False Relations and the Cadence
Stanley Boorman · 2023
This chapter puts forward a hypothesis for which there is no theoretical support, but which depends on a series of interlocking patterns of evidence—of the notation in the sources, of formal awareness on the part of composers, and of questions of performance practice. The musical situation which stimulated this study involves the presence of ‘leading notes ’ in more than one voice at the approach to a cadence. The sounding of suspension against resolution seems to have been an irregular occurrence in the late fifteenth century. The evidence that the musicians of the papal chapel sang without rehearsal, that they could change the selection of music even during the performance, and also that the singers for solo sections seem not always to have been selected in advance may come from the seventeenth century, but there is no reason to believe that the tradition was different in the previous century, and some evidence to suggest that it was the same.