
- Hindemith, Paul. The Craft of Musical Composition. Schott Music — a complete theory of tonal counterpoint for the 20th century.
- Taruskin. Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. IV. Oxford University Press.
- Open Music Theory — 20th-Century Voice Leading (openmusictheory.net, CC BY-SA 4.0).
- IMSLP — Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (imslp.org).
- Straus, Joseph N. Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. Norton, 4th ed.