[Smt-talk] (no subject)

[Bryan Parkhurst]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Dmitri Tymoczko <dmitri at princeton.edu>wrote:

> 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 <http://music.princeton.edu/%7Edmitri>


Hello Dmitri,

That is, to be sure, one plausible (and admirably concise) stipulative
definition of voice-leading.  I'd say that, in most cases, it is more or
less what I mean to be communicating when I use the term.  Were we all to
agree on this usage (and to agree to discount # 3 and #4 on your list of
complications, as being aberrations), I don't imagine that there would be
much room for disputation of the sort I was detecting in previous posts.
However, I think your definition (Premise 1, below), as it stands, has at
least one undesirable entailment:

P1.) Voice-leading is identified with a "way of mapping the notes of one
chord onto those of another."
P2.)  Any time there are at least two chords, there is a "way of mapping"
(some or all of) the notes of one onto (some or all of) the notes of
another.
C.)  Therefore, any time there are at least two chords, there are
voice-leadings to be observed.

I don't find the conclusion  to be congenial to my own views on this topic
(ill-formed though they are, at this point), because I'm inclined to reserve
the term "voice-leading" for a phenomenon that doesn't proliferate quite so
wildly.  I think Premise 2 is right, so I am lead to question whether
Premise 1 really tells the whole, or the correct, story.  I think your
definition provides a useful standard for making certain determinations and
judgments about some cases of voice leading, but not all determinations and
judgments.  For example, as for the question about the extent to which
voice-leading is present or absent in a repertory or work, your definition
obviates it:  voice-leading is present everywhere there are simultaneities,
so it is trivially true that it is present almost anywhere we look or
listen.  Naturally, you would be free to qualify your definition but this
would be to admit that things are more complicated than you suggest.

What more might we include in a definition of voice leading?  We might wish
to use a descriptive definition to try to capture further intuitions, such
as (perhaps) that voice-leading arises only in situations where there are a
consistent number of discriminable voices (I'm not sure if I agree with
this, but I can imagine someone arguing thus), or that each voice is active
within a suitably restricted tessitura, or that voice-leadings must be
between adjacent sonorities, and so forth.  As we try to accommodate more
and more intuitions like these, our definition will become proportionally
larger, less elegant, and more conjunctive (voice-leading is x AND y AND z
AND...).  This is what I meant when I called voice-leading "complex" and
"multifarious."

"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."

I don't at all disagree that identification is what is at issue.  But, many
times, a disagreement about identifying a particular thing is just
symptomatic of an underlying disagreement about what the nature of the thing
is.  If you and I are asked to identify the star of "Smokey and the Bandit"
and I say it is Tom Selleck and you say it isn't, we are not having a
disagreement about how to go about identifying actors--I expect we agree on
how this is accomplished.  Rather,  I genuinely think Tom Selleck has a
property which he does not in fact have, and we are having a disagreement
about the nature of Tom Selleck.  Likewise, given a precise definition of
voice-leading, I don't think we would struggle to apply it uniformly, nor do
I think we would be prone to disagree on cases of exemplification.  That we
do so-disagree implies that we aren't all working with the same definition.

Thanks for the opportunity to reflect on these issues.

Cordially,

Bryan Parkhurst


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