TWENTIETH- - Synapse Music

92 The Horizontal Dimension: Melody and Voice Leading
SUMMARY
The traditional approaches [ 0 composing melodies are still available to the composer,
and certainly there are twentieth-century melodies that exhibit many of them.
What interests us here is not so much the traditional aspects of twentieth-century
melodies as those aspects that set them apart from the music of the past. Though the
fragmentation of styles in the twentieth century makes any generalization difficult, a
list of the tendencies seen in twentieth-century melody wou ld include the following:
Wider range
More leaps
More chromaticism
Less lyricism
Unconventional rhythm
More expression marks
Avoidance of traditional harmonic implications
Less regular phrase struclure
Motivic use of pitch-class cells
Twelve-tone melody
Less emphasis on melody in general
Voice-leading procedures in the twentieth century are as varied as the multiplicity
of musical styles would suggest. The traditional procedures are still available and
have not been discarded entirely, but some important conventions of tonal harmony
must now be considered as options rather than rules. As a result, parallel motion of all
kinds is acceptable, including harmonic planing. while dissonances have been freed
from conventional resolutions, and even from any requirement for resolution at all.
NOTES
I. Throughout this chapter and much of the remainder of this book, "tonal" is used to
refer to the system of functional harmonic tonality employed in Western art music
from around 1600 to around 1900. This use of the term admittedly can be misleading,
since it implies that all other music is atonal. The author hopes that this disclaimer will
head off any such misconceptions.
2. Parallel octaves were allowed when one part merely doubled another consistently at
the interval of an octave. The same cannot be said of sths.
3. Some prefer to use the telm "organum" for harmonic parallelism in the twentieth
century, especially when it involves root-position triads.