Characteristics of a good textural reduction
1. with few exceptions, short tonal pieces before around 1830 (including all the examples for this assignment) do not, in general, modulate. Dominant functions applied to related keys signal tonicizations.
(That means the home key is never far from our minds. Roman numerals and scale-degree functions you indicate should all relate to the home key.)
2. the reduction includes most of the notes of the piece — the exceptions are mostly repeated notes and octave doublings that make no apparent contribution to the counterpoint.
(You may also eliminate very fast passing and neighbor notes whose status as NCTs is *obvious.* When in doubt, include rather than exclude! Notes that are clearly incidental to the main chord progression can be drawn more lightly.)
3. use just one treble staff and one bass staff, whose clefs don’t change. When clefs change in the original composition, feel free to write them in the other staff, so that all the notes in the reduction are arranged clearly according to their pitch height and depth.
(Clef changes help us separate hands and read notes more quickly or clearly as performers, but they make things more confusing from the standpoint of listening. The goal is to visualize all the notes in the vertical position that best expresses how they sound.)
4. for the same reasons (see 3), avoid ledger lines below the treble staff or above the bass staff, and avoid “8va” symbols.
5. Identify two “essential intervals” associated with each cadence, and one associated with the beginning of each phrase. These are intervals formed above the “stemmed notes” in the bass.
(You may identify other essential intervals if you think they are important, but focus on consonant examples: 10 (or 3), 8, 6, 5, and 1. (12ths should be marked “5,” and all 13ths should be marked “6,” treat other compound consonances similarly.) Finally, you may occasionally mark 7, d5, or a4, but only when they are crucial for the description of an I.A.C. (e.g. viiº -> I).
6. The reduction you turn in should not be your first draft. Write the submitted draft neatly, and preferably on horizontal staff paper.
(Once you’ve fully sketched your analysis, you’ll notice you’ve changed your mind about a lot of notes, and the result on paper looks muddled. You’ll be much more satisfied with your second draft, where the main chords of the composition can be written strongly and clearly, and a quick glance at the rersult shows the structure very well. Horizontal staff paper allows us to see longer passages all in one continuous line.)