Chapter 10

Cadences, Phrases, and (more about) Subphrases

By

Robert Fleisher, Northern Illinois University

Textbooks and scholarly writings on the subject of musical form begin with many of the same concepts presented in Chapters 10 and 20 of Tonal Harmony. For listeners and performers alike, perceiving and interpreting form in tonal music begins with the phrase, which Spencer and Temko define as "the smallest structural unit that terminates with a cadence."¹ This criterion—that each phrase must have a cadence (and vice-versa)—can help us to avoid unnecessarily (and unmusically) chopping up coherent musical thoughts into smaller (and less coherent) fragments that obscure meaningful relationships between phrases and larger structural units. However, if we think of cadences as purely harmonic formulas, we can imagine that we see or hear them every time a particular chord follows another. An authentic cadence occurs only if dominant harmony leads to tonic at the end of a phrase. The definition above begs an important question: What happens in a phrase and how do we know where it ends? To answer this we need to consider additional factors in phrase organization and say a bit more about cadences.

Is the length (or at least the metaphor) of a single breath a useful yardstick for judging a phrase, as many have suggested?² Might we perceive the phrase as "a motion with a beginning, middle, and end."?³ If so, we may concur with William Rothstein that "if there is no tonal motion, there is no phrase."⁴ All these ideas resonate well with Arnold Schoenberg's description of the phrase as "a kind of musical molecule consisting of a number of integrated musical events, possessing a certain completeness, and well adapted to combination with other similar units."⁵ Spring and Hutcheson discuss a variety of ways in which rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic activity all help to define phrase organization.⁶ While composers combine phrases to produce larger structural units, such factors as repetition, sequence, and contrast also commonly partition phrases into smaller units. In Tonal Harmony, such "a distinct portion of a phrase" is termed a subphrase (p. 150).⁷ Understanding that a single phrase may contain two or more subphrases offers an alternative to identifying every V or I chord as part of a cadence.⁸

Spencer and Temko describe the cadence as "a point of relative cessation of musical activity."⁹ Schoenberg provided a more comprehensive definition, though without actually using the term "cadence" (or mentioning harmony): "Phrase endings may be marked by a combination of distinguishing features, such as rhythmic reduction, melodic relaxation through a drop in pitch, the use of smaller intervals and fewer notes; or by any other suitable differentiation." ¹⁰ We may also think of a cadence as the punctuation of a phrase and as a relatively "stable point of arrival."¹¹ It may be clear by now that the cadence (like the phrase) is a complex structural phenomenon. When we identify them by type, however, the names we use reflect the concept of the cadence as "a harmonic goal, specifically the chords used at the goal" (p. 145).

The concepts of phrase, subphrase and cadence allow room for subjectivity and confusion, and they can be challenging. Tonal Harmony offers a useful distinction between the melodic emphasis of the subphrase and the harmonic emphasis of the phrase; the "harmonic event" associated with the phrase is, of course, its cadence. Since phrases end with cadences, a phrase may conclude with a subphrase that either coincides with or comprises a cadence.¹² In other words, the relationship between subphrase and cadence is coincidental. Let's expand on one other statement: if "subphrases frequently end with progressions that could be cadences" (p. 151), it simply means that these progressions would comprise cadences if (or when) occurring at the ends of phrases. For the concept of the subphrase to be maximally useful, remember that cadences are defining attributes of phrases, but are only incidental attributes of subphrases.¹³