Craft Notes
The Deceptive Cadence
There is something in classical music called the deceptive cadence, in which the chord progression seems to build toward one thing–to resolve itself in a way that is naturally pleasing/tension-releasing to us–but instead does something different and a little bit wrong. (Technically, it is a five chord that doesn’t go down to a one chord like it ought.)
In a wonderful TED talk called “Feeling Chopin,” Benjamin Zander talks about the deceptive cadence in Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor (Op. 28 No. 4). I’m performing the prelude tomorrow, so it is all I can think about today, which is why I’m writing about it now. Zander suggests raising one’s eyebrows at the audience when playing the deceptive cadence, so they get it, but I’m not really close to the level of being able to do two things for my audience at one time.
It’s really worth a watch, even if you aren’t performing the piece tomorrow. Zander compares what Chopin is doing to what Shakespeare does in Hamlet–Hamlet finding out in Act I that his uncle killed his father but dithering around until Act V to do something about it, because otherwise it would end too soon. And thus a series of deceptive cadences. In the prelude, we know what we want from the beginning, right from the first B–we want the E. But we don’t get it till the very last, after a series of heart-wrenching (truly–it is the saddest) fake-outs.
Can you think of any poems or stories with a deceptive cadence, where you feel entirely set up for something and then don’t get it until much later? How is it done? I mean, I would think there are lots of them, but I’m curious about just how purely formal they could be in writing, rather than plot-based. Or, what other formal devices do you find useful from other art forms?
Tags: benjamin zander, chopin, TED talks
Wow. What a phenomenal, moving presentation. Many thanks, Amy.
Best of luck to you tomorrow. Wish I could be there. (I’m one of the 3% Zander mentions)
I think there are elemental moments of deceptive cadence in most of my favorite works of art–The Stranger (violence, or high action), Straw Dogs (ditto), 2001: A Space Odyssey (reemergence of the Other), Punch Drunk Love (violent love)… Such an interesting device, or way of speaking.
Wow. What a phenomenal, moving presentation. Many thanks, Amy.
Best of luck to you tomorrow. Wish I could be there. (I’m one of the 3% Zander mentions)
I think there are elemental moments of deceptive cadence in most of my favorite works of art–The Stranger (violence, or high action), Straw Dogs (ditto), 2001: A Space Odyssey (reemergence of the Other), Punch Drunk Love (violent love)… Such an interesting device, or way of speaking.
Thanks, Ken! Isn’t he phenomenal?? He kind of does an inverse of a deceptive cadence..you think you’re just waiting to hear him play the piece all the way through, but that is not the real resolution–all of a sudden it is about the Troubles in Ireland and Auschwitz and the way to live a life, and shining eyes…he humbles me even more as a teacher than as a piano player…
Thanks, Ken! Isn’t he phenomenal?? He kind of does an inverse of a deceptive cadence..you think you’re just waiting to hear him play the piece all the way through, but that is not the real resolution–all of a sudden it is about the Troubles in Ireland and Auschwitz and the way to live a life, and shining eyes…he humbles me even more as a teacher than as a piano player…
Thanks for educating the reader about the “deceptive cadence” which I knew absolutely nothing about. Great blog.
Thanks for educating the reader about the “deceptive cadence” which I knew absolutely nothing about. Great blog.
im jealous you can play this! great post. good luck tomorrow.
im jealous you can play this! great post. good luck tomorrow.
Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way, the David Lynch film Inland Empire, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Diderot.
Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way, the David Lynch film Inland Empire, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Diderot.
This is one of my favorite TED Talks…
This is one of my favorite TED Talks…
chopin is the shit.
chopin is the shit.
you’re badass, amy. chopin… have you heard matthew shipp? he’s a 21st-century “jazz” composer-improviser, but you can hear chopin in his work as well as bud powell. isn’t most jazz (at least from post-parker bop to post-coltrane avant-garde) built around deceptive cadences?
you’re badass, amy. chopin… have you heard matthew shipp? he’s a 21st-century “jazz” composer-improviser, but you can hear chopin in his work as well as bud powell. isn’t most jazz (at least from post-parker bop to post-coltrane avant-garde) built around deceptive cadences?
Wow. What a talk!– thanks for sharing this.
The deceptive cadence sounds to me like a great shaping device for a story (or a poem). As a writer, you harness the energy of anticipation, and push on, and push on (hitting flats and sharps), until actually giving in– and hopefully the giving-in opens the work, broadens the work, instead of reducing it to the “surprise.”
Maybe this is mildly related to “The Bear at the Door” story-shape, where the reader is waiting, the whole time, for the bear to show up at the door?
I guess an example could be “Amazing Peter” by Chad Benson, from The Collagist a few months back:
http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/November2009/Benson/index.html
And maybe there’s a deceptive cadence in how it takes Ivan Ilyich such a long, agonizing time to bite the dust in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” But you know it’s going to happen. (It’s the title! And then you get that little authorial gift, the scene at his own funeral…another dissonant note?)
Wow. What a talk!– thanks for sharing this.
The deceptive cadence sounds to me like a great shaping device for a story (or a poem). As a writer, you harness the energy of anticipation, and push on, and push on (hitting flats and sharps), until actually giving in– and hopefully the giving-in opens the work, broadens the work, instead of reducing it to the “surprise.”
Maybe this is mildly related to “The Bear at the Door” story-shape, where the reader is waiting, the whole time, for the bear to show up at the door?
I guess an example could be “Amazing Peter” by Chad Benson, from The Collagist a few months back:
http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/November2009/Benson/index.html
And maybe there’s a deceptive cadence in how it takes Ivan Ilyich such a long, agonizing time to bite the dust in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” But you know it’s going to happen. (It’s the title! And then you get that little authorial gift, the scene at his own funeral…another dissonant note?)