HEARING THE INTERROGATIVE IN THE CADENCES OF SIGISMONDO D'INDIA: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE POLYPHONIC MADRIGALS

Although two of the madrigals from his Third Book of 1615 end in lovelorn questions, Sigismondo d'India furnishes one of them with a far stronger final cadence than the other. To understand why, this corpus study investigates the expressive meaning of cadences in a quantitative analysis of the 85 madrigals that d'India published within his first five books (1606–16). Three determinants of cadential strength-cadence type, fullness, and modal degree of resolution-test the hypothesis that the cadences which d'India employs at the close of interrogative sentences will tend to be weaker than those he employs at the close of other sentences. The results are consistent with the argument that d'India sought to account for the sense and intonation of an interrogative sentence when setting it to music, yet also suggest that such concerns sometimes conflicted with his obligation to present a coherent musical structure.