Learn All About Abandoned Cadence With WKMT
One of the critical components for piano students is to analyse the pieces they play. This should be the responsibility for all piano teachers to use a certain amount of time of the piano lessons to provide the necessary information to shed clarity into the true form of the pieces their students approach.
The reason is that within music, the clarification of the form will be expressed by the performer, if an analysis is not made before, the performance will suffer.
One of the primary framing functions in music is the cadences; these devices are crucial to determine the length of phrases, passages, or pieces.
Sometimes, composers need to rephrase, extend or deviate the listener’s attention through certain devices such as deceptive cadences, evaded cadences or abandoned cadences.
The latter, the abandoned cadence is by the definition of W. Caplin in his book “Analysing Classical Forms” is: “The failure to realize an implied authentic cadence by eliminating the cadential dominant in root position or by inverting that harmony before its resolution.”
How This Definition Applies to Music?
They are many ways in which a composer can utilize and put it into practice, although its main function is always to extend the cadential function.
According to Juan Rezzuto, one of the ways this can be seen is when the dominant chord is undermined. Inversions, or omitted completely.
In other cases, the abandoned cadential progression is immediately followed by a new cadential one which certainly brings cadential closure; the phrase might end in a half cadence after a perfect authentic cadence was hinted and then abandoned.
In another case, a whole expanded cadential progression can dilute its target slowly by using inversions of the dominant and the use of a cadential 6th four on the tonic degree.
All these different devices represent one of the ways of framing the form of the pieces loosely, but the main aspect will always be to have enough knowledge to distinctively see them before playing them.
Click on the link aforementioned to learn more about these famous cadences, as well as the rest of the cadences analyzed by WKMT.
