Horizontal reading (following the voice)

[neueliteratur]

Hi forum,

I've been trying to read music horizontally, listening/reading where each note comes from and goes to.

But I've encountered a problem.

For example, if I wanted to orchestrate this Schumann piece:



It's easy to see where each note is going.

But if I were working on this Scriabin thing:



The number of notes decreases or increases.

In this type of cases, how do I determine the trajectory of the voice?

Do I have to see it with a different perspective than voice leading?

Thanks for illuminating my newbie problematic.

[coincidental]

The Schumann example is indeed an example of part writing. You're right to surmise that often such voice leading is obscured - or transformed creatively - by various other embellishments: doubling of voices, changing octave, arpeggiation (all of those can be seen in the Scriabin excerpts). However, sometimes the voice leading is less important to what's going on in the music than, say, the harmony. So a chord may be there for rhythmic and structural (harmonic) reasons, in which case the voicing used may be more to do with tone/timbre, or the limitations of what can be played practically on an instrument. Or there may be inner lines which carry small motifs from elsewhere which need to be accommodated...

As ever, in 99% of cases, these things are partly one thing and partly another - so in the Schumann the voice leading is driven by the contemporary harmonic practice as much as by counterpoint theory. The elegant simplicity of the voice leading is intentional - and part of its meaning. The Scriabin example is harder to pin down out of context, but the topmost lines may well be carrying a melody. How much counterpoint/motif work is hidden in the accompaniment is hard to say. And there may be rhythmic and harmonic motifs at play as well...

Scribbled in haste, but hope this helps...

[Ogg Vorbis]

Hey Half,

Keeping an eye on the horizontal for me means something rather Schenkerian rather than trying to keep individual voices.

Individual voices come and go at will in piano music where the harmonic voicings are often fit to the human hands or to achieve a certain density.

I suggest taking a "google earth" type of approach to analysis. Zoom out until you can see individual phrases and analyze where the cadences are, what tonality you find yourself in and then see how the melodic and harmonic contours work like studying a drainage area of a section of a continent.

Then zoom in until you can see how the uppermost and bottom most voices work together to push and pull each other toward new tonal areas, always keeping in mind, "what's the tonal goal of this phrase?" and "where is this goal in relation to the overall tonality of the piece?"

Zoom in again until you see individual vertical elements (traditional harmonic analysis) and do some root movement analysis. If you run into strange dissonances, see if they are as a result of voiceleading and if there is a resolution in the next beat.

Is the dissonance functional or coloristic? Debussy can't always be analyzed functionally. Many of his sonorities are the result of extended tertian harmonies or are the result of building harmonies upon an exotic scale, such as the wholetone scale, etc.

Therefore, your roman numeral analysis won't tell you HOW the phrase holds together except in the most general way. Debussy (and a lot of Scriabin) are using harmony coloristically rather than using them to set up a tonal cadence.

If the harmony is truly functional, how does it contribute toward moving the phrase toward its goal? Prolongation, dominant preparation, preparing the new tonic, etc.

So those are some things I think about. It's sort of "Ghetto Schenker" because it avoids all the formalities and tries to get the gist or essence of phrase construction.

There are MILLIONS AND BILLIONS of ways of analyzing music and no "right" answer in my opinion. This is here just to see if it helps you see what you want to see. Hope it helps.

[jancivil]

IMO the Scriabin would be a challenge for someone with arranging experience... As an exercise in determining parts in the abstract it kind of indicates that you would want more experience with analysis before getting into 'what parts assigned where'...

That said, as a practical matter, with that Scriabin, I would first determine the palette. there is quite a range here.

how much color change do you 'hear' knocking this out on a piano? that's a primary question. imagine first, rather than arbitrarily decide/think. EG: those first chunks in the RH I see; is that woodwinds and then woodwinds, or is the second one brass. Go through it with that in mind and determine, limit yourself to a palette.

the arpeggio in the LH in the last bar; is that practical for one instrument? Which one? that IME is a more important question than voice leading per se. The G at the bottom in that bar: how much weight per each? The same? When it lands on the second one is a doubling justfied as per your conception of its weight?. and then is it practical as per your available palette (in irl it would be determined by the amount of forces available). et cetera.