Plum-soft conclusions

How does a piece of music end? Does it end or does it simply stop? Is it a strong ending, eliciting applause? Or quiet, fading out? Does it conform to a convention? Or does it want to tell us something special? Tragic, funny? Questions of this kind are raised and examined in this volume, albeit not conclusively answered. For the Close - End - Stop of music is too diverse and too historically conditioned to be reduced to a single denominator. An Amen in a Gloria requires different solutions than the lieto fine of a baroque opera, and whether a symphony ends in a light rondo or a triumphant exaltation has a lot to do with the spirit of the times. Yes, sometimes the closing is not so "musical" at all, and we only realize that a piece is finished when the conductor drops his shoulders and arms.

So here it is: the "musical ending as a problem in music history", which the subtitle announces in a somewhat academic manner. Fortunately, the volume, which is based on a 2016 symposium in Mainz, is not that dry, but rather demonstrates (a nice side effect) how much musicologists are inspired by this fundamental topic. And most of them succeed in arousing interest and drawing you in as you read. In this way, the dissonant-consonant cadences of the 14th century or the tragic or cheerful opera finales or the morendo endings of the late Romantic period - Richard Strauss called them "plum-soft". The examples are each explained in such a way that, even if we don't know the piece, we can hear them in our mind's ear.

The eighteen contributions are divided into four sections: Under "Orders", more general (including philosophical, rhetorical and literary) aspects are examined. In the "Theory formations", the difficulty of a binding regulation of musical finales is immediately apparent; the levels of comparison are also too different: are we now talking about the end of a melody, an exposition, a movement or an entire work, even a cycle? Under "Appearances", the case studies from late medieval chant melodies to Mahler's "Lied von der Erde" are revealing. And in "Openings - (Re)solutions", it becomes clear what difficulties (post-)modernism has encountered in dealing with or circumventing conventions of endings. And this once again opens up a wide field. The editors conclude by stating that this is not the last word on endings.

Closing - Endings - Cessation. Musikalische Schlussgestaltung als Problem in der Musikgeschichte, ed. by Sascha Wegner and Florian Kraemer, 467 p., numerous music examples, € 59.00, edition text+kritik, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-86916-662-9