Harmony And Voice Leading

Harmony and voice leading is a textbook in two volumes dealing with tonal organization in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An accessible scientific explanation for the traditional rules of voice leading, including an account of why listeners find some musical textures more pleasing than others. Voice leading is the musical art of combining sounds over time. In this book, David Huron offers an accessible account of the cognitive and perceptual foundations for this practice. Drawing on decades of scientific research, including his own award-winning work, Huron offers explanations for many practices and phenomena, including the perceptual dominance of the highest voice, chordal-tone doubling, direct octaves, embellishing tones, and the musical feeling of sounds “leading” somewhere. Huron shows how traditional rules of voice leading align almost perfectly with modern scientific accounts of auditory perception. He also reviews pertinent research establishing the role of learning and enculturation in auditory and musical perception. Voice leading has long been taught with reference to Baroque chorale-style part-writing, yet there exist many more musical styles and practices. The traditional emphasis on Baroque part-writing understandably leaves many musicians wondering why they are taught such an archaic and narrow practice in an age of stylistic diversity. Huron explains how and why Baroque voice leading continues to warrant its central pedagogical status. Expanding beyond choral-style writing, Huron shows how established perceptual principles can be used to compose, analyze, and critically understand any kind of acoustical texture from tune-and-accompaniment songs and symphonic orchestration to jazz combo arranging and abstract electroacoustic music. Finally, he offers a psychological explanation for why certain kinds of musical textures are more likely to be experienced by listeners as pleasing.

Conceptually sophisticated and exceptionally musical, Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music provides a thorough treatment of harmony and voice-leading principles in tonal music.

Is a comprehensive volume that spans the entire harmony component of the music theory course. Starting with the basics of harmony and taking students through progressively more difficult material, this text helps readers make connections between the details and the broad, inclusive plan of a musical composition. Emphasizing the linear aspects of music as much as the harmonic, this text introduces large-scale progressions (both linear and harmonic) at an early stage.

In this groundbreaking book, Tymoczko uses contemporary geometry to provide a new framework for thinking about music, one that emphasizes the commonalities among styles from Medieval polyphony to contemporary jazz.

(Jazz Book). A study of three basic outlines used in jazz improv and composition, based on a study of hundreds of examples from great jazz artists.

Is a comprehensive volume that spans the entire harmony component of the music theory course. Starting with the basics of harmony and taking students through progressively more difficult material, this text helps readers make connections between the details and the broad, inclusive plan of a musical composition. Emphasizing the linear aspects of music as much as the harmonic, this text introduces large-scale progressions (both linear and harmonic) at an early stage.

-- Stanley Persky, City University of New York

Music theorists have long believed that 19th-century triadic progressions idiomatically extend the diatonic syntax of 18th-century classical tonality, and have accordingly unified the two repertories under a single mode of representation. Post-structuralist musicologists have challenged this belief, advancing the view that many romantic triadic progressions exceed the reach of classical syntax and are mobilized as the result of a transgressive, anti-syntactic impulse. In Audacious Euphony, author Richard Cohn takes both of these views to task, arguing that romantic harmony operates under syntactic principles distinct from those that underlie classical tonality, but no less susceptible to systematic definition. Charting this alternative triadic syntax, Cohn reconceives what consonant triads are, and how they relate to one another. In doing so, he shows that major and minor triads have two distinct natures: one based on their acoustic properties, and the other on their ability to voice-lead smoothly to each other in the chromatic universe. Whereas their acoustic nature underlies the diatonic tonality of the classical tradition, their voice-leading properties are optimized by the pan-triadic progressions characteristic of the 19th century. Audacious Euphony develops a set of inter-related maps that organize intuitions about triadic proximity as seen through the lens of voice-leading proximity, using various geometries related to the 19th-century Tonnetz. This model leads to cogent analyses both of particular compositions and of historical trends across the long nineteenth century. Essential reading for music theorists, Audacious Euphony is also a valuable resource for music historians, performers and composers.