One Foundation, Every Style

The composers who score blockbuster films, the jazz pianists who reharmonize standards, the singer-songwriters who make you cry at the bridge — they all drew from the same well. The style changes. The surface changes. The underlying craft does not.

> The short answer: Every style of composition — from Renaissance polyphony to film scoring — rests on the same foundation: voice leading, harmonic tension and release, melodic shape, and contrapuntal independence. Gradus teaches that foundation. What you build on it is your own.

Does the style of music you want to write change how you should learn composition?

It does not. This is one of the most persistent misconceptions about music education, and one of the most damaging. Aspiring film composers sometimes skip counterpoint because it sounds like "old music." Jazz students sometimes skip harmonic fundamentals because they want to improvise. Pop songwriters sometimes skip music theory altogether because they distrust anything that sounds academic.

In every case, they are skipping the floor of the house they want to build.

The reason Fux codified species counterpoint in 1725 was not to make students write like Palestrina. It was to train the ear and the hand to manage independent melodic lines — to hear where motion creates tension, where it creates release, where voices support each other and where they fight. That skill is not Renaissance skill. It is compositional skill. It belongs to every style that has ever used more than one note at a time.

What did the great film composers actually study?

John Williams studied at Juilliard with Rosina Lhévinne, then privately with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco — the same teacher whose students included Henry Mancini and André Previn. He studied piano, harmony, and counterpoint in the traditional conservatory manner. The sweeping lines of the Schindler's List theme, the contrapuntal texture of the Imperial March, the voice-leading beneath the concert selections from Close Encounters — these are not accidents of instinct. They are the product of a trained compositional mind.

Bernard Herrmann, whose Psycho shower scene changed what film music could do, studied at Juilliard under Percy Grainger and Philip James. His scores are dense with contrapuntal writing — strings moving in contrary motion, inner voices that carry as much weight as the melody. He knew what he was doing with every voice because he had been trained to think in voices.

Ennio Morricone — arguably the most original film composer of the twentieth century — studied counterpoint and composition at the Rome Conservatory under Goffredo Petrassi. His famous trumpet lines for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sit atop harmonic and rhythmic counterpoint constructed with the same intentionality as a Bach invention. The whistled melody is the soprano voice. Everything beneath it is structured voice leading.

Even Hans Zimmer, who built his reputation on synthesizers and hybrid orchestration rather than classical scoring, credits his early work analyzing Bach chorales as foundational to his understanding of how harmony moves.

Is counterpoint only relevant to classical music?

This question contains a hidden assumption worth naming: that counterpoint is a style. It is not. Counterpoint is a discipline of thought — the discipline of managing multiple independent musical lines simultaneously.

A Beatles song with a melodic bass line beneath Paul McCartney's vocal is using counterpoint. A jazz pianist comping behind a trumpet soloist is practicing a form of counterpoint. A film cue that places a solo oboe melody against a pizzicato cello figure is using counterpoint. A church hymn with four voices moving in different rhythms is using counterpoint.

The formal rules of species counterpoint — no parallel fifths, resolve tendency tones, avoid leaps into dissonance — are not arbitrary restrictions invented to gatekeep composition. They are distilled observations about what makes independent voices sound independent rather than muddy, what makes tension resolve satisfying rather than random, what makes melody feel inevitable rather than accidental. These observations are as true in a Bernard Herrmann string cue as they are in a Palestrina motet.

Why do so many composers study the same historical method?

Because the historical method works. That is the whole reason it survived.

Fux published Gradus ad Parnassum in 1725. Haydn studied it. Mozart studied it. Beethoven worked through its exercises with Haydn as his teacher. Brahms kept a copy on his desk throughout his career. Schoenberg — who dissolved tonality itself — still taught species counterpoint because he understood that freeing yourself from a constraint requires first mastering it.

When a method passes through Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schoenberg without losing its relevance, something is being transmitted that transcends any single era's stylistic preferences. What is being transmitted is the ability to hear and control musical relationships — between voices, between chords, between expectation and resolution.

That ability is what separates the composer who realizes a vision from the composer who hopes the notes will work out.

Can you really learn to write film music by studying counterpoint and figured bass?

Yes — and this is not an indirect path. It is the direct path.

Film music depends on harmonic tension for suspense. It depends on voice leading for seamless modulation between keys and moods. It depends on contrapuntal independence for cues where the orchestra needs to support dialogue without overwhelming it. It depends on knowledge of instrumentation — which comes from studying the same orchestral writing that Brahms and Mahler were doing. None of these competencies come from imitating film scores. They come from building the craft that underlies them.

Imitation teaches surface features: that action cues tend to use brass, that love themes tend to be strings and woodwinds, that horror uses high strings and low brass. These are useful observations, but they are observations about the paint, not the architecture. The architecture — the ability to construct a cue that actually works — requires the craft.

John Williams did not score Schindler's List by studying Bernard Herrmann. He scored it with a musical intelligence built over decades of contrapuntal and harmonic training, applied with artistic judgment to a specific emotional situation. The training made the judgment possible.

What makes Gradus different from a classical theory course?

Gradus is not a classical theory course. It is a composition method that uses the historical sequence — from Renaissance polyphony through the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and into the twentieth century — as the structure for building compositional skill.

The sequence is historical because that is how the craft actually developed. Dissonance was the thread: each era expanded what was permissible, and understanding why each expansion happened is inseparable from understanding how to control the sounds involved. You learn modal counterpoint not to write like Palestrina but because modal counterpoint is where the ear first learns to hear independent voices. You learn figured bass not to write like Bach but because figured bass is where harmony becomes something you can hold in your hands and manipulate.

By the time a student completes the method, they have worked through the full vocabulary of Western harmony — every chord type, every voice-leading convention, every modulatory technique — not as a catalog of names to memorize but as sounds heard, written, and internalized. That vocabulary belongs to every style that draws on it, which is virtually every style of music composed in the Western tradition, including film music, jazz, musical theater, and the full range of contemporary concert music.

The style you want to write is waiting on the other side of the craft. The craft is what Gradus teaches.