Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h30 à 15h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance - Falling Nicely Into Place: The Cadence in History and Theory
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Maddie Kavanagh Clarke
Despite representing one of the most fundamental aspect of formal theory, a single, codified definition for the cadence remains elusive. Among major recent contributions to Formenlehre, theorising of the cadence has lagged behind understandings of form and syntax (although, see for example Caplin, 2004; Neuwirth and Bergé (eds), 2015; Schmalfeldt, 1992). These issues are compounded in the largely virgin, untouched territory of the early nineteenth-century. Reliance on classical models has inhibited production of comprehensive theories detailing the new syntaxes of the romantic period, and the interaction between syntax, formal articulation, and cadence.
This paper interrogates current literature, evaluating the cadential strategies producing formal articulation, and presents a new method for understanding cadence and closing function in the early nineteenth-century, taking the outer movements of Mendelssohn’s String Quartets as representative case studies. The theory of formal functions provides the most fruitful starting point for syntactic analysis, but modified to a more fluid perspective, allowing for romantic syntactic change. In order to best understand novel nineteenth-century practice, we must produce a flexible theory capable of encompassing non-cadential closure, weaker cadential articulation, deferral of structural closures, elision, non-congruence, and reinterpretation of inter-thematic cadences as intra-thematic cadences, and vice-versa, rather than a prescriptive set of normative models.
