Cadences! We've spent several days learning about them... What each does and how to identify the difference between them in a song. How hard could it be? Easy! Am I right?.... Wrong. I had some pretty high hopes going into this challenge. I had just finished a class where I was confident in my ability to identify the difference between a half cadence and an imperfect authentic cadence, and I knew for a fact that I had trained my ear enough to find the perfect authentic cadence in a phrase.
So, I actually developed a thought process behind my next song selection. I knew it needed to be something slower and to be something with a more apparent and steady rhythm. I also was feeling kind of bassy after hearing the upright bass in the previous song... so my thoughts took me right to "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes. I am a huge Jack White fan, and everyone has heard of "Seven Nation Army" and it fit my requirements. You figure that if it's something so catchy, people are chanting it at football games and when they want a musician to bring out an encore, that it would be pretty easy to pick out a cadence structure! Well, I quickly found the smooth and steady 4/4 time signature, but I was a bit stumped when finding cadences. All I could hear was the bass line, and I noticed it didn't change at all between phrases. Plus, the guitar is really on there when Jack wanted to shred out, and the only other sound was Meg White's bass drum giving a heavy thud. I truly couldn't even tell if there was anything other than a perfect authentic cadence, but maybe I just wasn't listening hard enough.
Alas, I tried again. I scrambled through my Spotify library to find a song I used to listen to all the time, "American Daydream" by Electric Guest. I was still craving a killer bass line, and this fixed that perfectly. I could detect another 4/4 time signature, and this time my ear picked out some differences in these phrases. I gave the song a few listens and began listen for a cadence structure. I don't exactly have a very large knowledge of notes and scales just yet, so my decision on this cadence structure is based on some different aspects of the song. As you can hear at the beginning, the bass line ends on two different notes every phrase. The first sounds open and unresolved, and the second gives a bit more of a finished sound, kind of like it's saying "alright, time to start over again." With this knowledge, I knew the second set was a perfect authentic cadence, and I sort of had to guess with the first one (god, I wish I knew the proper vocabulary of music). The definition of a half cadence is the most unresolved cadence in a phrase, and through my reasoning, I decided to claim the first part of the phrase a half cadence.
I know I have left myself without a perfectly clear answer to what the cadence structure is, but I feel a lot better than when I first began this assignment. Although I may not be 100% sure of the structure, I have reasoning to defend my answer that this song is a HC-PAC cadence structure. Please let me know if you think differently!!
Awesome song choice! I noticed that you had a lot of trouble with figuring out which type of cadence all you're songs were, which is good, because only one of you're songs had a cadence remotely similar to what we've learned in class.
ReplyDeleteThe first song is a country styled string quartet written in 4/4 meter, meaning that the song experiments with different key signatures other than the major key signatures we've studied thus far (which then leads to confusing cadences). For example, the end of the first phrase doesn't lands on the solfege syllable "te" which is a half step lower than "ti." In fact, every cadence in the beginning of this piece ends on "te," so identifying any cadence would've been impossible for we haven't learned about any cadences with "te" in it.
However, you're second piece does have one instance of a Half- Perfect Authentic Cadence. If you listen to the second phrase, you'll hear the singer end on sol. One way to figure out where "do" in this piece is, is by listening to the bass. The first note the bass plays is "do," so if you sing that note the entire time while listening, you'll be able to find the one instance in the third phrase where the singer resolve the phrase to a perfect authentic cadence.
Finally, your third song has the song problem and the first song; most of the cadences end on "te" and not "ti." Hope this helps!
Lauren Thaete