About Contrapunctus

Contrapunctus is an atlas of Western art music in seven chapters, from Bach to the present, with a prologue that reaches back to plainchant.

The recordingsPublic domain and Creative Commons

Every recording in the Concert Hall is in the public domain or under a Creative Commons licence, drawn from Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive. That gives the Hall Nikisch conducting Beethoven in 1913, Rachmaninoff playing Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky conducting The Rite of Spring. It also means the Hall cannot play most music written since 1945; for those composers the chapters point to the recordings worth hearing on the labels’ and artists’ own channels. Each recording has a dossier noting who played, when and where, with the evidence for each.

The scoresEngraved in the browser

Short examples are written in ABC notation and engraved in the browser with abcjs, and each has a Play button that sounds it. For some pieces a public-domain edition has been aligned with the recording bar by bar, so the Hall can turn the pages with the music.

The writingQuotations and sources

Quotations name who said them, to whom and when. The notes in the Hall carry their sources under “Evidence”; the influence connections, places and recordings carry theirs in full, and Sources & method explains how evidence is labelled. Where a story is legend, the text says whose legend it is.

In numbersContents of the site

• 80 composers in seven chapters, and 9 before Bach.
• 386 recordings in the Concert Hall (48 h 34 min), 63 more for comparing performers.
• 206 works with their own pages, 61 of them with the score following the recording.
• 343 sourced connections in the Web of Influence; 120 terms in the glossary.

Corrections are welcome as issues on the project’s GitHub repository.