ABSTRACT
Part writing is most easily observed and practiced through music of limited melodic range that is rhythmically uncomplicated, harmonically compact, and syllabic—that is, each syllable of text accorded a pitch of its own—in a word, music that’s hymnlike. One of the legacies of J. S. Bach and his contemporaries is a large corpus of harmonized chorales. A chorale is a Lutheran hymn. Chorale melodies were drawn from a number of sources and used for congregational singing in the Protestant worship service during the sixteenth century. Bach and others made four-part arrangements as part of larger sacred compositions called cantatas and Passions. An aspect of chorale melodies that make them particularly useful for the study of voice leading is their prevailingly stepwise nature. This and their limited range facilitate keeping the spacing between the upper voices more or less uniform without requiring excessive leaps.
