ABSTRACT
Freshman music theory students are presented with the instructor’s list of voice-leading and part-writing errors with the task of locating errors in a short excerpt from a nineteenth-century song (prepared with the text removed). Students are then presented with a score and poetic translation, and notice that the voice-leading “error” is a strategic move on the composer’s part in order to depict imagery and ideas in the given poem. This pedagogical approach is a practical application of Kofi Agawu’s recommendations on text-to-music analysis.
