Editing Schenkerian analysis (section)

===Counterpoint, voice-leading===
Two-voice [[counterpoint]] remains for Schenker the model of strict writing. Free composition is a freer usage of the laws of strict counterpoint. One of the aims of the analysis is to trace how the work remains subject to these laws at the deepest level, despite the freedom taken at subsequent levels.<ref>Heinrich Schenker, ''Counterpoint'', vol. I, p. 12: "In the present day, when it is necessary to distinguish clearly between composition and that preliminary school represented by strict counterpoint, we must use the eternally valid of those rules for strict counterpoint, even if we no longer view them as applicable to composition".</ref>

One aspect of strict, two-voice writing that appears to span Schenker's theory throughout the years of its elaboration is the rule of "fluent melody" (''fließender Gesang''), or "melodic fluency".<ref>N. Meeùs, "[http://periodicos.udesc.br/index.php/orfeu/article/download/10538/7525 Schenker's ''fließender Gesang'' and the Concept of Melodic Fluency]", ''Orfeu'' 2/1, 2017, pp. 160–170.</ref> Schenker attributes the rule to [[Luigi Cherubini]], who would have written that "fluent melody is always preferable in strict counterpoint."<ref>''Counterpoint'', vol. I, p. 74. J. Rothgeb and J. Thym, the translators, quote Cherubini from the original French, which merely says that "conjunct motion better suits strict counterpoint than disjunct motion", but Schenker had written: ''der fliessende Gesang ist im strengen Stile immer besser as der sprungweise'' (''Kontrapunkt'', vol. I, p. 104) ("the fluent melody is always better in strict style than the disjunct one"). ''Fliessender Gesang'' not only appears in several 19th-century German translations of Cherubini, but is common in German counterpoint theory from the 18th century and might go back to Fux' description of the ''flexibili motuum facilitate'', the "flexible ease of motions" (''Gradus'', Liber secundus, Exercitii I, Lectio quinta) or even earlier. N. Meeùs, [http://periodicos.udesc.br/index.php/orfeu/article/view/10538 Schenker's ''Fliessender Gesang'' and the Concept of Melodic Fluency], ''Orfeu'' 2/1 (2017), pp. 162–63.</ref> Melodic fluency, the preference for conjunct (stepwise) motion, is one of the main rules of [[voice leading]], even in free composition. It avoids successive leaps and produces "a kind of wave-like melodic line which as a whole represents an animated entity, and which, with its ascending and descending curves, appears balanced in all its individual component parts".<ref>''Counterpoint'', vol. I, p. 94.</ref> This idea is at the origin of that of [[linear progression]] (''Zug'') and, more specifically, of that of the Fundamental Line (''Urlinie'').