A THEORY OF VOICE LEADING IN TWENTIETH CENTURY TONALITY
It is the purpose of this study to document the decline of voice leading concept for the twentieth-century tonality.In this essay I shall try to show how Shostakovich achieves a sense of unity through the association of interval structures made up of linear melodic patterns and of the voice leading provided by accompanimental harmonic figures.Some twentieth-century music seems to invite the use of traditional analysis.Lots of music by Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg, and even Schoenberg has a kind of tonal sound, at least in certain passage. But on closer inspection, we generally find that tonal theory has little to tell us about most twentieth-century music. When twentieth-century composers create a tonal sound, they usually do so by using non tonal means. And for a piece to be tonal, it must have two things: functional harmony and traditional voice leading. But, a piece is not tonal, does not mean it can't have pitch or pitch-class centers. All tonal music is centric, but not allcentric music is tonal.Post-tonal voice leading models are 3 patterns. The first has its bases in the theories of Heinrich Schenker. The second has its the pitch-class set of Allen Forte and others. The third has its bases in recent theoretical work by David Lewin. The prolongational analysis identifies some tones as structural and others as embellishing. Associational analyses linear projections of harmonic type from musical surface. Transformational model shifts our attention from the chords themselves operations, transformations, that connect them.Nowadays, many composers are again exploring the possibilities of synthesis of tonal and atonal procedures. The time is ripe to approach voice leading techniquesanalytically.