That music scholarship accords an important place to the eighteenth-century cadence is undeniable. The study of cadence is well documented throughout the history of music theory and continues to remain relevant to a number of academic domains (historical musicology, music analysis, music theory pedagogy, music perception and cognition). Yet despite the immense body of scholarship concerning cadence, it is perhaps surprising to note the lack of agreement, from eighteenth-century theorists on, as to how various instances of musical closure might be usefully defined and classified. Given the current interest in theories of musical form (in which cadence plays a critical role), the failure to provide a uniform theory for the eighteenth-century cadence has prompted renewed activity from the academic community over the last few decades. Efforts to define what precisely constitutes cadence have resulted in a number of studies that reconsider how composers articulate cadences, classify the instances in which a promised cadential arrival fails to materialize and attempt to trace the development of eighteenth-century conceptions of cadence using contemporaneous source material.

The conference What is a Cadence? Theoretical and Analytical Perspectives on Cadences in the Classical Repertoire, organized by Pieter Bergé and Markus Neuwirth (University of Leuven) and hosted at the Academia Belgica of Rome, wonderfully testified to this revival of interest in cadence. To reflect the growing diversity of current cadence scholarship, the conference organizers brought together historical musicologists, music theorists, psychologists and computer scientists with the goal of laying the foundations for an interdisciplinary investigation of the eighteenth-century cadence. Sessions were organized around five main topics: ‘Cadences, Schemata and Forms’; ‘Cadential Articulations’; ‘Empirical Approaches’; ‘Partitura and Partimento’; and ‘Avoiding the Cadence’. A special additional session was devoted to the ‘Leuven Cadence Compendium Project’. To promote dialogue among the participants, each presentation was allotted forty-five minutes, with a further forty-five minutes for discussion. Presenters were asked not to read prepared papers, but instead to present their findings in a seminar environment. Thus the organizers hoped to sidestep some of the problems facing researchers attempting to communicate across disciplines, as well as to mitigate the difficulties associated with the diverse and often confusing nomenclature of cadence scholarship.

The first session considered the relationship of schema theory to current theories of cadence. William E. Caplin (McGill University: ‘Harmony and Cadence in Gjerdingen's “Prinner”’) explored the harmonic potential underlying the ‘Prinner’, a galant contrapuntal schema consisting of descending parallel tenths (the soprano passing from to , the bass from to ) identified by Robert Gjerdingen in his book Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). After situating the Prinner within a three-part categorization of harmonic progressions (prolongational, sequential and cadential), Caplin provided examples demonstrating the Prinner's harmonic flexibility in realizing each category. He then introduced the concept of the ‘Prinner cadence’, a weakened form of the imperfect authentic cadence characterized by the insertion of between and in the bass line of Gjerdingen's descending pattern. Caplin concluded by suggesting that the Prinner cadence became less prevalent in the high classical period (that is, in the 1780s) because it fails to elicit unambiguous formal closure. In his paper ‘Schemes: Schemata and the Eighteenth-Century Cadence’ Vasili Byros (Northwestern University) considered how schemata serve both to foreground and to anticipate sonata-form cadences. Using the first movement of Beethoven's Second Symphony as a case study, Byros presented sonata form as a script consisting of a series of alternating states of cadential experience (cadential implication, realization, denial and extension), in which phrase-level schemata act as cues to sonata form's important punctuation markers (for example, medial caesura). By relating examples of form-defining schemata to listener expectations, Byros provided a convincing argument that listeners who acquire the appropriate stylistic knowledge possess a mental representation of sonata form; form therefore is not located in the music, but in the mind.

The second session, ‘Cadential Articulations’, began with ‘The Half Cadence and Other Analytic Fictions’, a presentation by Poundie Burstein (City University of New York) concerning the half cadence in eighteenth-century compositional practice. Burstein suggested that this cadence type is paradoxical, representing the ending of a formal process on a harmony that is by nature both unstable and unclosed. Starting with Heinrich Christoph Koch's Quintabsatz, Burstein defended the position that half and authentic cadences are not categorically distinct, but instead lie on opposite poles of a continuum. He proceeded to outline the musical parameters (harmonic and surface rhythms, hypermetric grouping, textural and voice-leading shifts) that contribute to the distinction between half and authentic cadences. In a paper concerned with the experience of tonality, ‘Eighteenth-Century Concepts of the Tonic as Reflected in the Exposition and Its Recomposition’, Peter A. Hoyt (University of South Carolina) questioned the prevailing view of the tonic key as a governing force in the temporal unfolding of a sonata-form movement, suggesting instead that through multiple articulations, the tonic key can generate instability, a kind of large-scale dissonance that Hoyt claimed can be resolved only by modulation. Citing Albrechtsberger's assertion that modulation serves to provide variety, Hoyt went one step further, suggesting that the tonic key, just by repeated confirmation, becomes structurally dissonant. As evidence of this structural dissonance he appealed to the fairly common occurrence in sonata-form movements of the move to the subdominant in the transition section of the recapitulation.

Day two began with papers concerned with empirical approaches to the eighteenth-century cadence. My presentation (David Sears, along with co-authors William E. Caplin and Stephen McAdams, McGill University), ‘The Perception of Cadential Closure in Mozart's Keyboard Sonatas’, explored the underlying mechanisms responsible for the perception of cadential closure by two groups of differing expertise – musicians and non-musicians. Twenty participants from each group heard fifty excerpts drawn from Mozart's keyboard sonatas containing an equal number of perfect authentic, imperfect authentic, half, deceptive and evaded cadences. At the end of each excerpt, participants rated the strength of completion of the excerpt on a seven-point scale. Results indicated that musicians rated each of the cadential categories as significantly different, and the two groups did not differ in their ratings of genuine cadences (authentic and half cadences). In their responses to failed cadences (deceptive and evaded), however, the groups differed remarkably in their responses. Regardless of expertise, listeners, simply as a consequence of exposure to Western music, learn to perceive the relative strength of genuine cadences in a way that is consistent with the hypotheses of music theorists. In a study concerned with determining the statistical regularities of cadential harmonic progressions, ‘Characteristic Signatures of Cadences in Mozart's Piano Sonatas’, Martin Rohrmeier (University of Cambridge) and Markus Neuwirth (University of Leuven) presented a computational corpus study of harmony derived from Dmitri Tymoczko's analyses of Mozart's keyboard sonatas. First annotating the cadential arrival of every cadence in the corpus and then applying a set of heuristic rules for determining cadential starting-points, they proceeded to provide the frequency of occurrence, transition probabilities and entropy profiles characterizing this corpus of annotated cadential progressions. After presenting the most typical cadential progressions for each cadence type, they concluded by discussing the potential of corpus analysis in future music research.

The next session, ‘Partitura and Partimento’, began with Felix Diergarten's (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) ‘The Cadence in the Partitura Tradition’, which gave a historicist account of cadential procedures found in treatises from the Austrian and South German branch of the partitura tradition. Gathering descriptions of cadences in contemporary treatises, Diergarten provided substantial evidence for the important role accorded to the suspension dissonance in articulating cadence, a musical parameter largely overlooked in modern theories yet fundamental to the understanding of cadence outlined in the partitura tradition. Diergarten concluded by attempting to reconcile the current and historical accounts of cadence, suggesting that the suspension dissonance might play a more important role in current theories of form. Following this review of the Austrian and South German traditions, Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata), in his paper ‘The Cadenza in Partimento Theory and Practice’, presented Italian concepts of cadence as found in treatises from the eighteenth-century Neapolitan maestros Gasparini, Pasquini and Fenaroli. Various definitions of cadential types illustrated the ambiguous nature of cadence in the Italian partimento tradition. Anticipating the Urlinie, for example, Fenaroli defined cadence as a motion in the bass from to and back to ; Fenaroli's cadence therefore represented the most important of all tonal structures as well as a compositional starting-point upon which composers could add layers of diminution. Cadence was also understood as a conventional closing formula, characteristically defined according to the metrical units allotted to the dominant. Finally, Sanguinetti cited a clear relationship between modern conceptions of the cadential progression and Pasquini's ‘cadenza lunga’, or ‘long cadence’, which introduced pre-dominant scale degrees in the bass.

Danuta Mirka (University of Southampton) began the final session with ‘Absent Cadences’, a discussion of several types of cadential absence. Following Forkel, Mirka distinguished between cadential evasion, in which the expected tonic of the cadential arrival is instead replaced with a dissonant or foreign harmony, and cadential ellipsis, in which the cadential arrival (and even the preceding cadential dominant) is simply absent. Mirka then provided examples from Haydn's string quartets of each type, in which a number of musical parameters (for example, the resolution of dissonance and registral and voice-leading shifts) shape the experience of these varying cadential absences. To close the session, Markus Neuwirth's (University of Leuven) ‘Fuggir la cadenza, or The Art of Avoiding Cadential Closure: Contemporaneous vs Modern Perspectives on “Deceptive Cadences” in the Classical Repertoire’ provided categorical definitions of cadential deviation found in contemporary treatises and then considered the form-functional role these cadential deviations play in eighteenth-century compositional practice. Neuwirth cited four structural functions for cadential deviation: (1) formal extension, or ‘one-more-time’ technique, in which the cadential deviation elicits another attempt at the cadence, often using the same melodic-motivic material; (2) dominant prolongation, in which the cadential dominant suggests, but ultimately denies, resolution to tonic; (3) tonal parenthesis, in which the harmonic deviation at cadential arrival acts to prolong a given sonority; and (4) modulation, in which the deviant chromatic harmony at cadential arrival effects a modulation to a new key.

Finally, the organizers (Pieter Bergé and David Lodewyckx, University of Leuven) devoted a special session to the ongoing development of an accessible cadence compendium in ‘The Leuven Cadence Compendium Project’. Bergé and Lodewyckx first created a database consisting of cadence types, then a glossary of cadence definitions and related concepts and finally a bibliography. Each cadence type is accompanied by a list of related cadences, definitions and music examples from the repertoire along with references, quotations and remarks found in the extant literature. They plan to release the compendium both as a book and as an updatable online database. They additionally presented the ‘Leuven Cadence Typology’, a descriptive typology that includes for each cadence type all of its parametric features in a visual representation that is both analytically relevant and didactically attractive. The project represents perhaps the first systematic attempt to provide a comprehensive compendium of concepts and terminology associated with cadence, a project from which the scholarly community should benefit enormously.