From Past to Present and from Listening to Hearing: Final Indefinable Moments in Bach's and Stravinsky's Music

Abstract

The way a musical composition ends is a critical moment: the musical ordering stops while the daily order of affairs is not yet in effect. Especially since the late 19th century, composers have created musical endings in which the musical ordering is gradually waning, increasingly allowing silence to enter. Such ending is called in this chapter ‘final indefinable moment'. Taking as case studies compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky, written to texts dealing with time and death, this chapter argues that the critical final moment has been conducive to the innovation of composing and listening. The endings of these compositions enable the perceiver to move from listening to hearing, that is, to make a transition from an orientation bound up with a cognitive grip on the syntactical course of events), to an orientation connected with openness of attention and a heightened sensitivity to sound as timbre and to silence (surrendering to the absence of a clear order). This moment of closure functions at the same time as one of opening. Such final indefinable moments in music may be taken as a preparation for both living and dying.