'If at First You Don't Succeed . . .' The Parsimonious Voice-leading Index

Danny Beard, University of Southern Mississippi

Freshmen and sophomore music theory students are often encouraged to complete part-writing assignments using primarily common tone and step-wise motion. Some students, however, continue to voice chords in a vertical manner with seemingly little regard to horizontal, linear voice-leading considerations. This vertical treatment often leads to errors that could have been easily avoided. To help counter this tendency, this paper will present a pedagogical tool for the part-writing tool-kit which makes a "contest" out of part-writing assignments. This tool is called PVI, "The Parsimonious Voice-leading Index."

In his book, The Game of Work, Charles Coonradt proposes that repetitive tasks -- such as those performed by assembly line workers -- can be made competitive, and creating a more satisfied worker, and more profits for the company. PVI makes part-writing competitive as the student generates a score for their assignment by summing the generic pitch intervals of the soprano, alto and tenor voices. This score is compared to the instructor's PVI value, not unlike a golfer trying to achieve "par for the course." The closer the student's value is to the instructor's, the higher the confidence level that the assignment is part-written correctly. A student score differing from that of the instructor suggests there are possibly errors in the part-writing that need to be corrected.

Informal data have shown that PVI has potential for aiding students to write (nearly) error-free part-writing. The plans for a research project in spring 2008 to validate this will be presented.