Help! "Voice Leading" - Musical Defenition Needed!

Can anyone help me? I can't find a definition of "voice leading" anywhere! I'm a music student needing clarification!

The context in which I have recently come across this term is some research into my one of my favorite works: Mozart's Requiem. I read that

"errors in 'voice leading', and melodic meterial borrowed from Bach and Handel meant that many considered the first edn. of the Requiem not up to Mozart's standard"

- in the first edn. sussmayer's completions were, I understand, attributed to Mozart.

Interestingly enough, the other point about "melodic meterial borrowed from Bach & Handel", I don't really "get" this point, either: I myself recognised that the subject of the Kyrie Fugue can be clearly recognised both in Bach's WTC and in Handel's Messiah..... The thing that confuses me is that the Kyrie fugue is DEFINATELY by Mozart - if anyone knows of any other melodies in the requiem that this statement could be referring to, I would be very much interested to hear!


This was only supposed to be a short post, as I'm a newbie to this forum! sorry for going on a bit, there!

Many Thanks.

 

Here's a guess: "leading" pronounced to rhyme with "bedding" is a typesetting term to describe the padding out or spacing of letters and words. Perhaps the term you are trying to understand was simply a printing defect in which the words were not correctly aligned relative to the notes in the score?

Apologies if this is a huge red herring.

 

Voice leading, I believe, is a rather old-fashioned term used when discussing counterpoint and simply means the nature of the writing for each individual line or "voice"; "errors" in voice leading might include parallel fifths or parallel octaves, which generally sound ugly.

edit: If you've got a copy of Grove's you'll find it under "part-writing".