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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: reason of the very incompleteness with which they express
finality. There is no sense of finality whatever about the
Phrygian cadence; it leaves the mind occupied with the feeling of
a boundless region beyond, into which one would fain penetrate;
and for this reason it has, in sacred music, a great value.
Something of the same feeling, too, attaches to those cadences in
which an unexpected major third usurps the place of the minor
which the ear was expecting, as in the "Incarnatus" of Mozart's
"Twelfth Mass," or in Bach's sublime "Prelude," Part I., No. 22
of the "Well-tempered Clavichord." In a less degree, an analogous
effect was produced upon us by the cadence with a pedal on the
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
