[Smt-talk] (no subject)

[Bryan Parkhurst]

Quoting Covach:
"Or to put a little less abstractly: if somebody is strumming away on the
guitar, playing a chord sequence using the conventional voicings and with no
regard to traditional voiceleading--or at least, no *conscious* regard--is
it helpful to account for the resultant music in terms strongly directed by
voiceleading or contrapuntal concerns and practices?"

One thing that would illuminate this discussion of voice-leading and it's
pertinence to the analysis of popular music is a (more) rigorous definition
of voice-leading.  Reading over the posts, I find myself mostly unable to
decide how much I agree with the authors' assertions about the relative
importance of voice-leading in certain pieces or styles, or about the extent
to which voice-leading is relevant to our concerns as analysts of pop music,
or about whether a given sonority is better explained in terms of
voice-leading rather than in terms of triadic harmony, etc. because it isn't
especially clear to me what kind of entity (or process or event or property
or whatever) is being talked about when "voice-leading" is invoked.

Indeed, I rather doubt that we are all talking about the same thing.  In the
last batch of messages I received, these characterizations of voice-leading
appeared:  "A kind of aural streaming" (Covach), something "whose tokens are
taken as objects of aural experience" (Fitzgibbon), a "system of principles
and parameters" (Wolf, quoting Seeger), and something identical with "the
combination of melodic lines" (Porterfield, describing counterpoint).
Pretty bewildering.  I wonder if the disagreements about voice-leading's
importance, or about the degree to which it is operative in music X, are in
fact disagreements about how the term "voice-leading" ought to be used.  For
example, if I understand voice-leading as a set of rules that composers
consciously follow, and believe that rule-following is constitutive of
voice-leading, as it sounds like John Covach does, I am going to want to
side with John and claim that, for the purposes of contemplating the
structure of a piece of music, it matters a lot whether that piece's creator
was aware of the rules or not.  Consider this analogous example of the
importance of rule-following to our interpretation of events:   if two
monkeys, sitting on opposite ends of a chessboard, accidentally move the
pieces in the right way, there's still no strong sense in which they are
playing chess, because they don't possess the requisite rule-knowledge, and
we won't be warranted in interpreting their actions as instances of chess
playing (this is not meant to compare pop musicians to monkeys).  On the
other hand, if I think of voice-leadings as perceptual properties of sound
sequences (as it seems Patrick Fitzgibbon does--sorry if I'm paraphrasing
you inaccurately, Patrick) and believe that my auditory experience is the
sole and final arbiter in deciding whether voice-leading is present or
absent from a specific repertory or song, I won't likely agree with John's
conclusion.

Now, voice-leading, whatever it is, is bound to be complex and multifaceted,
and no short descriptive definition will respect all of our many intuitions
about it.  But the truth of one's assertion about voice-leading is going to
be relative to one's preferred conception of the phenomenon, so it would be
helpful if we could find a point of convergence from which to proceed.  That
would tame this debate a lot, I think.

All best,

Bryan Parkhurst



*Bryan Parkhurst
PhD Student
Department of Music Theory
School of Music
University of Michigan*
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