1 Introduction

1.1 Voice-leading concepts

Here are some ideas to explain why analysis of voice leading can help our understanding of Mozart's music.

• Ordinary chord-function analysis (using roman numerals) is not able, on its own, to explain the sense of logical continuity in Mozart's music.

• Order and coherence are, in part, produced in Mozart's style by smooth linear patterns of notes, hidden within the individual parts (or ‘voices’) of the music.

• These smooth lines can be identified at several different levels: in the music as the composer wrote it (that is, the ‘surface’ or ‘foreground’); in the underlying ‘skeleton’ of the harmony; and at a number of levels in between.

• Each of these levels obeys the basic rules of counterpoint, in which dissonances must resolve – as passing notes, neighbour notes or suspensions – to consonances.

• Analytical notation can be used to show the relationships between these levels, by representing them using noteheads, stems and slurs.

In this course you are going to look in more detail at these deeper levels of the structure. In AA314_1, you saw that analysing the voice leading of a passage can often reveal connections we would otherwise miss – you may remember, for instance, that bars 3–4 and 5–8 of Mozart's Sonata in C, K545 have the same underlying structure, despite being completely different on the surface (see AA314_1, Example 14). These connections become more visible when we look at deeper levels of harmonic organisation.