This piece of music right here. This roughly put together, really rigid piece of music is life. You can add non-chord tones to it, you can add dynamics and expression to make it louder or softer. You can change the rhythm to make it sound more smooth. You can add more rests to make it pause. You can add articulation to make. it. sound. staccato. like. this. Or you can add tenuto marks tomakeitsoundverylegatoandflowylikethis. You can even continue this piece to make it as lengthy as you’d like or as pretty as you’d like. It tells a story. There is a rise and fall. There is punctuation, a beginning, a middle, and an end. This music is my life. It is a mere phrase of my life, but it is indeed my life. It will continue past this point and it does have non-chord tones and dynamics and expression. It gets loud and soft. It gets tense and resolves. It is pretty, it is common, it flows very legato at times, and it becomes very short and staccato too. It’s beautiful. 

This phrase is called a “deceptive cadence”. Just before the pause in the middle, is a chord that cannot be complete. In the moment just before that middle chord, your ear thinks it knows what comes next. The beauty of it is that your ear is wrong. It is not a perfect cadence, because my life is not perfect. It is not an imperfect cadence, because my life is not imperfect either. The human brain wants to hear that chord resolve. It is expecting that chord to resolve because a five chord always resolves to a one chord. But in this instance, the five does not resolve like you want to hear it resolve. Not right away when you would like it to. It moves from five to six. It is deceptive because not knowing where something is going is adventurous. Our ears like to hear resolution. We like that sense of security in the five to one chord progression but it doesn’t always happen like that. Life can be deceiving. But not always. That’s the tricky part. If it were always deceptive, we would then expect it. There’s no happiness in always expecting something. That is why we then end the piece with what is known as a “perfect authentic” cadence. It provides resolution and calm after the distress before it.
So the chord happens and provides tension and discomfort. It is not complete! We can’t handle stopping it there! It’s not full, it doesn’t happen like we wanted it to.

But the beauty of it is that it’s not over. After all the stress of that dissonance and conflict of the notes in that chord, it moves. It moves toward the much anticipated, happy, resolution. The bigger picture.  

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Posted on February/13/2012
Tagged as: personal, deceptive cadence, music theory,

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