A Voicing-Based Model for Additive Harmony

Abstract

This article develops, for the Parisian modernist repertoire, a model of additive harmony in which voicing plays a foundational role. In comparison with the conventional extended-triad model of additive harmony, the voicing-based model better describes the range of novel verticalities used in tonal progressions in this repertoire, and the features that allow those verticalities to serve as stand-ins for common-practice chords. This study also enriches our understanding of the important developments in Western tonal language that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most research on these stylistic developments details how innovation within certain horizontal-domain pitch constraints allowed for the incorporation of new harmonic successions into tonal contexts; this paper demonstrates that a similar process can be read in the vertical domain, wherein adherence to certain vertical-domain pitch constraints allowed for the incorporation of new chords into tonal contexts.