Back in 1878, the organist (and composer, and professor) Sir John Frederick Bridge completed a musical primer that he simply called Counterpoint, an educational work focusing on species counterpoint. I discovered this book during the summer of 2017 on archive.org while looking for free, public-domain materials to use in my own Counterpoint class.
After reading through it, I decided that it could still be a useful text today, despite being well over 100 years old, simply because the rules of species counterpoint -- as pertaining to the 16th century -- have not changed. Once I cleaned up some of the vocabulary, Bridge's Counterpoint book could still find use in a 21st century classroom.
That said, I did not want to simply give my students a link to the old PDF on archive.org. The formatting looks bad, there's no text search, some of the vocabulary is dated, and there are no audio examples. That would be a poor textbook, indeed.
Counterpoint - The New Digital Edition
It took a couple months of work, but the new digital edition of Sir Frederick's Bridge's Counterpoint book is available.
- Counterpoint - Title Page
- Counterpoint - Table of Contents
- Counterpoint - EPUB download (52 MB)
You can read my full rationale on the Title Page. This new digital edition features updated formatting and vocabulary, plus working audio files for each musical example. Indeed, students can simply "press play" directly on the page. There's no more fumbling with CDs, logging into the publisher's online portal, or hunting on YouTube for the audio. Best of all, this book is free for anyone to use.
If you are a teacher and you end up using this resource in your classroom, I simply ask that you drop me a line and let me know.