Cadences?

The word comes from the Latin 'cadere', which means 'to fall'. Cadences are chord changes that give some sense of finality... they're only used at the end of phrases.

Piston explains them as musical punctuation marks: a full cadence (ending on I) is like a period, while a half cadence (ending on V) is like a comma. That's certainly as good an explanation as I've seen :)

Ive never really thought to research on that. Guess Ill have something to do at work today.

Kido

like what noteboat said.. but not like for ends of pieces.. usually they will be the end of music, it makes the music sound finished..
play your favourite song... and stop it half way through..
does it sound like it should end there?? i would doubt it.

i only know about one type..the perfect cadence.... and that (as far as i can tell) is made up of the dominant seventh followed by the tonic chord.

for instance, play in the key of c major .. G7 (G, B, D, F) and then Cmajor (C, E, G) .. it sounds complete, resolved.

in tablature:


--1-----
--0--1--
--0--0--
--0--2--
--2--3--
--3-----

the change to dominant (V) is also a resolution, but it's not nearly as strong as that of the tonic (I).

try it :)

the tonic is expected after a dominant, especially after a dominant 7th, so i wouldnt say that it sounded like an "end" chord, only if you modulated up a fifth before hand so the dominant was the new tonic, (not in the case of the dom7).

A perfect authentic cadence ends on the tonic in the bass and soprano.
or highest pitch ,lowest pitch.

how can the tonic be in the bass and soprano..

tonic is a chord, and notes go in those voices..

unless you mean the tonic note is in the bass and soprano..

it depends how you want it to sound

D E
B C
G G
G C

would sound a little like a perfect cadence, with only the bass note moving by skip, wheras if you had..

D G
G C
B E
GC

then all the voices are moving by skip and it would give you more of that "dramatic ending"..

so there is more than one way to manipulate a V-I for different sounds

Alex, he meant the tonic NOTE. It's not just a chord, it's also the technical name for the first degree of a major scale. You've got:

1 - Tonic
2 - Supertonic
3 - Mediant
4 - Subdominant
5 - Dominant
6 - Submediant
7 - Leading tone

A perfect cadence in four-part harmony ends with the tonic note in both bass and soprano. Anything else is an imperfect cadence... so you can have a perfect authentic cadence, and an imperfect authentic cadence.

Thanks for clarifying noteboat. Same thing only different. Yea in 4 part harmony, a piece always ends on a perfect authentic cadence. You should check out a theory book on cadence. My teacher and I have been discussing this lately. Interesting to see how jacked up music is today. i.e. a V-IV, or a IV-V progression, but I guess its all open to interpretation today anyway. I am by no means an expert but cadence/ theory defiantly
has a place in my practice.

Dirty Rotten

Actually, lots of four part harmony uses other cadences. Imperfect authentic cadences have been used by folks like Beethoven and Mendelssohn, so the rule of tonic in soprano and bass really only applies if you're writing strict counterpoint as they did in the 16-1700s - and even then, only for the final cadence.

The other cadences really aren't anything new - in, fact, the second most common cadence, the plagal (IV-I) is sometimes called the 'Amen' cadence because of its use in church hymns. Serious composers pick up on that for a church feeling - Handel used a plagal at the end of the Hallelujah Chorus.

A few other 'old' cadences: half cadences (I-V), deceptive cadences (V-VI), and Phrygian cadences (the IV-V you mention) date back to at least the 1600s - Bach used 'em all.

Even the more modern ones, like II-I, VI-I, and VI-V are still 100-200 years old. Still, the authentic cadence is used so often, and in so many types of music, that we're accustomed to it... and everything else sounds 'jacked up'.

I think the cadence I was thinking of was V-IV . I was told it an absolute no-go for classical music and would be wrong to even in modern music. Due to the parallel octaves and 5ths and what not. A(IV)-men(I) --just a little joke.

Dirty rotten

It's true that V-IV isn't used, but it could be under the right circumstances.

Cadences can be arranged into three major groups - those that end on I (the perfect, plagal), those that end on V (the half) and those that end on a substitute of I (the deceptive). Ending on IV falls into the deceptive category.

Avoiding parallel fifths and octaves is easy enough to do - a couple solutions come to mind, the simplest of which is to have tenor and alto at unison on the V:

G F
B C
B A
D F

So the problem really isn't how to voice it, it's how to deal with the root of your closing chord - that F kind of hangs there in C. Since it shares only one voice with the tonic - the common substitute of VI shares two - it's a pretty weak substitution.

I think it could be pulled off with the right melodic material... it's just that there are better choices available.

you called IV-V a Phrygian cadence, never heard of that cadence before..

is it because ending on the V kind of says, or hints to tonic, and say in C, V = G, and the IV, in C is F, and because it ends on G, you would expect the leading note, not the subtonic, and seeing as that is the only note changed it leads to some analysis of Phrygian?

i know im wrong, but why is it called that anyway?

Piston gives a little history, Alex:

"The Phrygian cadence is so called, not very accurately, because of the half step relationship in the bass, supposedly a late survivor from the II-I cadence of the fifteenth century."

That's kind of murky, I know... so here goes a better explanation:

First, the Phrygian cadence only occurs in minor keys, so we'd be dealing with C minor: Fm is the IV, and G is the V (harmonic minor - you raise the 7th degree from Bb to B).

In the Phrygian cadence, the IV is played in first inversion, so you've got the third in the bass (Ab) and it resolves down a half step to the root of the V (G). The reason they call it Phyrgian is that this root movement mimics resolution to the tonic in the Phrygian mode in a II-I progression, as Piston noted:

G minor: G-A-Bb-C-D-Eb-F#... II-I = root from A to G
G Phrygian: G-Ab-Bb-C-D-Eb-F... II-I = root from Ab to G

Like he said, it's not very accurately named.