Voice leading (or part writing) is the linear progression of individual melodic lines ( voices or parts) and their interaction with one another to create

harmonies In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. Howev ...

, typically in accordance with the principles of common-practice harmony and

counterpoint In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tra ...

. Rigorous concern for voice leading is of greatest importance in common-practice music, although

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

and

pop music Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former descri ...

also demonstrate attention to voice leading to varying degrees. In ''Jazz Theory'', Gabriel Sakuma writes that " the surface level, jazz voice-leading conventions seem more relaxed than they are in common-practice music."Terefenko, Dariusz (2014). ''Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study'', p. 33. Routledge. . Marc Schonbrun also states that while it is untrue that "popular music has no voice leading in it, ..the largest amount of popular music is simply conceived with chords as blocks of information, and melodies are layered on top of the chords."Schonbrun, Marc (2011). ''The Everything Music Theory Book'', pp. 149, 174. Adams Media. .

Example

The score below shows the first four measures of the C-major prelude from J.S. Bach's ''

The Well-Tempered Clavier ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', BWV 846–893, consists of two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the composer's time, ''clavier'', meaning keyboard, referred to a variety of i ...

'', Book 1. Letter (a) presents the original score while (b) and (c) present

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(simplified versions) intended to clarify the harmony and implied voice leading, respectively. : In (b), the same measures are presented as four block chords (with two inverted): I – II – V – I. In (c), the four measures are presented as five horizontal voices identified by the direction of the stems (which are added even though the notes are actually whole notes). Notice that each voice consists of just ''three'' notes: from top to bottom, (1) E F — E; (2) C D — C; (3) G A G —; (4) E D — E; (5) C — B C. The ''four'' chords result from the fact that the voices do not move at the same time.

History

Voice leading developed as an independent concept when Heinrich Schenker stressed its importance in " free counterpoint", as opposed to strict counterpoint. He wrote: Schenker indeed did not present the rules of voice leading merely as contrapuntal rules, but showed how they are inseparable from the rules of harmony and how they form one of the most essential aspects of musical composition. (See Schenkerian analysis: voice leading.)

Common-practice conventions and pedagogy

Chord connection

Western musicians have tended to teach voice leading by focusing on connecting adjacent harmonies because that skill is foundational to meeting larger, structural objectives. Common-practice conventions dictate that melodic lines should be smooth and independent. To be smooth, they should be primarily conjunct (stepwise), avoid leaps that are difficult to sing, approach and follow leaps with movement in the opposite direction, and correctly handle tendency tones (primarily, the leading-tone, but also the , which often moves down to ). To be independent, they should avoid parallel fifths and octaves.

Contrapuntal In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...

conventions likewise consider permitted or forbidden melodic intervals in individual parts, intervals between parts, the direction of the movement of the voices with respect to each other, etc. Whether dealing with counterpoint or harmony, these conventions emerge not only from a desire to create easy-to-sing parts but also from the constraints of tonal materials and from the objectives behind writing certain textures. These conventions are discussed in more detail below.

Harmonic roles

As the

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gave way to the Baroque era in the 1600s, part writing reflected the increasing stratification of harmonic roles. This differentiation between outer and inner voices was an outgrowth of both

tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is ca ...

and homophony. In this new Baroque style, the outer voices took a commanding role in determining the flow of the music and tended to move more often by leaps. Inner voices tended to move stepwise or repeat common tones. A

Schenkerian analysis Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how it relates to an abstracted deep structure, the ''Urs ...

perspective on these roles shifts the discussion somewhat from "outer and inner voices" to "upper and bass voices." Although the outer voices still play the dominant, form-defining role in this view, the leading soprano voice is often seen as a composite line that draws on the voice leadings in each of the upper voices of the imaginary continuo. Approaching harmony from a non-Schenkerian perspective, Dmitri Tymoczko nonetheless also demonstrates such "3+1" voice leading, where "three voices articulate a strongly crossing-free voice leading between complete triads .. while a fourth voice adds doublings," as a feature of tonal writing.

Neo-Riemannian theory Neo-Riemannian theory is a loose collection of ideas present in the writings of music theorists such as David Lewin, Brian Hyer, Richard Cohn, and Henry Klumpenhouwer. What binds these ideas is a central commitment to relating harmonies directly to ...

examines another facet of this principle. That theory decomposes movements from one chord to another into one or several "parsimonious movements" between pitch classes instead of actual pitches (i.e., neglecting octave shifts).Richard Cohn, "Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their 'Tonnetz' Representations", note 4, writes that the term "parsimony" is used in this context in Ottokar Hostinský, ''Die Lehre von den musikalischen Klangen'', Prag, H. Dominicus, 1879, p. 106. Cohn considers the principe of parsimony to be the same thing as the "law of the shortest way", but this is only partly true. Such analysis shows the deeper continuity underneath surface disjunctions, as in the Bach example from BWV 941 hereby.

Example

History

Common-practice conventions and pedagogy

Chord connection

Harmonic roles

References

Further reading