Cadences are the most important thing that people learning to write music are not using
correctly. Ignore them, and the music can feel wandering, unbalanced, and uninteresting.
"Gee, this is uplifting."
Cedric Thorpe Davie, who wrote the book 'Musical Structure and Design,' puts cadences into
three categories. The first is those that give a feeling of rest. Oh, the technical
term for this is an authentic cadence, and they can be perfect or imperfect.
Let's listen to this short track, Hudson Moves Out from 'Breath of the Wild':
[Music]
This is in the key of D-flat major, and for the last chord, we have a D-flat major chord
with D-flat in the bass and D-flat in the melody. It's technically a D-flat six-nine
chord, but that's really just an issue of flavor. The important thing is that, with
that melody and bass both on the tonic and finishing on the one chord of the key, it's
about as stable as we can get. There is a sense of complete resolution or rest, as we
called it before, and we'd call this a perfect authentic cadence. The cadence is essential
for making the theme feel complete, even a theme that's only three bars long like this
one:
[Music]
This chord in measure 8 also counts as a perfect authentic cadence. It's an F minor chord in
root position, there's an F in the melody, and it feels completely at rest. The twist
is that the melody actually starts in A-flat major and modulates to F minor in the second
half, but that perfect authentic cadence in F minor feels completely settled and at rest,
even though we're no longer in our original key.
Impressive, I know. Not only can we use a cadence to close a theme; we can also use
it to confirm a new tonal center and keep our harmony moving along in interesting ways.
[Music]
Now let's check out Kass's theme:
[Music]
The
theme starts in A minor, but that C major chord in bars 7 and 8 feels at rest. Just
like with Revali's theme, we've modulated to a relative key. The difference is that,
instead of the root of the chord in the melody, it's the third (E) when we have an authentic
cadence with something other than the root in the melody. It's considered an imperfect
authentic cadence. It's like a slightly less restful version of the perfect authentic cadence,
still giving us a feeling of stability, but not quite as final. Kass's theme uses the
difference between the perfect and imperfect types perfectly. The first half of the theme
ends in the relative major key with an imperfect authentic cadence, but the theme isn't over
yet. The second half of the theme brings us back home to A minor and ends with the perfect
authentic cadence, so we get this beautiful balance of somewhat restful in a related key
and then completely at rest in the home key.
I want to point out that just because you have a one chord or a five-one progression
somewhere does not automatically mean you have a cadence. As Alan Belkin puts it, 'When
harmonic punctuation and rhythmic punctuation coincide, we speak of cadence.' The harmony
is important, but the position in the form and that sense of punctuation are important
factors too.
The second type of cadences are those that feel incomplete. The technical term for this
is a half cadence, and in traditional harmony, this means reaching a cadence on the V chord.
In contemporary music, we don't have to be so strict. It's really that feeling of being
incomplete that we want to focus on. Think of the half cadence as a question mark.
At the end of the first theme in Gerudo town, we cadence on the V chord:
[Music]
Notice that it's at the end of an eight-bar structure, the end of a phrase, and the rhythmic
activity of the melody has settled down and taken a breath. All of these things come together
to make it feel like we've finished a complete thought, but because we've cadenced on the
V chord, it feels incomplete. There's this itch for the music to get back home to A-flat.
In Daruk's theme, we also have a half cadence, but it's not the usual V chord.
[Music]
The piece is in C minor mostly, but there's a melody cadence on a D-flat major 7 sharp
11 chord, basically borrowing the flat 2 chord from the C Phrygian mode. It's a beautiful
chord, and it does exactly what a traditional half cadence would do, which is to give us
a feeling of the music being incomplete when it settles back into the C chord in the next
bar. There's this feeling of return to home and of relief.
[Music]
Also notice how the half cadence is stretched out for extra time with this fermata, which
is a wonderful way to sustain the tension and keep us itching for resolution just a
little bit longer. I mentioned at the start, beginners don't use cadences correctly, and
it's really about this sense of taking a moment to breathe at regular intervals throughout
the form, with different degrees of tension and release. Remember that, and you'll be
fine.
There's a third type of cadence which is probably the most fun and that is those that surprise
us. It helps when I think about the most common of these is the deceptive cadence, which is
when people are expecting a cadence to a certain chord, but you deceive them and give them
something else instead. Hateno village has a classic version of this.
[Music]
The final phrase has E minor 7 going to a sus4, a classic 2 5 progression that is clearly
setting us up for our usual two five one, but oh no, the composer has deceived us, and
instead of the expected D major chord, we end up with a B minor, the six chord. Six
is a common substitute for one, so though it's not quite what we expected, it's also
not like we went completely into outer space. Notice how the melody is still that expected
D, it's just the flavor of the chord has been modified slightly for extra variety
and interest.
[Music]
Rito Village is a bit more adventurous. [Music]
[Music]
The theme starts in G minor, and although it moves around a little bit towards the end
of the theme, we still feel like G is home. We're on this E-flat major chord, the flat
six of G minor. It feels like the phrase is about to wrap up, but then it keeps going.
We suddenly move down a third to this C major chord, and then we keep going and move down
a third again to A-flat major 7, where we end up with this half cadence on a chord that
had nothing to do with our original key and ends up being used to modulate to D-flat for
the next section. But the reason it works is that semantically, we're at the end of
the section. We are expecting things to wrap up, and instead, we get teased along for a
while. We still eventually have some sort of cadence. It's still important to get there,
it's just that most people probably didn't have a flat major 7 as their pick for likeliest
places to end up. What the a Cadence can't surprise us if we aren't set up to expect
anything. So in the cases where you want to do something interesting, counter-intuitively,
the best way to set it up is with a cliche expected thing. Make people feel confident
that a certain resolution is coming before you surprise them with something else.
I used this in a scene for a film I scored years ago. The main character is recording
a video where he confesses to a murder but he changes his mind decides not to send it
to the police. I used a G minor over D to D7 flat 9 progression to make it feel like
a strong resolution in the key of G minor is coming. [Music] But after the V chord instead
of resolving to one, I just changed the D7 flat 9 chord to a d diminished seven, stripping
it of all its power and leaving us feeling completely unresolved and disappointed.
[Music]
Manipulating the cadence and playing with expectations is a really powerful tool. The
thing is, cadences are not the only thing composers struggle with. If you're serious
about writing good music, then you can't afford to miss this video here, where you'll learn
how to take diatonic harmony and turn it into something rich and beautiful and make your
music 10 times better, maybe even 100 times more interesting. Thanks for watching. I will
see you in the next one.