From Zero to Mozart
Stage 4Scales & musicianshipLesson 38 of 70 · Ear & musicianshipNEXT

The other three cadences

The perfect cadence is the full stop. Three others fill in the rest of the punctuation.

Plagal — the "Amen"

IV → I. Softer than a perfect cadence — no leading tone straining up, just the subdominant settling home. It's the "A-men" at the end of a hymn.

44 bpm
A plagal cadence in G major — C major to G major. It arrives, but gently. Sing 'A-men' to it.

Half — the comma

Ends on V. The phrase leans forward, unfinished, expecting an answer. Very common at the end of a first phrase (the antecedent of a period).

44 bpm
A half cadence — it comes to rest on the dominant, not the tonic. It sounds like a comma: 'and then…'

Deceptive — the swerve

V → vi. The V sets you up for the tonic, and at the last moment it goes to vi instead — the relative minor's chord. A little surprise; the phrase carries on to find a real ending later.

44 bpm
A deceptive cadence — the V resolves to E minor instead of G major. You expected home; you got its shadowy neighbour. The phrase isn't over.

The era changes it — the Picardy third

Here's a "the symbol tells you what, the era tells you how" moment. A minor-key piece can end its final cadence on a major tonic chord — you raise the 3rd of the last i chord. It's called a Picardy third. Bach does it in roughly half his minor-mode pieces; by the Classical era it had largely gone out of fashion. Same cadence on the page (V → i), a different final chord depending on when it was written.

Try it

The cadences

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4

The usual mistake

Hearing a half cadence or a deceptive cadence and thinking the piece has ended (or gone wrong). They're open punctuation on purpose — the music is telling you keep listening, there's more. Only the perfect and plagal cadences are genuine full stops.