The Four Cadences: How a Phrase Ends
A phrase of music ends the way a sentence does: with punctuation. A full stop, a comma, a question mark, or the twist that makes you read the line again.
Those are the four cadences, and they are the reason you can tell a piece has finished without being told.
Authentic: the full stop
V → I. The dominant resolves to the tonic, the leading tone rises the semitone it has been leaning on, and the music arrives.
This is the strongest ending there is, and almost every piece you know uses it as its last two chords. When it also carries the seventh — V7 → I — it is stronger still, for the reason the last lesson gave: two voices moving by semitone in opposite directions.
Nothing is left open. If a piece stops here, nobody waits for more.
Plagal: the softer close
IV → I. The subdominant resolves to the tonic instead.
It arrives, but without the leading tone there is no semitone pull — so it settles rather than resolves. Warmer, rounder, less final in a way that is hard to name until you hear the two side by side.
It is sometimes called the “amen cadence”, because that is where a great deal of church music puts it, and having heard that once you will notice it is exactly the shape of the sung a-men at the end of a hymn.
Half: the comma
Anything → V. The phrase stops ON the dominant instead of resolving away from it.
This is a cadence that ends unfinished, on purpose. The tension is left standing, and the listener knows without being told that a second phrase is coming to answer this one.
Whatever precedes it, the definition is the landing: a phrase ending on V is a half cadence. That is why so many tunes are built in pairs — the first phrase asks by stopping on V, the second answers by ending on I.
Deceptive: the twist
V → vi. The dominant sets up the tonic, and something else arrives.
Everything is in place for a full stop: the leading tone is there, the pull is there, and the ear has already decided where this is going. Then the bass moves up a step instead of down a fifth, and the chord that lands is the relative minor — which shares two of its three notes with the tonic and is almost it.
That “almost” is the whole effect. It is not a wrong chord; it is the right chord withheld, and its usual job is to keep a piece going exactly when the listener expected it to stop.
The four, in one table
| Cadence | Chords | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Authentic | V → I | Ends. Nothing is left open. |
| Plagal | IV → I | Ends more gently, with no leading tone. |
| Half | … → V | Stops unfinished, waiting for an answer. |
| Deceptive | V → vi | Promises an ending and withholds it. |
Two of the four end on the tonic and two do not, and that is the first split to hear. Then within each pair: does it pull, or does it settle? Did it stop, or did it swerve?
Common mistakes to avoid
- Naming a cadence from the chord it starts on. A half cadence is defined by ending on V, whatever came before it.
- Expecting a deceptive cadence to sound wrong. It sounds unresolved, which is the point, and it is extremely common at the end of a first verse.
- Hearing the plagal cadence as a weak authentic one. It is a different ending, not a lesser one — the difference is the absent leading tone.
Now play
The drill below plays a short progression and asks which of the four ways it ended.
Two questions get you there faster than any table: did it land on the tonic? and was there a pull, or did it just settle? The first splits four into two, and the second splits two into one.