page_title: Voice crossing
section_title: Examples from the Repertoire
hierarchical_section_title: Voice crossing / Examples from the Repertoire
caption_attribution_description: English: Edi beo, English medieval "twinsong"
context_page_description: In music, voice crossing is the intersection of melodic lines in a composition, leaving a lower voice on a higher pitch than a higher voice. Because this can cause registral confusion and reduce the independence of the voices, it is sometimes avoided in composition and pedagogical exercises.
context_section_description: An early example of medieval voice-crossing can be found in what Richard Taruskin (2009, p.394) calls “English twinsongs.”  “These songs, among the earliest polyphonic vernacular settings to survive in any language, employ a more sophisticated sort of voice-leading, through contrary motion and voice crossings.” 
  
  Further examples of voice crossing can be found in music of the fifteenth century, where “the voices overlap constantly.”: 
  The early seventeenth century, as in this canon by Michael Praetorius: 
   
  
  The eighteenth century, as in Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins: 
  
  And the late nineteenth century , in the finale of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony “which begins with a composite melody that is shattered among the whole string section (no single instrumental group plays the tune you actually hear, an amazing, pre-modernist idea)” 
  As Tom Service points out, Tchaikovsky's approach to instrumentation here was indeed prophetic.  Some nineteen years after the première of the “Pathétique” symphony, Arnold Schoenberg was exploring a similar voice crossing technique involving flute, clarinet and violin in “Ein Blasse Wascherin”, a movement from his seminal melodrama Pierrot Lunaire (1912). Jonathan Dunsby cites this as an early example of Klangfarbenmelodie (sound-colour melody).
caption: Edi beo
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