Saturday, April 16, 2016

16th century cadences, part 7: Vecchi, duet n21

In the same year as Gastoldi, Orazio Vecchi published his own book of instructional duets. I have chosen two of them for the sake of a census of cadence types: n21 in today's post, n22 in tomorrow's. Granted, these pieces are somewhat arbitrary constructions, but I suspect that the numbers in "proper" compositions will be similar.

I tried to focus on clearly articulating phrase-ending cadences. I did not include evaded cadences or brief cadence-like figures that are obviously within longer phrases. On those terms, the duet has 11 cadences, six of which are 6-8, and five are 3-1. Cadence types are distributed more or less evenly throughout. Of particular interest is that every one of the 6-8 cadences is different, something obviously useful for pedagogical illustration.