YNET, "Private Investigators" section; Published 23/8/2025 link
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When I was a teenager studying performance and composition, there was a word my teachers would occasionally drop into conversation that sounded mysterious, almost mystical: counterpoint. From half-heard explanations I gathered that it was a skill one only encountered after high school. The aura of secrecy around it, almost kabbalistic, grew when I asked directly what exactly I would be learning, only to receive the infuriatingly vague reply: “It’s hard to explain, but through the music you’ll write people will know you’ve learned it.”
When I finally came to study counterpoint in my undergraduate degree, some of the fog lifted. I discovered that counterpoint is essentially the art of combining melodies so that they “fit” together and sound pleasing. I was even taught rules, admittedly quite restrictive rules, for doing so: how to rise to the higher notes and descend from them, how one melody should move when the other is being static, and so on. Counterpoint classes are, in essence, training in writing melodies that sound as if they were composed 450 years ago—using a strict set of rules to make them blend in a way that would have been considered pleasing to the ears of listeners back then.
But the deeper one digs into counterpoint, the more one realizes that it is not just a technical exercise. It holds a key not only to the combination of melodies across periods and styles, but also to understanding something much larger: simultaneity. Writing counterpoint is, at its core, the organization of multiple things happening at once. And simultaneity is not just a musical phenomenon—it is everywhere. It is in the crisscrossing of cars and pedestrians at a crowded junction, in the dawn chorus of birds, or in the intertwining plotlines of a good episode of Seinfeld. Each plotline in Seinfeld unfolds independently and seems unrelated to the others—Jerry cannot let go of his lucky shirt, Kramer is obsessed with driving golf balls off a cliff, George spins lies to impress his girlfriend. Yet at the episode’s climax, these storylines intersect, interlock, and resolve in a way that feels both perfect and inevitable.
Counterpoint gives us a way of theorizing simultaneity that is nearly impossible to achieve in other fields. It’s relatively straightforward to describe all possible combinations in a system with limited elements (twelve pitch classes, two categories—consonant and dissonant—and a handful of proportions between note lengths). It is far harder to theorize comedy, where a single misplaced detail can collapse the joke. (I doubt many other sitcoms will bring together marine biologists and golf balls flying into the horizon—that is a unique case of simultaneity, not a recipe to be reused.) Counterpoint, then, is the purest laboratory we have for thinking about how multiple things coexist.
Early in my doctoral studies, I began examining the rule systems composers used to manage simultaneity—some familiar from my conservatory training, others alien or lost to time. One such system was devised by a Jesuit priest in the late sixteenth century. He presented it as a numerical table, promising readers that if they used the numbers correctly, their melodies would combine beautifully. I found great pleasure in “cracking” the code behind that table.
Later, I turned to “reverse engineering” the music of Henry Purcell, one of the most inventive seventeenth-century composers, to understand the contrapuntal logic he relied on. Purcell knew the rules intimately, but he also tested their limits: could a melody combine pleasingly with itself in canon? What about at different speeds? At different pitch levels? Could he force together preexisting melodies that were not meant to be heard simultaneously?
My research showed that Purcell often arranged such experiments in palindromic structures: combinations at the beginning would return at the end; those just after the beginning would reappear just before the close; those before the midpoint would surface again just after it. Tricks like these were rarely written down—they were passed from teacher to student like trade secrets, fueling a spirit of competition among composers. Each had his own preferred devices, or invented new ones. Until around 1750, a composer’s reputation rested largely on the sophistication of his counterpoint. Bach’s unfinished Art of Fugue remains to this day the supreme monument of that tradition.
Studying counterpoint reveals the architecture of a piece—the planning behind it, the blueprint of its combinations—even when no sketches survive. It exposes hidden layers of craft. Recently, for example, I found the same palindromic device I once traced in Purcell’s works in those of his Austrian contemporary, Georg Muffat. Mapping their compositional choices side by side might uncover unexpected connections. Did they know each other? Did both learn their tricks from a common source? We know they admired the music being written in Rome at the time; their contrapuntal techniques may help reconstruct their genealogies of influence—who learned what, from whom, and how far each took the art.
For me, studying counterpoint has become a way of tracking the movement of ideas across composers, regions, and generations. It also offers a glimpse into a hidden dimension of intellectual history. Beneath the surface of a beautiful piece lies a web of sophisticated calculation; by unpacking it, we can learn about the evolution of thought, planning, and design in our culture. Alongside this work, I also study earlier repertoires, nineteenth-century manuscripts of Jewish music, and the history of music in Mandate-era Palestine. I even reconstruct works whose notation has only partly survived. And in the end, all of these threads—different in style and subject as they may be—intertwine in a counterpoint of their own.