The Landini Cadence: A Pseudo-Suitable Ending

Album: The Second Circle: Love Songs of Francesco Landini
Track: "Nella partita pianson" (Track #4)
Composer: Francesco Landini
Instruments: 2 voices
Musical Form: Ballata
Year: ~1350-1370

I tried very hard to care about this, I really did. The way a composer chooses to end a composition (or a section of a composition) seems like it would be really important; after all, human aesthetic judgement is highly prejudiced towards endings. Nevertheless, I have yet to see a correlation between how much I like a composition and how it chooses its cadences.

A cadence is a pattern of notes that establishes some kind of ending or transition within a piece. In medieval music, virtually all candences end on the tonic, with voices either singing in unison or an octave apart (sometimes including the fifth). For those of you who didn't take music theory, the tonic is simply the "root" note of a scale (the "do" in "do-re-mi"). If you don't end a song on this "root" note, it has a tendency to sound like it's not finished yet. In medieval music, the cadence is the sequence of notes that leads up to and includes this "root" note. A standard two-voice cadence in the ars nova period involved a transition from the leading tone (the note a half step down from the tonic, "ti" in the "do-re-mi" sequence) up to the tonic. Just as the tonic has a feeling of finality, the leading tone, true to its name, gives a feeling of leading to an ending; the next-to-last step, if you will.

What Francesco Landini did that was supposedly so important was that, in his "Landini cadence" (also called the "under-third" cadence), he stuck a note in between the leading tone and the tonic. Specifically, he moved down a step from the leading tone before coming back up to the tonic, "ti-la-do". This note did not give the listener the feeling that the composition was moving anywhere different than it would with the standard cadence, it simply "dressed up" the ending to his pieces. If you listen to enough of his compositions (such as "Nella partita pianson," referenced above), you'll begin to recognize it, but personally, I don't think it adds much to the music. Perhaps it's important for historical reasons, but I don't think it would be of much interest to the casual listener.

Related Links: Advanced discussion of Landini cadence; Youtube; Wikipedia; Intervals