Weak Openings
David S. Ferris · 2000
Abstract One way to explain the concept of closure in music and literature is to say that there is a metaphorical frame that separates the complex structure of the artwork from the chaotic flow of everyday life. Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues that because our experiences are so often “fragmentary, interrupted, fortuitously connected, and determined by causes beyond our agency or comprehension,” we feel compelled to create “structures that are highly organized, separated as if by an implicit frame from a background of relative disorder or randomness.” In the case of a musical performance, as Edward T. Cone observes, this frame is created by the silence that precedes and follows. But Cone describes a variety of techniques that Romantic composers use to blur the boundary between the musical work and the surrounding silence, creating the impression that the music has begun before we hear the first notes and will continue after we hear the last ones, and it is in this category that Schumann’s experiments with song forms belong. The Romantic impulse to disguise or over flow the musical frame must be differentiated from the attempts of some twentieth-century composers to get rid of it altogether and thus to negate the viability of the musical work as a closed structure. Both procedures can be interpreted as responses to an increasing sense of chaos and puposelessness, which calls into question the possibility that art can provide the stability and coherence that are felt to be lacking in life. But where the elimination of the frame in more modern music expresses resignation or perhaps acceptance, the weakening of closure in Romantic music is associated with the wistful yearning for transcendence, the hope that what appears to be fragmentary in the material world will turn out to be whole in the world of the spirit.