Maillard was an able
contrapuntist whose music joined a clear if often repetitive sense of melodic shape with a penchant for reworking melodies drawn from plainsong and psalmody.
Schumann's self was no worse
contrapuntist. (Pacchiarotto, ll.
By considering source authentication, compositional elements, texture, and rhetorical shape, Patrick Macey weighs conflicting attributions of the psalm motet De profundis clamavi to Josquin or his younger contemporary Nicolas Champion, "a skilled
contrapuntist who created excellent music," deducing that "the weight of the evidence tips the scales in Champion's favor" (p.
Although Dr Jones finds Werner a more effective
contrapuntist than some of his contemporaries (he also wrote a Mass setting with the same title as Haydn's), none of them was as resourceful as Haydn.
It is a matter of some disappointment to those who admire the eight-voice textures of contemporary Franco-Flemish works that Palestrina, the great
contrapuntist, failed to produce a single through-composed eight-voice motet.
The composers themselves were subjected to a variety of these isms and other assessments: Diamond ("rhapsodic expressionist"); Riegger ("romantic chromaticism"; "esoteric expressionism"); Cowell ("utilitarian"); Sessions ("a composer of music an und fur sich [in and of itself], without programmatic allusions"); and Carter ("
contrapuntist par excellence").