Voice-leading analysis of music 3: the background

# 3.3 What is the point to voice-leading analysis of form?

This analytical discussion may have seemed very dry, and it is quite difficult to follow, simply because this is a long and complex piece of music. But the aim behind it is far from dry, nor is it an attempt to plaster a pre-existing model of how music works on to the score come what may. The voice-leading graph in Example 10 becomes meaningful only when it is compared in detail with the score. You may have noted some of the unusual aspects of the movement, especially where it differs from many other examples of sonata form. Here, these features (such as the beginning of the second subject and recapitulation sections) are seen to fit into a much more standard progress between tonic and dominant key areas, and comparing the harmonic analysis in this course with a thematic analysisshould have deepened your appreciation – and respect – for Beethoven's complete mastery of his craft in every detail from the smallest to the largest. My voice-leading graph does not try simply to reduce Beethoven's harmony to a trivial counterpoint exercise, as if that were all that it consists of; rather, it shows how the unusual aspects of the harmony are held in balance by a coherent background form, so that the tension between these perspectives produces the excitement and exhilaration which we feel ever more deeply the better we come to know the music.

There is one further advantage to a voice-leading approach in analysing form, and that is the scope that it gives for identifying large-scale features which recur within the movement – even the whole work – which serve to bind together its different parts as a single course. I have already identified two of these structural motives: the non-synchronisation of thematic and harmonic formal boundaries, and the many small descents in the movement. This gives a special importance to the note B♭. In the opening bars of the movement, the melodic line centres on B♭in bars 4–6 as part of a descent from the initial C to F, a descent completed (with another prominent B♭) in bars 9–12. B♭then recurs at several points in the movement as part of a prominent, long-range descending line, with different harmonic settings. In bars 20–32 it is repeated again and again in the violin line, before being harmonised as a neighbour note to the A in bar 34 onwards, so that the B♭is used to introduce the ‘wrong’ key of D major for the second subject. And we have just looked at the memorable pause on the B♭in bar 332 which inaugurates the close of the whole movement. If you think back for a moment to our earlier analysis of the Minuet and Trio, you will remember that there, too, there was an emphatic and memorable stopping-point on the B♭which formed part of that movement's structural descent: look again at bars 34–5 of the minuet to see the similarity. In this way, the voice leading of the different movements reveals features which bind together the whole work.

I hope that you have enjoyed this rather intensive look at the sonata form of this first movement. To close this course, I am going to discuss one more topic, and that is how background voice-leading structure relates to the shape of sonata form as we normally describe it.

OpenLearn - Voice-leading analysis of music 3: the background
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