Publisher's Synopsis
"Chapter 1 first surveys general concepts of closure in everyday life, gestalt psychology, and literature, and then turns to how some recent theorists conceptualize closure in music. Some principles of perception and cognition (e.g., "laws" of proximity, similarity, and continuity) are applicable to musical closure, as well as the general distinction between stopping and ending. Closure is further characterized by many writers as either a temporal or atemporal (or spatial) phenomenon, the former being most applicable to the sense of ending in music. Especially important are two concepts suggested by Barbara Herrnstein Smith for poetic closure: the use of "terminal modification" following a series of repetitions and the idea of formal circularity, created by bringing back opening lines to conclude a poem. The chapter shows how all of these ideas resonate in discussions on closure by music theorists. Some of their formulations are relativ
