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"Chordal skips" in my harmony textbook refer to when a voice skips to another note within the same harmony. "Chordal skips" may be used as voice leading correctives with regards to forbidden parallels but they must also not create any parellels either. This brings me to the point and to my question:

enter image description here

Here the bassline alternates with the tenor on the upbeats and this causes the G# on upbeat 2 to move to the G# on downbeat 3. With a "chordal skip" this would be faulty voice leading (even though the G# is in another octave). But heres the thing... to my ears these are not "chordal skips". Yes they skip from one chord member to another chord member but the consistent motion creates two distinct voices. This is known by Shenkerian analysts as "compound melody". According to Shenkerian analysis, this would be two voices and indeed it does sounds that way to me. So , if that is true then it is the C# that is leading to the G# not the tenor G# and the G# is just an octave doubling of another voice. I would love to hear what other people think about this, especially those who are familiar with "Shenkerian analysis". Do compound melodies cause voice leading errors? How can they since they are effectively two different "voices"

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  • What is the (potential) voice leading error here? One voice moving from G#3 to G#2 while another moves from E4 to D#4? I'm inclined to say that this shows that the answer to your question is "no," at least not in this instance, but I don't know whether it's generally true nor whether theoreticians have articulated such a principle, whether generally or in certain specific circumstances.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 6 at 7:58
  • That the tenor and bass both progress to G#.. had I left the bass line without the upbeat note it would have progressed from E to G#.
    – armani
    Commented Aug 6 at 9:26
  • But the tenor is staying on G sharp, not progressing to it, isn't it? That is completely fine.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 6 at 10:00
  • If octaves by contrary motion are just as bad as parallel octaves, how are octaves by oblique motion ok?
    – armani
    Commented Aug 6 at 18:22
  • The rule is basically, octave is ignored. In "octaves by contrary motion", if you moved one note by an octave you would get simply parallel octaves movement, and so it's not allowed either way. But in your example, you would get two voices in octaves both staying on the same note, which is ok. Parallel movement is prohibited, not parallel staying-where-you-are. Commented Aug 6 at 19:20

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If you want to look at a compound melody as two separate parts, or if you want to look at an arpeggiated part as a sustained chord, rewrite the parts involved and rhythmically shift parts so they realign with the chord changes, which will normally be on the beat. We can do this to your bass clef in stages:

reducing compound melody and broken chord figuration to whole notes

First beak apart the beaming so that the notes are literally two separate parts. In this case the tenor becomes syncopated, so we move it back a half beat to realign with the on beat chord changes.

...Here the bassline alternates with the tenor on the upbeats and this causes the G# on upbeat 2 to move to the G# on downbeat 3 ... That the tenor and bass both progress to G#...

After you beak up the compound (really it's a broken chord texture) you can see the "tenor" part is really a repeating G#3. It is not moving so it cannot be part of any forbidden relative motion.

Anyway, you can keep reducing the bass clef part until you get to a "three part" chord in whole notes. At that point the treble clef at beat 2 can then be regarded as a appoggiatura chord embellishing the G#m chord. It seems worthwhile to reduce the texture all the way to whole notes, because it sort of confirms what can be heard in the original form. In the original the C#m chord on beat two is on the beat against a D# bass and dissonant. Instead of looking for some exotic chord identity involving all pitches as chord tones of some extended chord, it's simpler to recognize everything in the bass clef indicates only one chord for the whole measure. This is important regarding the concerns of relative motion, because the only real motion occurring is oblique motion when D#4 B4 make the auxiliary move to E4 C#5 and back.

Back to the title question.

Can compound melodies cause voice leading errors? "Chordal skips" in my harmony textbook...

If your book says to not disguise bad relative motion with broken chord motion or compound lines, then don't do that in the book's lessons. But, in real common practice era scores you will see broken chord motion used to mitigate parallel motion.

A lot of your questions stem from the textbooks you choose. It's clear you are interested in 18th century practices, but you use modern textbooks, and some of those you have mentioned in the past seem to have a jazz orientation. Try using textbooks that are either specialized on the 18th century or just get modern, translated editions of historical textbooks. Michael Callahan's Techniques of keyboard improvisation in the German Baroque and their implications for today's pedagogy (https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=13844) and Niedt's Musical Guide (https://archive.org/details/musicalguide0000nied/) are good examples.

The following is from Niedt's guide...

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After the model passage there are many examples of how to play the chords with many different broken chord patterns. There are two things to point out.

First, example XI shows parallel fifth circled in red. This would be an example of how broken chord patterns or compound line may introduce forbidden parallels into an otherwise OK voice leading chord skeleton.

Second, read Neidt's comment highlighted in yellow. Notice is annoyance with "fifth-hunters" and how they mistake what is important (in this case how to enliven a simple chord structure with rhythmic and melodic motion) and focus instead on a fleeting instance of parallel fifths.

From a technical point of view, I think it needs to be mentioned that if the passage were reduced to four parts it would be...

enter image description here

...and we can see the "parallel" motion is the result of mistaking the soprano part for the alto part in the single notes line arpeggiating the chords.

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  • The last eighth note in the left hand is A, not G sharp.
    – phoog
    Commented Aug 7 at 15:26
  • Hi Michael thanks for the answer. I don't think you understood the point I was questioning if chordal skips and forbidden parallel motion is the same as compound melody. In a chordal skip, the note actually moves to the other note in the same voice whereas with a compound melody it doesn't. In a compound melody with two lines involved ( some compound melodies can have more than 2 lines) , every note leads to every other note. Which means your voice leading would have to remove syncopation as you did :) With chordal skips you cant un-syncopate the texture as you did.
    – armani
    Commented Aug 8 at 8:15
  • My ear hears one chordal skip as one melodic event with a leap but my ear hears 2 or more chordal skips in an up and down pattern like in my example as 2 voices, the repetition of up and down leaps makes me hear it this way. When my text book talks about voice leading it talks about chordal skips so obvioulsy you will account for the leap in the same line. Your chordal skip never changes to another line. What any harmony book doesn't say is how voice leading applies to compound lines and if there is any music theorist or academic paper out there that talks about this.
    – armani
    Commented Aug 8 at 10:22
  • @phoog, correction made,thanks. Commented Aug 8 at 15:18
  • @armani, this dissertation by Michael Callahan gets into the detail of compound melody and figuration of chord outlines. Check the table of contents. Starts around p. 147 urresearch.rochester.edu/… Commented Aug 8 at 15:29

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