ABSTRACT
For over 200 years an important pedagogy for theory instruction has been part writing or voice leading. The procedure is founded on three primary conditions: First, it is based on contrapuntal practices. Second, it uses four voices: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. And third, it assumes the (tertian) triadic harmony of Western common-practice music. Part writing, as we know it, dates primarily from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its procedures find a basis in compositional practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and its principles continue to influence composers into the twenty-first century.
