ABSTRACT
Discussions of consonance and dissonance in medieval music sometimes imply that the composer must have worked in some kind of score, and that he was in a position to manipulate his part-writing on the same basis and with the same visual control as we are. I believe that this was not the case, and that it is a necessary preliminary to considerations of euphony in the finished product to explore the technical and practical problems which faced the composer in combining more than two contrapuntal voices. The rules of two-part counterpoint have been extensively treated both by medieval theorists and modern scholars: my concern in this short paper is more with how, in practical terms, such rules could be applied in composition, and by what means they were applied to composition in more than two parts.
