The evaded cadence

A close is promised and then slipped: the dominant, instead of falling to a root-position tonic, passes its seventh into the bass or steps to the tonic’s first inversion, so the arrival lands on a chord that cannot end anything. The tendency tones all resolve correctly — nothing is wrong, the ending is simply withheld — and the phrase must continue until a real cadence pays the debt. Where the deceptive cadence substitutes a different chord, the evaded cadence substitutes a different inversion.

Useful anywhere the harmony needs to keep moving through what sounds like the final resolution: the goal chord arrives on time, but its unstable bass position keeps the phrase from stopping there. Because the dominant’s own dissonance resolves properly, the evaded cadence reads as smoother than the deceptive cadence — it postpones an ending rather than denying one, suited to sequential writing or any passage that needs to grow past an almost-cadence. The debt still has to be paid: a later, root-position arrival is now owed.

• Letting the tonic land in root position after all, which erases the very feature — an inverted, less stable arrival — that keeps the phrase open.
• Leaving the chordal seventh to resolve by leap or not at all, when the whole device depends on that dissonance stepping down exactly as it would in a full close.
• Doubling the leading tone within the dominant seventh sonority, a fault no less serious here than at any other cadence that carries it.
• Landing on a scale step other than the tonic, which turns the evaded cadence into a deceptive one and loses the distinction between substituting an inversion and substituting a chord.

• Ebenezer Prout, Harmony: Its Theory and Practice (1889), The chapters on the dominant harmony — The mechanism itself: the 4/2’s bass carries the seventh and resolves down into the sixth chord.
• Fedele Fenaroli, Regole musicali per i principianti di cembalo (1775), The rules of the cadences — The graded closes of the partimento school, against which the slipped resolution is understood.