LASSO: an intelligent computer-based tutorial in sixteenth-century counterpoint

The LASSO tutorial in sixteenth-century counterpoint is a software system intended to provide an efficient learning environment. The project was undertaken in order to answer the need for new means of building skills in the compositional discipline of counterpoint (Newcomb 1983). There is no substitute for training that requires neophyte composers to deal with the problem of multiple voices according to rules that (1) ensure an agreeable motion and form within each voice, (2) maintain a balance of importance among all the voices, (3) keep all voices in independent motion, and (4) set the voices free from slavish dependency on prearranged chord changes. It is emphatically not the purpose of the LASSO system to imbue undergraduates with an appreciation for systematic musicology, or to turn students into composers of irrelevant sixteenth-century music. The purpose is not even necessarily to give them an absolutely accurate account of sixteenthcentury style, although the rules are intended to do that as much as is consistent with the overriding objective of simplicity and consistency of the judging criteria. The proper purpose of sixteenthcentury counterpoint instruction in the twentieth century is to acquaint young composers with one kind of intellectual exercise that Western composers have found valuable for centuries. The best way of providing this kind of training is still through the use of some version of the venerable "species" counterpoint method first introduced in the early eighteenth century (Fux 1725). Like Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, LASSO is a latter-day attempt to make instructional sense of the style by codifying its elements in a fashion that a scholarly composer or musicologist might feel amounts to an oversimplification, or even a misrepresentation. Several problems are commonly encountered by music teachers who provide species counterpoint instruction. LASSO is intended to answer or at least ameliorate the issues discussed in the following paragraphs. First, few professional composers (or musicologists, for that matter) can agree on a particular species counterpoint text, and they generally end up choosing a text they consider the best of a bad lot. It is quite difficult to write a textbook on species counterpoint; problems result from the conflict between the intended purpose of counterpoint instruction (to develop compositional skill) and the normal academic procedure used when teaching any historical subject (examination of original sources, such as the works of Palestrina, Victoria, Lassus, et al.). Some scholarly texts tend to be long on historical examples and short on simple advice for students (e.g., Jeppeson 1939); others, presumably in the interest of conciseness and clarity, fail to account for all the possibilities (e.g., Krenek 1959). The Schoenberg text (1963), while having the virtue of communicating the general features of the style by means of hierarchies of stylistic acceptability, can be a nightmare for a student trying to make a list of rules by which he can pass a course. While in many respects the Soderlund (1947) text appears the most useful for classroom purposes, students sometimes find even it confusing and self-contradictory, due to the fact that some of the general considerations outlined in the introductory section do not apply to certain species that are introduced later. Regardless of which text is being used, for each homework assignment the instructor must explain to the class what will be accepted and what will be rejected in student exercises despite (or in addition to) what is written in the text; to fail to do so is to Computer Music Journal, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1985, C 1985 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.