Voice leading, counterpoint, and what you actually need to know
The traditional rules of voice leading and counterpoint are widely taught and studied, but it seems like we are all missing the point.
Every time you write in parallel fifths, Bach kills a kitten.
-the internet
Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like a master.
-Picasso
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
-Confucius
I’m going to avail myself of the opportunity to be a fool for a minute or five.
Why do music students spend so much time on learning Baroque-era counterpoint and four-part chorale-style writing?
“Avoid parallel fifths and octaves.”
“Don’t approach octaves by similar motion.”
“Don’t overlap parts.”
These are just a few from the litany of admonitions music students find when they are introduced to the basics of music theory and composition. The rules of counterpoint and four-part chorale-style writing are so well-documented, Google was able to build a program that harmonizes any melody you put in according to those rules:
Music students spend at least a few terms working through exercises to learn this style of writing, which amounts to little more than solving Sudoku puzzles.
Too often it seems students go through these exercises without anyone explaining what these rules lead you to: one of many many many ways you can structure your music to have multiple and distinct parts that sound good together.
My issue isn’t with the style—though I find baroque counterpoint-focused writing quite boring (fugue = snooze); four-part writing is pleasant on occasion, though the texture quickly gets old—or that it is taught in most every music program, but that so much time is spent and emphasis placed on it and it is rarely contextualized as what it really is*: but one tool in a tool box, a series of points on several spectra of musical choices (more on that below) someone could make. Rules are communicated, but not the why behind them. And not the when/where/why you might want to ignore them, or explicitly go against them.
So let’s add that context and take counterpoint/chorale-style writing down off the pedestal and place it among all the other ways music can be structured to produce interesting and multifaceted (or not!) textures.
*Note: I am not seeking to add to/address the criticisms of these rules (that all college music students have to learn…) as merely descriptions of how a few dozen composers during a few dozen years in the 18th century wrote their music—though those are worthwhile criticisms.
David Huron’s Voice Leading
The 217 pages of David Huron’s Voice Leading provide a robust exposition not only of the rules of voice leading (with an update to account for new findings since the 1700s) but of modern-day research into acoustics and psychology that corroborate the effectiveness of the baroque part-writing canon. Throughout the book are all sorts of interesting tidbits and illustrative anecdotes:
14 Hierarchical Streams
When I was about twelve years old, my father was driving me home from a piano lesson one day when I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before: the car horn in our 1965 Plymouth consisted of two pitches, tuned a major third apart. Before, I’d always heard the horn as a single sound, but now I could hear that there were actually two horns. My father (who was quite unmusical) was skeptical of my observation. When we got home, a quick look under the hood confirmed that there were indeed two physical horns connected to the battery. I was delighted. My father must have wondered whether the piano lessons were preparing me for a distinguished career as an auto mechanic…hearing-out these component pitches was not easy. The natural tendency was for the individual pitches to become absorbed into a more cohesive sound object. Hearing-out the constituent pitches required some mental effort.
Similar phenomena happen with musical sounds.
Huron then dives into how the precepts of voice leading create (or prevent) multiple sounds from cohering.
I’d give the book a strong recommendation for anyone looking to write music better with a eyes wide open approach to the why behind many of the musical “rules” that are taught.
Controlling your musical texture
But the book’s greatest value (for me, and I’d argue for composers) is not in its exposition and corroboration of voice leading, but in Huron’s discussion of musical textures and auditory streams (“the subjective sense of sonic line or singular sound activity continuing over time”—an instrument playing or a voice singing). Huron identifies the most consequential areas of musical choice with respect to controlling the musical scene, i.e. the combination of multiple auditory streams into musical texture—the most important work of the composer:
When composing a musical texture or acoustic scene, the musician faces the same questions at each moment in time: How do I want listeners to experience this?…How many concurrent streams do I want listeners to hear? Do I want the listener to hear each stream as equally important, or do I want particular streams in the foreground or background? How do I ensure that the components of this auditory or textural stream remain fused? How do I ensure that a given stream is not inadvertently absorbed by another? Have I created too many independent streams for listeners to follow? How should the auditory scene evolve over time?…
The [baroque part-writing] rules tell us how to make musical parts perceptually independent…
If you want a set of disparate instruments to cohere as a single textural stream, the best results will arise when they employ synchronous onsets, move in parallel, play harmonically related pitches, are positioned close together in space, use homogeneous timbres, include more than three instruments, and so on.
This is where Huron opens the door to where I want to go. He identifies the most important parameters a composer can adjust to control how their music is perceived:
Synchronicity of onsets or when different voices begin sounding and/or change pitches
Motion of voices relative to one another
Harmonic relationship of voices
Physical position of various voices relative to listener
Timbre of voices
Number of voices
Harmonic spacing of voices (e.g. low and high)
Each of these represents a spectrum of places music can fall moment to moment. And abiding by baroque part-writing rules confines you to a point or very narrow range on each of these spectra. To better illustrate and to create a tool to analyze (and generate) music, I turned this list of parameters into a graphic of a series of spectra with different points defined along the way:
And here is music written according to the baroque four-part chorale writing canon plotted on the diagram:
You could use this tool to plot many different styles of writing, or just individual moments in music to understand how it’s working. The point is that the baroque part-writing canon shows you how to manipulate a few points along these spectra (relative motion and harmonic relationship), but there are so many other methods of controlling how simple or complex your musical picture is that aren’t understood and taught with the same level of rigor (and time investment) as a set of writing practices that are coming up on 300 years old.
If you’re having trouble controlling the textures and clarity of your music, try referring back to this graphic or these ideas. Plot out where your music is sitting on this chart and let it inspire how you might be able to nudge your music around to make it as clear as you want it to be.
Happy writing!