Counterpoint is the combination of two or more melodic lines in musical harmony.
Counterpoint (from Latin 'punctus contra punctum': note against note) is the technique of combining two or more melodic lines that are harmonically related yet rhythmically independent — each voice pursuing its own path while combining with the others into coherent harmony. The technique was the central compositional discipline of Western art music from the Renaissance through the Baroque period, codified by theorists including Palestrina (whose style became the model for strict counterpoint) and Fux. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier (48 preludes and fugues) and The Art of Fugue are its supreme achievements: voices that maintain complete independence while combining into absolute harmonic logic. The fugue — in which a single theme is introduced successively by different voices and then developed through complex interweaving — is counterpoint's highest form. Counterpoint remains central to music education today. The technique reached its most rigorous codification in the Renaissance and early Baroque, when theorists like Johann Joseph Fux, in his 1725 treatise 'Gradus ad Parnassum,' formalized 'species counterpoint' — a pedagogical system of graduated exercises still used to train composers today, moving from simple note-against-note writing to increasingly independent, rhythmically complex interweaving of voices. Bach represents counterpoint's historical summit: his fugues, in which a single melodic subject is stated and then imitated, inverted, stretched and combined with itself across multiple independent voices simultaneously, remain the technique's most studied and admired demonstration, and 'The Art of Fugue,' left unfinished at his death, reads almost as a final systematic exploration of everything counterpoint could do. The style fell somewhat out of fashion in the Classical period, when composers like Haydn and Mozart favored a more homophonic texture — a single clear melody over supporting harmony — though both were thoroughly trained in strict counterpoint and deployed it strategically for dramatic or scholarly effect. Counterpoint never disappeared, however: it resurfaces throughout later Western music, from Beethoven's late string quartets to Brahms's deliberately Bach-influenced writing, to 20th-century composers like Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and its underlying principle — multiple independent lines that remain individually coherent while combining into a unified harmonic whole — has direct analogues in jazz counter-melody and even in multi-track popular music production.