Cadences, resolutions and the pleasure of uncertainty

A feeling of conclusion, a feeling of a new beginning and a feeling of uncertainty are all part of the same moment, a moment of openness and possibility.

“lake blue sky (1458)” from Small Frame Infinite Canvas

The gap between Christmas and New Years is always a time of year for reflection for me. This year, I’ve been thinking of musical cadences as a metaphor for the steady drip of artworks and projects that my year has comprised of.

You may not know music theory, but if you listen to western music then you’ll have a feel for cadences. If you listen to the bassline in the Beatles’ When I’m Sixty-Four. The final line of the verse, ‘when I’m sixty-four’ ends with a feeling that we’ve arrived somewhere. The harmony of that line follows perhaps the most important cadence in pop and jazz: 2-5-1.

Officially, a cadence is a sequence of chords that leaves you with a feeling of conclusion. But within that conclusion is a sense that we’re starting something new. The feeling of ending and the feeling of beginning are the same.

In my work, I feel the cadences as a potential ending to a work, or a project, or a chapter in life. It’s a moment when I need to decide whether the next step is to dig in deeper, or to start something fresh.

The first academic conference I ever went to, I saw a paper by Matthias Mauch where he’d trained a simple statistical model over the Beatles’ entire song catalogue trying to predict the next chord based on the previous three chords. Then, he looked for places in the music where the model was most uncertain about what was about to happen next. Those moments of maximal uncertainty were right after the 2-5-1 cadence. I liked this because it gives an alternative perspective on what a cadence is: it’s a moment when I don’t know what’s coming next – not because I’m clueless but because the world is unpredictable right now. A feeling of conclusion, a feeling of a new beginning and a feeling of uncertainty are all part of the same moment, a moment of openness and possibility.

While a cadence feels complete by itself, one of the tricks of harmony is to reveal those few chords as part of something bigger and more profound. In All The Things You Are, the harmony keeps resolving, but then another chord arrives which reveals that resolution to just be part of a larger unresolved picture.

This sequence of endlessly descending a 5-1 interval is common across Western music, including Pachabel’s Canon and Fly Me To The Moon. But you can overdo it. Michael Nymen’s Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds does it until we loop round the entire circle of fifths and end up back where we started, and on it continues. It feels like the soundtrack to someone who never takes a moment to look back and take stock.

Another kind of repeating cadence appears in works from the Classical and Romantic eras where the piece is clearly at its end but endlessly repeats a final cadence. 5-1. 5-1! 5-1!! My favourite example is actually Dudley Moore’s parody of a Beethoven Sonata. It’s like two new lovers endlessly saying bye to each other as they struggle to end a phone call.

vIt can be hard to conclude something that feels so momentous. But most projects feel momentous to me when I’m immersed and enjoying them. Likewise, a project can suddenly seem trivial and pointless just at the moment I get to the difficult and boring part.

Sometimes I fear I’m stuck in a loop, continually returning back to the same place, like in Nymen’s Chasing Sheep. But I can look back at other times where I’d only just tapped into a brief well, but gotten bored and moved on.

My resolutions for 2024 are too fluid to commit to writing. But I’m most excited about the concluding type of resolution: projects that have said what they need to say, stale goals, things I attached to my identity but forgot why. Making space for the new.

Tim
Glasgow, 1 Jan 2024

PS Thank you to everyone who came to the opening of Small Frame Infinite Canvas. If you’re in Glasgow and still haven’t seen it, the exhibition will be open for an extra few days on January 3rd-5th and 8th-9th.