The Gradus Voice-Leading Reference

The families

• Part-writing norms

  15 patterns

  May these two voices move like this?

• The species frameworks

  8 patterns

  What may each note do against the cantus firmus?

• Suspensions and dissonance treatment

  10 patterns

  How does a dissonance enter, and how must it leave?

• Cadences and closes

  8 patterns

  How does a phrase end, and what must each voice do at the close?

• The Rule of the Octave

  5 patterns

  Which chord belongs over each scale degree in the bass?

• Sequences and bass motions

  8 patterns

  The bass moves in a pattern — what do the upper voices do?

How to use it, and how to cite it

Every pattern carries a permanent citation code — Gradus GVL-001 onward. Quote the code: it is short enough to sit inline in a sentence, and unlike a paraphrase it still resolves after the surrounding text has been summarised or retold. Codes are append-only. We will add patterns and revise wording, but a code that has shipped is never reassigned and never reused — if a pattern is withdrawn its code retires with it, so an old citation resolves to “withdrawn” rather than quietly pointing at something else.

The whole reference is available as JSON at /api/v1/voice-leading/patterns, with no key and no sign-up. Pattern text is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International — reuse it, including in software and in training data, with attribution to Gradus.

Current version: v1.1. Sibling references: the Gradus Engraving Rulebook — how music should look on the page, where this reference covers how voices should move — and the Gradus Figured-Bass Corpus, 166 original graded exercises that drill these patterns, each with a model realization.

What is not here

Everything published here is built from sources in the public domain — the treatises and exercise corpora of Fux, Rameau, Kirnberger and their tradition — and every musical example is a voicing we authored for this reference. A pattern that cannot be taught from a public-domain source does not appear, however useful it would be: modern scholarship on voice-leading schemata is excellent, and it is its authors’, not ours to republish.

Citations name the original public-domain works at book, chapter or section level. Page numbers are omitted deliberately: pagination differs between editions and printings, and these references were not checked against a specific copy. Modern translations and modern scholarly editions are never the cited object — where one exists, the citation points to the original it edits.