A New Model for Pitch Motion in Tonal Music
Lisa Hanford · Music Analysis · 1987
Despite the sophisticated tools we use to analyse many aspects of tonal music, we have no systematic procedure which allows us to investigate a composer's pitch connections on the foreground level. Current methods were not devised to address this issue. It is fashionable to ignore connections between adjacent pitches and instead to study certain theoretical connections between nonconsecutive notes. While the study of large-scale connections is necessary for ultimate understanding of music, it leaves many more immediate questions questions with direct relevance for scholars and performers unanswered. By overlooking pitches in these reductive analyses, we neglect some of the most basic choices that a composer faces: local connections between adjacent pitches constitute the structure of the piece at the most immediate level. This is not to say that scholars have never been interested in these questions, but rather that their methods have been unsatisfactory. Because we lack a systematic way to study foreground connections, analyses are often arbitrary and inconclusive. This article presents a way to define all tonal musical textures in common terms, and thus to compare foreground relationships systematically. While pitch motion is influenced by many elements, the primary forces are harmony and counterpoint. Although we know a great deal about the individual tendencies of these forces, the relative role that each plays is still controversial. In studying local pitch relationships, however, we need not be concerned with the supremacy of one or the other of these two forces; rather, we can examine the way they combine to form the foreground texture of the piece. To study the synthesis of harmonic and contrapuntal forces is to study voice leading. Because every pitch in a piece performs both a harmonic and contrapuntal role, voiceleading considerations govern its path. Tonal voice leading is the realization of a composer's melodic and harmonic ideas within the confines of the tonal system, and is at the heart of the compositional process.