[Smt-talk] (no subject)

[Dmitri Tymoczko]

On Sep 4, 2009, at 10:22 AM, Bryan Parkhurst wrote:

> 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.

Formally defining "voice leading" is not so difficult.

Intuitively, a voice leading is a way of mapping the notes of one  
chord to those of another.  Voice leadings, as I understand them, can  
be identified with phrases such as "move C major to F major by holding  
C constant, shifting E up by semitone to F, and G up by two semitones  
to A."  I've written a number of papers dealing with this issue.  See,  
for example, "Scale Theory, Serial Theory, and Voice Leading" Music  
Analysis 27.1: 1-49.

The complications arise from the fact that voice leadings can be:

	1. Explicitly present in the scores, as articulated by polyphonic  
voices.
	2. Less explicitly present, as in a series of homophonic piano chords  
in which individual voices are not notated.
	3. Imposed upon a relatively neutral stimulus by the listener -- for  
instance when we hear a particular melodic connections in a series of  
chords played in Shepard tones.
	4. Imposed upon a recalcitrant stimulus by the listener -- as when we  
take a piece of polyphonic music, and assert the presence of a voice  
leading that is different from the one implied by the voices.

So I would say that any ambiguities here arise not so much from  
disagreements about what voice leading is as from disagreements about  
how to go about identifying voice leadings in particular pieces.   
There's probably no one right answer here -- for different purposes,  
different approaches are appropriate.

> 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.

Maybe it's not so complicated after all.

The reference to aural streaming arises when we identify voice  
leadings by ear, as in #2-4 above.  Ditto for "tokens of auditory  
experience."  The "principles and parameters" refer to style-specific  
conventions for articulating mappings between successive chords (and  
largely applies to #1 above) -- in some styles, for example, parallel  
octaves are OK, while in others they're not.  "Combination of melodic  
lines" refers to this as well.

DT

Dmitri Tymoczko
Associate Professor of Music
310 Woolworth Center
Princeton, NJ 08544-1007
(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri