Harmony and Voice-Leading

 "Harmony and Voice-Leading" is the title of one of the basic texts in music theory. Written by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter it is the basic undergraduate theory text. I actually took an avid student through most of it one year as part of his weekly guitar lesson. "Aldwell and Schachter" as it is affectionately known, has sat on my shelf for years and an earlier edition of it was part of my music library in Canada. But oddly enough, through eight years of university music school, none of my theory professors ever used the text. I think they hated the idea of teaching from a text, plus they may disagree with a few, or many of the details.

I have a more fundamental issue with the book as recently came to light in the comment section to one of my pieces, the Quartet 3 Section 3. It turns out a frequent commentator and composer was hearing cadences in the piece. Fair enough, you hear what you hear, but, apart from, sort of, at the end, I really wasn't writing any cadences. You see, here is the thing: I'm just uncomfortable with harmony in general.

That sounds a bit like Dmitri Shostakovich saying to a friend one day that he knew nothing about music theory. I think what he meant by that was that he did not compose using music theory. Probably so. And I don't really compose using harmony so's you would notice. For Aldwell and Schachter, the harmony is the important thing and "voice-leading" is just what you do to get from one exciting harmony to another. For me, the harmony part is the dull bit and it is just what results when you do some interesting counterpoint or "voice-leading."

I'm afraid that, fundamentally, I look at composition rather as the composers of the Middle-Ages did: music is the combining of voices in interesting ways. Harmony is a mere byproduct the way that sawdust is the byproduct of a sawmill. Now I adore those wonderful harmonic surprises we come across in Haydn, or Beethoven, or Mozart, but my musical vocabulary doesn't really have the tools to create such things. So I have to get by with counterpoint and timbre and, oh yes, rhythm and meter.

Mind you, in my earlier days as a composer, twelve years ago when I wrote the song "Symptoms of Love" that I just put up, you will find loads of harmony. But not now. Let me just post that section from the quartet again so you can see what I mean. It consists of melodic lines in various incarnations with inversion, augmentation and so on.