- Hi.
In this short film, we're
going to thinking about
something called the perfect cadence.
Well, first of all, what are cadences?
Well I like to think of them as
kind of musical punctuation.
Some people when they write their own
pieces of music, have some
great ideas on the go,
but is just has that kind
of sort of continuous
feeling about the piece, it never
comes up for air anywhere.
And this would be a bit like me speaking
like this now, I'm not going to put
any punctuation in at all.
I'm just going to keep talking for
as long as I can in one breath
but I've got no full
stops and no commas and
it's just becoming an endless sentence.
You see the problem.
We've just got words coming out
with no punctuation.
Music can sound like that too.
We need punctuation, and
that's where cadences come in.
And so we've got four main cadences
that we use, that are a means of saying
we've come to the end of a musical
phrase or a musical sentence,
and we're going to use
two chords that just
help us to enforce that we've come
to the end of something.
And the perfect cadence is frequently
used in music.
Now, what the perfect cadence is
is chord V followed by chord I.
So how do we find the chords?
Well, if we're in C
major, we need to work out
the first degree of the scale, which is C.
And we build a chord, a triad.
So here's C,
three notes above it is E,
five notes above it is G.
So that's my chord I
or my C chord,
or sometimes that's called
my tonic chord in C major.
So that's the I that
we're talking about here.
In order to find the V, we find the
fifth note of the scale.
So if I'm in C major, C is number one,
D is number two, E is number three, F is
number four, G is number five.
So I'm going to build a
chord or a triad on G.
So it's G, three above G is B
and five above G is D.
And that gives me chord V.
So, when I come to the
end of a phrase, if I want
to have a perfect cadence I need to have
chord V followed by chord I.
So here's V,
followed by I.
Now of course I don't
have to just use it in
this form of just a triad followed
by another triad, I can use the notes
of chord V in any way I want to.
So I might have G, B, D, or I might have
a chord that's spread out like this.
Or like this.
Or like this.
Or like this.
In other words I can do anything I like
as long as I'm using these notes
G, B and D that belong to chord V.
And I follow it with chord I, and I
can do anything I like with that
as long as it belongs to these notes.
So I could have V-I that goes like this.
I could have V-I that goes like this.
I could have one that goes like this, V-I.
So I can change octaves, I can change the
way that I distribute these notes, I can
have it in three parts, I can have it in
four parts, I can have it in eight parts.
Whatever you want to do.
But if you have the notes of chord V
followed by the notes of chord I, you have
the pattern for a perfect cadence.
So, for example, I might have a
melody that goes like this and I'll
put a perfect cadence on the end of it.
And you can hear how that V-I
gives me kind of a musical full stop.
I like to think of the perfect cadence
as a full stop because chord I
is the chord that brings you home.
So it's the homing-in
chord, the full stop.
So if I put chords under all of the notes
in that melody, and then included the
perfect cadence, you'll hear
that musical full stop.
And you can hear that V-I at the end.
Actually what I did that
time was I made the V
into a V7.
So if you wanted to do that, you could
include a seventh at
the top of it as well,
it just makes that V chord even richer.
So that's the recipe if you like
for a perfect cadence.
So if you are writing music, every time
you come to the end of a phrase, a kind of
musical statement, you might want to
think about using something like
a perfect cadence.
And we'll be around in other films
to explain the other cadences.
So have fun!
You can play them on the keyboard and
experiment with them, you could use
these notes to play on
any other instrument.
So if you're, say,
playing on the violin or
the flute you could
say, "Well, here are the
notes of chord V,
and here are the notes of chord I."
Could you make up a melody that uses V
followed by I?
So you could feel a cadence even
on a melodic instrument.
Anyway, have some fun
with the perfect cadence.
