A Compendium of Voice-Leading Patterns from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries to Play, Sing, and Transpose at the Keyboard

Authors

Derek Remeš

Abstract

An original Compendium of baroque and classical voice-leading patterns offers a wealth of historically informed teaching materials for today's pedagogues. Drawing from recent scholarly trends in the German-language music-theoretical community, the historical approach offered here is at odds with many aspects of current Anglo-American music theory pedagogy. Chief among these is the absence of any reference to Roman numerals, chordal roots, or chordal inversion in the Compendium. Instead, a thoroughbass-centered approach is favored, in which the scale degree of the bassline is the primary analytical annotation. This encourages contrapuntal, rather than harmonic, considerations to come to the fore. The voice-leading patterns are divided into three categories: cadences, rules of the octave, and sequences. Each patterns is given in C-major and A-minor in a variety of upper-voice spacings. The student internalizes these patterns by playing, singing, and transposing them at the keyboard. Thus, the Compendium takes a decidedly practical, and less discursive approach than many current textbooks on baroque music.

Recommended Citation

Remeš, Derek (2019) "A Compendium of Voice-Leading Patterns from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries to Play, Sing, and Transpose at the Keyboard," Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy: Vol. 33, Article 21.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.lipscomb.edu/jmtp/vol33/iss1/21