19: The basics of cadences, still only in triads

Music, just like the written or spoken word, is organized into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, clauses, and so on—only we have different terminology for all that. Crucially though, just like written text has commas and periods and question marks and a whole host of other punctuation, so does music. Again, we just have some different terminology for it.

The musical analog of the concept of “punctuation at the end of a sentence” is “a cadence at the end of a phrase.” A phrase is simply a single musical idea. In  the following example, we have phrase A, phrase B twice, and phrase A again:

A sheet music with notes AI-generated content may be incorrect.

and here again, we see the same score, but with the cadences highlighted:

 

One could even make the (very good) argument for more highlighting, like this:

I don’t phrase it like that because I find that stopping and starting every two bars makes it feel too repetitive, so instead, when possible, I choose four-bar phrases. But any good theory teacher or exam would never fault you for picking the second highlighting scheme, declaring every phrase to be 2 bars.

Notice that the chords in the green boxes are not always the same: sometimes A goes to D, sometimes A goes to E, sometimes E goes to A. Those different sequences demonstrate three of the most common types of cadences out there.

·       An authentic cadence (there are many types, but these are all the same type—we’ll look at the subtypes in an upcoming article) moves from the V chord to the I chord (or the minor versions thereof—V-i, v-I, or v-i). Imagine this as “a period” or “an exclamation point” depending on the context.

·       A Plagal cadence (also called an “Amen” cadence, since the word “Amen” used to be written with this cadence, at the end of a prayer) moves from IV to I. This is “a period,” but not quite as strong as the authentic.

·       A half cadence moves from I to V.  Imagine this as “a question mark” most of the time.

There is another type of cadence which doesn't appear here at all-- the deceptive (or you might also hear "interrupted") cadence is one which V goes to anything other than I. 

For reasons that will become clear in a very short time, authentic cadences (especially the perfect subtype thereof, which we have here) are the strongest possible cadences in the sense that they induce the strongest sense of “this is finished/I am home/we are at rest.”

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