When we perform a harmonic analysis, we are attempting to explain how a listener hears a harmonic progression. We identify which pitches are essential to the music and which are decorative–at least to a majority of listeners–by relying on a culturally-conditioned assumption: what does “good” music sound like? Our understanding of diatonic tendencies and voice-leading results from our emersion in the musical soup into which we are born, and this creates a shared language that can explain likely interpretations of a listener.
Once we go beyond looking at the building blocks of Western music–rhythm, intervals, chords, keys, etc.–and begin combining these concepts to analyze function, we start to organize music into structures that transform these individual ideas into complete musical statements.
A motive (or motif) is the smallest identifiable fragment of music. It can be a short melodic fragment, a short harmonic progression, a distinct rhythm, or a combination of these things. A composer can take a motive and build an entire work around it through various transformations, but it will always retain some fundamental relationships of pitch, rhythm, or both.
A phrase is the complete musical idea built to expand and combine motives. A common analogy in music theory is to describe a phrase as a “musical sentence”. A good sentence has a clear beginning, middle, and end. It has a few required structures and often some decorative parts to provide interest and detail. This is exactly how a musical phrase works. It has a clear beginning, middle, and end; it has required structures to define its function; and it can be manipulated, decorated, and transformed to relate to the ideas that surround it. Phrases can sometimes be divided into sub-phrases, but these sub-phrases do not function independently; instead, sub-phrases are best thought of as motives with support.
Music listeners instinctively separate musical ideas into phrases and how those ideas interact to form the larger structure of a work. Before we dive into the technical details of how we define a phrase, let’s take a moment to demonstrate your natural ability to classify musical ideas in this way.
You were likely able to hear each phrase with minimal effort. You can start by checking your answers against the following list:
For most, you probably identified that there is a strong melodic component in defining each phrase, which includes visually obvious clues such as the notated rest in the top line at the end of each phrase. Beyond that, however, there is an easy-to-identify quality that begins and ends each phrase that can be difficult to describe. Perhaps even more surprisingly, you can remove the melodic line and listen only to the bass line, and you will still be able to clearly hear the implied phrases.
The bass line for this removes rhythmic variety and melodic decorations entirely, showing that there is an implied harmonic element that defines phrasing. Cadences are this “missing link” that unites harmonic function to phrase structure.
Before we formally define cadences, let’s quickly review our terminology of function from the previous units. After having developed voice-leading procedures in Unit 7a, you should now understand how the voice-leading between V and I contributes toward tension and release. This progression defines tonal harmony, and it is from this that we derive our three primary functions: tonic, dominant, and pre-dominant. While it is easy to memorize which chords belong to each of the primary functions, it is more important to understand how and why these functions work, because context can change a chord’s function to any other function.
Note that the two first primary functions–tonic and dominant–share terms with the older scale degree system (i.e. The system that we discussed in Unit 2a that uses terms such as mediant, submediant, supertonic, etc.) as well as certain commonly-used chord types such as dominant chords. Because students often confuse the meaning of these, this text will use the following style guide:
The three primary harmonic functions of tonic, dominant, and pre-dominant shape all musical phrases through tension and resolution, and no where is that more obvious than in studying how phrases end. A cadence is the harmonic progression at the end of a musical phrase. All cadences finish a phrase, but not all cadences provide closure and stability. In fact, some cadences are purposefully unsettled.
We will study the chords associated with classifying cadences, but as we studied above, it takes far more than a specific set of chords to create a cadence. Some of the most common cadences conclude with V resolving to I, but not all progressions that include V to I are cadences. In addition to chord progressions, cadences are affected by melodic shapes, melodic rhythm, harmonic rhythm, context, meter, and many other elements of music.
For this course, we will study five types of cadences:
Take special care to remember the abbreviations in parentheses for each cadence type. These will be used repeatedly in your analyses.
For each cadence in the following examples, determine:
Note: I have elongated each fermata note to a rhythmic value outside of the time signature to give you more time to hear the cadence.
Cadences close each musical idea and phrase, and we classify each cadence by certain characteristics of their voice-leading and harmonic progressions.
Do is in the soprano voice of the I/i chordThere is a special type of half cadence that is used often enough in certain musical styles that it has received a special name: the Phrygian half cadence (PHC). This cadence only occurs in minor and must consist of a iv6 resolving to a root-position V chord. We will not discuss this particular cadence often, but you should be aware of it and able to label it when you see it.
Now that we have a basic understanding of harmonic progressions, harmonic function, labeling function with Roman numerals, and cadences, we can combine these ideas to explore musical phrases.
Because this piece only has two voices, many chords will have more than one option for a harmony, so you must use the harmonic flowchart and you knowledge of cadences from Unit 7a to choose the most likely harmony based on function. For example, if a harmony only has mi and sol, this could be either a I chord or a iii chord. If you put it into context, however, it will become clear what harmony the listener is likely to hear. If the harmony with mi and sol is preceded by fa and sol, it is highly unlikely that this is a iii chord, because fa and sol outline a V7 harmony and a V chord will not resolve to a iii chord. Instead the listener will hear this as a V chord resolving to a I chord–albeit an unstable I chord.
NOTE: This piece has multiple modulations that I have marked into the score. We will cover modulations in a later unit, but for now, make sure to analyze each phrase ending in the correct key. If you do not, your cadences will not make sense.
After combining all of your discussions, your definition of a phrase should include is a complete musical idea that:
Phrases
In this piece, each phrase is four measures long, and many musical pieces will establish a “standard” phrase length. This is not a defining feature of phrases, though, because many composers prefer to have varied phrase lengths in their compositions to keep the listener engaged.