Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

virtually every final cadence from the mid-fifteenth century on. They admitted considerable variation from
the beginning. For an idea of the possibilities, compare the lineup, in Ex. 12-5, of all the remaining
sectional cadences in the Caput Mass (two per “movement”). In Ex. 12-5a and b, from the Gloria, both
the superius and the altus are decorated with “Landini sixths,” producing pungent dissonances right before
the resolution. A variation of the same configuration occurs at the end of the Credo (Ex. 12-5d), where the
superius again has the Landini sixth but the altus has a simple lower neighbor, producing not a sixth but a
seventh (the first “dominant seventh”?) above the bass.

Example 12-5 g, from the Agnus Dei, is especially interesting since the bassus is modified so that the
final chord is a richly sonorous full triad. Both the avoidance of the fifth progression in the bass and the
presence of the third in the final chord, however, are justified by the fact that the chord in question is not
actually a final chord. It is a sectional cadence only, immediately followed by the continuation of the
Agnus Dei. The final cadence of the Agnus, Ex. 12-5h, returns to the concord of perfect consonances. The
presence of an imperfect consonance in a final chord would not normally be countenanced in strictly
composed polyphonic music (whatever may have gone on behind the closed doors of the oral tradition)
until nearly the end of the next century.

EX. 12-5 Missa  Caput   a.  middle  of  Gloria  b.  end of  Gloria  c.  middle  of  Credo   d.  end of  Credo   e.  middle  of  Sanctus f.  end of

Sanctus g.  middle  of  Agnus   Dei h.  end of  Agnus   Dei

As long as the perfect concord was required at full cadences, the theorists, our only direct witnesses
to contemporary concepts, went on calling the superius/tenor motion the essential cadential motion, with
the V–I in the bassus beneath playing a no more than a contrapuntally mandated supporting role. Just as
surely, however, by the middle of the seventeenth century the dominant–tonic cadence, articulated by the
V–I bass, was fully conceptualized and had become for contemporary musicians the primary means of
defining harmonic closure, as it remains for us today (that is, in our practiced habits of “hearing”). Over
the two centuries between 1450 and 1650, in other words, a gradual conceptual change took place in the
wake of a new perceptual reality. Roughly speaking, it was the change from “modal” to “tonal” thinking.