Yet another Word on the Urlinie

Just as the harmonic degrees fend off chords that contradict the tending of their arrangement towards tonality, so, too, does the Urlinie fend off diminutions (motives and ornaments) whose peaks or main tones do not agree with this archetypal succession of tones. Thus, one sees that where the Urlinie holds sway, the diminutions are fashioned in such a way that other diminutions with other peaks cannot be put in their place. Elaboration [Auskomponierung] brings to fruition a bass line that, in view of the fact that the roots of the harmonic degrees operate in the depths of the mind, is just as much an upper voice as the soprano with respect to the behavior of the line, its undulating play, and its consonances and passing [dissonances]. Thus, the setting of the outer voices [Außensatz] is to be understood as a counterpoint of two upper voices above the harmonic degrees, a two-voice setting the quality of which determines the worth of the composition. The Urlinie then leads to a selection of intervals in this contrapuntal setting (and in this selection alone lies the guarantee of the setting’s highest quality and most consummate synthesis), intervals that continue to bear in themselves the law of strict counterpoint. Only through such a selection do we then understand free composition’s prolongations of the law, which do not cancel it but rather validate it in freedom and newness. For example, if the intervals selected deviate in so many passages from those manifested by the diminutions, then it happens that often, on account of the selected intervals, the consecutive fifths and octaves presented by the counterpoint of the diminution are not really consecutives at all.