New Music USA Online Library

Amen: Quintet Fantasy on the Plagal Cadence

Don Freund

Don Freund’s Amen: Quintet Fantasy on the Plagal Cadence was commissioned by Jorge Muñiz and Ensemble/CONCEPT 21. It could be described as a twenty minute musical set-up for the last gesture, a simple two-chord progression played by piano alone. In the real world, this plagal cadence is most familiarly heard as an “Amen” tacked on as a coda to a hymn, but in this fantasy it is the final destination of a diverse array of musical ideas, all of which in varying degrees of clarity suggest the featured subdominant-tonic relationship (think of an F major triad followed by C major). 

Listeners looking for a guide to the structure of the work will appreciate knowing that the piece is divided into two equal halves by a piano cadenza of cascading chords occurring at roughly the 10-minute mark. The second half of the piece is in two large sections: a fast, energetic toccata followed by a lyric section that turns the plagal cadence into a jazz-styled tune. The first half of the piece is more episodic. The swirl of plagal progressions that begins the pieces returns again and again to link together a panoply of strongly charactered sections, each with its own distinctive reflections on the harmonic, melodic, coloristic and even rhythmic implications of the plagal cadence phenomenon. 

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