page_title: Voicing (music)
section_title: Examples
hierarchical_section_title: Voicing (music) / Vertical placement / Examples
caption_attribution_description: English: Beethoven, Arietta from piano Sonata 32
context_page_description: In music theory, voicing refers to one of two closely related concepts:
  How a musician or group distributes, or spaces, notes and chords on one or more instruments
  The simultaneous vertical placement of notes in relation to each other; this relates to the concepts of spacing and doubling
  It includes the instrumentation and vertical spacing and ordering of the musical notes in a chord: which notes are on the top or in the middle, which ones are doubled, which octave each is in, and which instruments or voices perform each note.
context_section_description: Many composers, as they developed and gained experience, became more enterprising and imaginative in their handling of chord voicing.  For example, the theme from the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s early Piano Sonata No. 10 (1798), presents chords mostly in close position:
  On the other hand, in the theme of the Arietta movement that concludes his last piano sonata, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111 (1822), Beethoven presents the chord voicing in a much more daring way, with wide gaps between notes, creating compelling sonorities that enhance the meditative character of the music:
  Philip Barford describes the Arietta of Op. 111 as "simplicity itself… its widely-spaced harmonization creates a mood of almost mystical intensity.  In this exquisite harmonization the notes do not make their own track – the way we play them depends upon the way we catch the inner vibration of the thought between the notes, and this will condition every nuance of shading." William Kinderman finds it "extraordinary that this sensitive control of sonority is most evident in the works of Beethoven's last decade, when he was completely deaf, and could hear only in his imagination."
  
  During the Romantic Era, composers continued further in their exploration of sonorities that can be obtained through imaginative chord voicing.  Alan Walker draws attention to the quiet middle section of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1.  In this passage, Chopin weaves a “magical” pianistic texture around a traditional Polish Christmas carol:
  Maurice Ravel’s Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant from his 1908 suite Ma Mère l'Oye exploits the delicate transparency of voicing afforded through the medium of the piano duet. Four hands can cope better that two when it comes to playing widely-spaced chords. This is especially apparent in bars 5–8 of the following extract:
   Speaking of this piece (which also exists in an orchestral version), Austin writes about Ravel’s technique of "varying the sonority from phrase to phrase by telling changes of register."
  The two chords that open and close Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms have distinctive sonorities arising out of the voicing of the notes. The first chord is sometimes called the Psalms chord. William W. Austin remarks:
  The first and last chords of the Symphony of Psalms are famous. The opening staccato blast, which recurs throughout the first movement, detached from its surroundings by silence, seems to be a perverse spacing of the E minor triad, with the minor third doubled in four octaves while the root and fifth appear only twice, at high and low extremes... When the tonic C major finally arrives, in the last movement, its root is doubled in five octaves, its fifth is left to the natural overtones, and its decisive third appears just once, in the highest range. This spacing is as extraordinary as the spacing of the first chord, but with the opposite effect of super-clarity and consonance, thus resolving and justifying the first chord and all the horror of the miry clay.
  Some chord voicings devised by composers are so striking that they are instantly recognizable when heard.  For example, The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives opens with strings playing a widely spaced G-major chord very softly, at the limits of audibility. According to Ives, the string part represents "The Silence of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing".
caption: Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32, Arietta: Listen
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