Overview 7c - Cadences

After having developed voice-leading procedures in Unit 7a, you should now understand why V readily resolves to I. This progression and its voice-leading define tonal harmony, and it is from this that we derive the three diatonic harmony classifications: tonic, dominant, and pre-dominant function. While it is easy to memorize which chords belong to each of the three functions, it is more important to understand how and why these functions work.

• The most stable harmony is built around the tonic of the key, so stable chords have a tonic function.
• The harmonies that pull strongly to tonic function are built around the dominant of the key, so these chords have a dominant function.
• There are also harmonies that resolve well to the dominant function chords, so these have a pre-dominant function.
  • Some systems call these chords subdominant function because they all share the fourth scale degree. We already use words such as “dominant” and “tonic” in a variety of ways (e.g. scale degrees, harmonic function, chord types, etc.), so we will be differentiating pre-dominant from subdominant to create slightly less confusion.

These harmonic functions shape every musical phrase, and nowhere is that more obvious than in studying how phrases end. Cadences are the term that we use to describe the harmonic progression at the end of musical phrase. If a musical phrase could be considered equivalent to a written sentence, then the cadence is the period at the end of that sentence. All cadences finish a phrase, but not all cadences provide closure and stability. In fact, some cadences are purposefully unsettled.

We will study the chords associated with classifying cadences, but it takes far more than a particular harmonic progression to create a cadence. In addition to chord progressions, cadences are affected by melodic shapes, melodic rhythm, harmonic rhythm, contextual clues, meter, and many other elements of music.

For this course, we will study six types of cadences:

• perfect authentic cadence
• imperfect authentic cadence
• half cadence
• deceptive cadence
• plagal cadence
• phrygian cadence