<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Dmitri Tymoczko <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dmitri@princeton.edu" target="_blank">dmitri@princeton.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>On Sep 4, 2009, at 10:22 AM, Bryan Parkhurst wrote:<br>
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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.<br>
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Formally defining "voice leading" is not so difficult.<br>
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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.<br>
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The complications arise from the fact that voice leadings can be:<br>
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1. Explicitly present in the scores, as articulated by polyphonic voices.<br>
2. Less explicitly present, as in a series of homophonic piano chords in which individual voices are not notated.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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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.<div>
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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.<br>
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Maybe it's not so complicated after all.<br>
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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.<br>
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DT<br><font color="#888888">
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Dmitri Tymoczko<br>
Associate Professor of Music<br>
310 Woolworth Center<br>
Princeton, NJ 08544-1007<br>
(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)<br>
<a href="http://music.princeton.edu/%7Edmitri" target="_blank">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a></font></blockquote><div><br>Hello Dmitri,<br><br>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: <br>
<br>P1.) Voice-leading is identified with a "way of mapping the notes of one chord onto those of another."<br>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.<br>
C.) Therefore, any time there are at least two chords, there are voice-leadings to be observed. <br>
<br>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. <br><br>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."<br>
<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">"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." <br></div><br>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.<br>
<br>Thanks for the opportunity to reflect on these issues. <br><br>Cordially,<br><br>Bryan Parkhurst<br><br><br><b>Bryan Parkhurst<br>PhD Student<br>Department of Music Theory<br>School of Music<br>University of Michigan</b><br>
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