Le 28 juin 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
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 : David Sears
In the Formenlehre tradition, contemporary accounts of the classical cadence typically identify the most common cadence categories according to essential characteristics relating to harmony and melody. I present an alternative view, one that exemplifies the probabilistic approach to category formation adopted by cognitive psychologists over the last half century, in which a category is understood as a network of overlapping attributes, and members are prototypical to the extent that they bear a family resemblance to—have attributes in common with—other members of the category.
To support this claim, this paper presents a corpus study of the classical cadence that re-examines the cadence typology presented in William E. Caplin’s treatise, Classical Form—represented here by a collection of 245 exemplars selected from 50 sonata-form expositions in Haydn’s string quartets (Opp. 17–76) of the five cadence categories that achieve cadential arrival (perfect authentic, imperfect authentic, half, deceptive, and evaded)—using a family of techniques for similarity estimation (the ratio model) and clustering (the neighbour-joining method) pioneered or inspired by psychologist Amos Tversky.
The analysis correctly classified 233 of the 245 cadences in the collection and discovered pertinent sub-types for certain categories that have only recently been described in the Formenlehre tradition. Thus, this study supports the view that category systems for the classical cadence are psychologically relevant if they mirror the structure of attributes encountered in a given repertory that listeners are likely to learn and remember, where category membership is determined not by essential features, but by family resemblance.
