„PRIMENA TEHNIKE POKRETNOG KONTRAPUNKTA U TENOR MISAMA PALESTRINE

Abstract

Imitation, cantus firmus or a convertible counterpoint technique, applied in the most part of Renaissance composers’ pieces, has been explored for centuries now with a goal to discover all their characteristics and fully unravel the regulations of their application. Unlike imitation or cantus firmus technique, the technique of convertible counterpoint represents a special challenge to researchers. In fact, for a long period of time its special features had not been recognized or completely presented in any study, up until very recently. The preservation of “composers’ secrets” was characteristic of all who made the compositions containing this technique, they were a part of “from master to apprentice” inheritance, and they were not fully explained theoretically up until the papers of the nineteenth and twentieth century theorists. Of particular importance, however, was the work of Sergei Ivanovich Taneiev (Серге́й Ива́нович Тане́ев), a Russian composer and theorist. The aim of this paper is to present the applied technique of the convertible counterpoint characteristics and its relation with the cantus firmus technique in Palestrinas’ (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina) tenor masses. This analysis incorporates all of the seven Palestrina’s tenor masses. Here, relation and confrontation of two very important counterpoint techniques are determined as the very essence of the Renaissance music.