What a cadence is
A cadence is the little chord formula that ends a phrase. It's punctuation — the musical equivalent of a full stop, a comma, or a "…". Every phrase of every tune you've played ends with one, and learning to hear them is learning to hear where the sentences are.
The full stop: the perfect cadence
The strongest ending is V → I (or V7 → I) — the dominant resolving home, with the melody landing on ^1. It's called a perfect authentic cadence, and it's how most pieces actually finish.
You already met the mechanism in The dominant seventh — the tritone inside V7 squeezing onto the tonic triad. A cadence is that resolution, placed at the end of a phrase to close it.
How to spot one
Look for the end of a musically complete unit — usually marked by:
- a longer note or a rest;
- a slur or phrase mark closing;
- a barline before a new idea starts.
Then check what chord the harmony lands on. Lands on I → an authentic or plagal cadence (an ending). Lands on V → a half cadence (a comma — more to come).
A common decoration: the cadential 6/4
You'll often see the tonic chord in second inversion (the "6/4" from Inversions and spelling) landing right before the V of a cadence — I(6/4) → V → I. It's a suspension in chord form: two notes of the tonic hang over the dominant bass before resolving. Recognise the shape; you don't need to write it yet.
Try it
Try
Play the V7 → I cadence at the top of this lesson a few times, then play just a plain V → I (drop the C). Both are perfect cadences; the V7 version is more emphatic because of the extra pull. Now play I → V (reverse it) and stop — hear how that doesn't sound like an ending. A cadence's direction is the whole point.
The usual mistake
Playing through a cadence as if it were just more notes. When you reach one — the harmony arriving home, the melody landing on the tonic, a longer note — let it land. Give it a hair more time, ease the bow. That's how you make a phrase sound finished instead of merely stopped.