conventional wisdom holds that the cadenza is a musical parenthesis.
Taken at face value, this generalization leads us to believe that cadenzas - however
engaging, illuminating, and insightful they might be - are not intrinsic
to structural coherence. Perhaps because of this view, the topic has remained
parenthetical in modern music theory discourse: Cadenzas, long the province
of performers and musicologists, have rarely been studied in analytic
detail;1 for theorists, they have been relegated to the realm of footnotes and afterthoughts, their tonal structures and formal functions mentioned in passing,
if at all.2 Despite the connotations this neglect implies, the cadenza tradition
stands as one endowed with great musical richness worthy of further
investigation.