Review of Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Bergé, Eds., What Is A Cadence? Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire (Leuven University Press, 2015)

[1] Questions related to underlying principles of tonal process often engender heated disagreement among musicians. Are there three tonal functions or seven Stufen? How is the minor mode derived, and how should it be understood in relation to major? Why are parallel fifths forbidden in common-practice (and a significant body of earlier) music? What are the conditions under which parallel fifths or octaves are acceptable in the foreground or middleground? Do seventh chords exist? What is the status of scales within tonal theory? Should we sing with fixed or movable do syllables, and if movable, according to Kodaly or Curwen? The list could go on and on, but the titular question of the book under review now joins the others, and it provides more contention than one might at first expect, even within the strict chronological confines of this volume. "What is a cadence?" resembles my other questions in that we cannot get very far until we have provided a provisional answer for ourselves, yet we are unlikely to reach a consensus anytime soon.[2] Markus Neuwirth and Pieter Berge have brought together nine essays on the subject, all of which were presented in January 2011 at a four-day conference held at the Academia Belgica in Rome. The authors explore a wide range of music-theoretic perspectives: Schenkerian theory; Formenlehre according to Caplin or Hepokoski/Darcy; schemata and partimento; eighteenth-century compositional theory according to Kirnberger, Koch, Riepel, and others; generative grammar according to Lerdahl and Jackendoff as well as Rohrmeier; and many others. Methodologies range from corpus studies, through music-cognition experiments, to traditional theoretical explorations. The editors have allowed the conflicts between approaches and readings to stand unmediated, and thus the collection reads like a music-academic free-for-all, with several musical examples reappearing from one article to another and the authors responding to each other throughout. In this respect, the collection will remind readers of another well-known volume from the same publisher (Berge 2009).[3] While the essays all intersect with each other in fascinating dialogue, both explicit and implicit, the editors suggest a two-part organization to the book (Introduction, 10). Five essays (by William Caplin, Felix Diergarten, Poundie Burstein, Markus Neuwirth, and Danuta Mirka) offer mechanical or technical investigations of the theory and practice of cadence in late eighteenth-century composition. Four further essays (by Nathan John Martin and Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, Vasili Byros, David Sears, and Martin Rohrmeier and Markus Neuwirth) are interdisciplinary in nature, and offer methodological innovations that lie further from traditional approaches to tonal theory and analysis. The nine essays all gain from being read as a collection; I suspect that many readers will reconsider some cherished notions in favor of what is offered here, while remaining firm in their convictions when confronted with other ideas in the collection. My own Schenkerian orientation will be quite evident as I discuss the individual contributions to this volume. Reading the essays collectively, I found ample evidence that the question of what constitutes a cadence in tonal music is bound to an understanding of hierarchical levels, and that all of the work presented here is explicitly or implicitly in dialogue with questions of levels. Among the many possible examples to be raised here, the following can be understood as specific versions of the question of levels: Koch's or Riepel's variously weighted cadential/punctuation types; Caplin's hierarchy of beginning, middle, and ending functions; preferred placement of the EEC or ESC within Hepokoski and Darcy's Sonata Theory; and right- vs. left-branching, or nesting decisions, in generative-grammar approaches to musical structure. Several of these issues are raised in Anson-Cartwright 2007, an important study of musical closure that appears in only one of the bibliographies within the collection under review. …