¹ In contrast to the ‘progressive’ dynamic of an apotheosis (which, after Edward Cone, is ‘a grand restatement of a theme with unexpected harmonic richness and textual excitement’), a frame typically has a more ‘recessive’ dynamic (to use Wallace Berry’s term). See Cone, E.T., Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968)Google Scholar , and Berry, Wallace, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar . More recent studies of apotheosis in the music of Chopin include Klein, Michael, ‘Chopin's Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative’, Music Theory Spectrum 26/1 (2004): 23–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and Schachter, Carl, Review of Jim Samson's The Music of Chopin, Music Analysis 8/1–2 (1988): 187–97Google Scholar.

² See Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne, ‘The Rhythms of Form: Correspondence and Analogy in Stravinsky's Designs’, Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987): 42–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Hepokoski, James, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Rothstein, William, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1989), Chapter 6.Google Scholar

³ Specifically, Hepokoski lists as ‘fully developed examples’ Wagner's Overture to Tannhäuser and the initial movements of Tchaikovsky's Second, Glazunov's Fourth, and Elgar's First Symphonies, and as ‘less developed examples’ Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, several overtures of Berlioz, and the first movements of Schubert's Ninth and Mendelssohn's, ‘Scottish’ Symphonies (p. 6)Google Scholar.

⁴ Kielian-Gilbert, speaking of the transposed repetition of the bassoon solo in the introduction to the Rite of Spring, and the brass fanfare at the beginning and end of ‘The Soldier's March’ from L’Histoire du soldat, points out that ‘their formal repetition effects closure apart from their difference in transposition’ (p. 48).

⁵ Even a cursory view of the literature suggests the ubiquity of structural frames. In addition to countless frames in the nineteenth century, we can find examples in a multitude of vocal and instrumental works throughout the ages. Readers will certainly have their own favourites; a few of ours include: Bach (Magnificat); Haydn (Trio, Hob. XV: 18, i), Mozart (Symphony 40, i and iv); Bartók (Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, i), Britten (Canticle No. 2, ‘Abraham and Isaac’), Debussy (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), Messiaen (Quartet for the End of Time), Penderecki (Prelude for Solo Clarinet), Ravel (Sonata for Violin and Cello, iii), Sessions (Sonata for Solo Cello, i, and Second Piano Sonata, i), Schoenberg (Violin Concerto op. 36, i), Stravinsky (Serenade in La), and Webern (Saxophone Quartet op. 22, i); as well as progressive rock albums such as Genesis's Selling England By the Pound and Duke and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

⁶ Schenker's term linkage technique (Knüpftechnik) is described in Jonas, Oswald, Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker, trans. and ed. Rothgeb, John (New York: Longman, 1982): 7–9Google Scholar and 134–5. See also Rothgeb's, ‘Thematic Content: A Schenkerian View’, in Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. Beach, David (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 42–5Google Scholar.

⁷ There are, of course, fundamental distinctions between epanalepsis in literature and structural framing in music. The ability of composers to ‘mark’ musical material makes it possible for listeners to recognize structural framing over vast time spans (the frame across Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, for instance, spans several hours). While it would seem quite difficult to recognize epanalepsis across the span of an entire novel, the technique is not uncommon in the short-story genre. See, for example, A.S. Byatt, ‘The Thing in the Forest’, published in The New Yorker, 3 June 2002, and reprinted in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, ed. Furman, Laura (New York: Anchor Books), 3–22Google Scholar . The story begins and ends with the line ‘There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in the forest’. (The final line ends with an ellipsis after the last word, ‘forest’…)

For a brilliant example of frames (and formal ‘boundary play’) in a novel see Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, trans. Weaver, William (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981)Google Scholar . Calvino, Esther, the author's wife, speaks of Italo Calvino's fascination with frames in a postscript to Under the Jaguar Sun (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1985)Google Scholar , a project the author did not complete. She writes: ‘in fact, in notes written a few days before he fell ill – when he had started to think about the book's overall structure – Calvino refers to the importance of the frame and defines it’: ‘Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls – and somehow stands for – everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness’ (85–6).

⁸ The Shakespeare and Voltaire examples feature sentence-size word play. A larger-scale (and more subtle) literary frame occurs in Dylan Thomas's famous villanelle, ‘Do not Go Gentle into that Good Night’. The initial line and its line-three partner ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ form a recurrent pair that, however, only appears decoupled over the course of the poetic form; the lines are finally coupled at the end to form a poetic structural frame. (The framing character of this moment is beautifully realized in Stravinsky's setting of the poem, which has its own framing instrumental prelude and postlude.)

⁹ See Caplin, William, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Function for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar . Caplin's work builds on the Formenlehre approaches of Erwin Ratz and Arnold Schoenberg.

¹⁰ Structural frames also occur in rondos and rondeaux (both musical and poetic – such as the poems to Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire). A discussion of rondos and other ritornello forms would require a separate study. The recurrence of the ritornello in Baroque forms often feels like a ‘falling back in’ following passages of developmental ‘Fortspinnung’ rather than a recapitulation (starting over) or balancing frame. However, a ritornello in the tonic late in the form regularly does sound like a movement-level framing reference back to the opening ritornello. In a multipart (seven-part, ABACABA) or sonata-rondo form, the return of the main theme, or A section, after the middle section (contrasting C section, or development) feels much like a sonata-form recapitulation; however, other recurrences of the theme, those following B sections, have a more subtle role: the first of these acts like the recapitulation of a small-ternary form; the final A section, because its preceding B section is already tonic-transposed, acts more as a final movement-level structural framing statement.

¹¹ Such ambivalence is famously exploited in works such as Beethoven's String Quartet in F Major op. 59, no. 1, where the beginning of the development initially masquerades as the exposition repeat. The same holds true in many movements of Brahms, including the first movements of the Sonata for Violin and Piano op. 78, and the Fourth Symphony, to be discussed shortly.

¹² It goes without saying that a performer's decision not to repeat the exposition (or recapitulation) of a sonata form robs the listener of this important association.

¹³ Prelude = postlude frames often effect a ‘bilateral symmetry’ about a composition, and provide a close analogue to the relationship between a frame and a picture in the visual arts. Of course, the real ‘frame’ to a musical composition is the silence on either end; this frame is normally structured by performer and listener. The frame for a painting is often chosen by a curator, the artist's responsibilities having ended at the edge of a work. Such ideas are explored throughout E.T. Cone's Musical Form and Musical Performance.

¹⁴ Most of the analytical interest in the Songs Without Words comes from the Schenkerian community. In addition to Rothstein's chapter (mentioned above), other Schenkerian studies include : Schenker, Heinrich, Harmony, ed. Jonas, Oswald and trans. Borgese, Elizabeth Mann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar ; Schachter, Carl, ‘Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Aspects of Meter’, The Music Forum 6/1 (1987): 1–59Google Scholar , ‘The Triad as Place and Action’, Music Theory Spectrum 17/2 (1995): 149–69Google Scholar ; Cadwallader, Allen, ‘Form and Tonal Process; The Design of Different Levels of Structure’, Trends in Schenkerian Research (New York: Schirmer, 1990): 1–21Google Scholar ; and Laufer, Edward, ‘A Different Reading for the Same Music’, read at the Music Theory Society of New York State Conference, Queen's College, New York, October 1993.Google Scholar

¹⁵ By thematic-qua-sectional we mean to acknowledge the way Mendelssohn's expanded and modulating consequent blurs the distinction between thematic and sectional units. In the case of op. 67, no. 3, by the time the thematic unit has completed its consequent phrase, the first section of the piece has also concluded, with its modulation to the dominant assisted by a structural-framing motivic association. Note that, redundancies notwithstanding, the framing association is incorporated into the cadence in the manner typical of a thematic frame, rather than appearing in the post-cadential position more typical of section-level frames.

¹⁶ Mendelssohn's op. 19, no. 2 features a similar ending, with a two-fold return of the main idea over a tonic pedal, first in the subdominant, then in the tonic.

¹⁷ Other ‘Gondellieder’ among the Songs Without Words include op. 30, no. 6 (discussed by both Schenker and Rothstein) and op. 62, no. 5.

¹⁸ For a close reading of the work see Fieldman, Hali, ‘Schubert's Quartettsatz and Sonata Form's New Way’, Journal of Musicological Research 21/1–2 (2002): 99–146Google Scholar . Fieldman's analysis invokes the notions of Hegelian dialectics and Schoenberg's Gründgestalt.

¹⁹ Similar issues of structural framing arise in other compositions with ‘deferred recapitulations’, such as the fourth movement of Mozart's String Quartet in G Major, K. 387, and in compositions whose recapitulations are not in (or ‘on’) the tonic, such as the first movement of Brahms's Sextet No. 1 op. 18. Both situations heighten expectations for a last-minute tonic statement of the main theme. Such statements can arise anywhere in the coda; some initiate the coda, others conclude it. In Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar , James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy refer to sonata forms that omit the main theme in the recapitulation as ‘Type-II’ sonatas. Timothy Jackson has characterized sonata movements where the main theme follows the subordinate theme in the recapitulation as ‘tragic’ – certainly an apt description of the emotional affect of tragic loss in Schubert's Quartettsatz. See Jackson's, ‘The Finale of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and Tragic Reversed Sonata Form’ in Bruckner Studies, ed. Jackson, Timothy L. and Hawkshaw, Paul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 140–208Google Scholar.

²⁰ This brings into question the ‘minimum requirements’: just how much material is needed to erect a frame? The answer depends, of course, on context; specifically, matters of timbre, register, spacing, dynamics, and so on. It is conceivable that a single chord, especially one that has been previously established as a referential sonority, could achieve a framing reference.

²¹ Several authors have noted this framing reference, and have suggested that the likely inspiration for the framing gesture in this song is Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte. A recent study that addresses the expressive potential of the postlude is Muxfeldt, Kristina, ‘Frauenliebe und Leben Now and Then’, 19th-Century Music 25/1 (2000): 27–48Google Scholar . Muxfeldt writes: ‘Schumann's postlude may be thought to represent a memory, and not merely a symbolic or formal return, precisely because the past is brought back through the filter of present emotion and experience. The very inaccuracy of the repetition, its muted passion, imitates the perceptual mechanisms of a memory that has no hope of being revitalized by physical proximity’ (47).

²² Robert Hatten offers an intriguing – and rather different – reading in ‘Schubert the Progressive: The Role of Resonance and Gesture in the Piano Sonata in A, D. 959’ , Intégral 7 (1993): 38–81Google ScholarPubMed.

²³ There is, however, some correspondence between the two passages: they are pitch-class retrogrades of each other. We leave it to the reader to decide if this retrograde is ‘hearable’, or merely a theoretical conceit.

²⁴ A more thorough coverage of framing techniques would invoke a special category for un-transposed references to opening material, when the key of the reference is not that of the opening. Both the Tristan example and Beethoven's op. 14, no. 1 belong to this category. Several other examples are discussed in Naphtali Wagner's ‘Tonic References in Non-tonic Key Areas’, in Israel Studies in Musicology 4 (1987): 59–72Google Scholar . Studies that discuss motivic association in Tristan (though rarely from the vantage point of structural framing) include Bailey, Robert, Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from ‘Tristan and Isolde’, Norton Critical Scores (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985)Google Scholar ; Boretz, Benjamin, Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (Red Hook, NY: Open Space, 1995)Google Scholar ; Kramer, Lawrence, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar , and Rothgeb, John, ‘The Tristan Chord: Identity and Origin’, Music Theory Online 1/1 (1995), http://smt.ucsb.edu/mto/mtohome.htmlGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ There are many delightful details worthy of exploration in these Lyric Pieces, especially the high degree of harmonic ambiguity achieved in large part through a subtle and extraordinary avoidance of ‘pure’ V or V⁷ chords. Fittingly, ‘Souvenirs’ is a larger, more nuanced composition, in which Grieg takes the waltz theme through a variety of common-tone modulations before returning to the home key of E b Major. The website www.bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Epanalepsis.htm, which focuses on examples of epanalepsis in Bach's cantatas, also cites Grieg's Lyric Pieces.

²⁶ See Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)Google Scholar , in particular pp. 55–62: ‘The Perception of Grouping Overlaps and Elisions’.