The ‘English’ cadence: reading an early modern musical trope

Abstract

Abstract Twisting through a dissonant flattened 7th now more commonly recognized as the Jazz ‘blue’ 7th, the ‘English’ cadence is a distinctive feature of early modern English music. Typically embedded within the texture of a piece in an inner part, this distinctive voice-leading pattern works by pulling against its own regularity: it highlights its predictability, the regularity of the cadence, by spiralling, just briefly, into the unpredictable. Nevertheless, ever since Thomas Morley dubbed it a thing ‘naught and stale’ the ‘English’ cadence has had a dubious reception, both in terms of its Englishness and its role within early modern musical textures. Much of this doubt derives from the status of the cadence as ‘ornament’ or ‘decoration’. As such the ‘English’ cadence is often viewed as superfluous to the tonality of the music as a whole. However, these interpretations do not take into account contemporary thinking about ornament and decoration in early modern England. This article seeks to demonstrate that by looking beyond the scant contemporary accounts of the ‘English’ cadence in musical theoretical treatises towards the visual culture of the period, it is possible to move towards a more nuanced understanding of the way the cadence communicates.