Turning to painting, we find that the edge of the picture demarcates that portion of a subject chosen for representation, but every depicted scene necessarily extends indefinitely outside its delimiting boundaries. Even in the case of abstractions, one can usually imagine the pattern as continuing beyond the picture-area. . . .

The frame of a picture is the intensification of the edge. It works in two directions. It marks the limits not only of the picture, but also of the real world around the picture—of the wall on which the picture hangs. In the same way theatrical conventions—the lowering of the lights, the curtain—act as frames; and the typographical layout of a book, a story, or a poem, implies a frame. In every case its function is twofold. First, it separates the subject chosen for treatment from its own imagined surroundings—what I call the internal environment: second, it protects the work from the encroachment of its external environment, that is, of the real time and space in which the perceiver lives. The frame announces: Here the real world leaves off and the work of art begins; here the work of art ends and the real world takes up again.

We can now recognize an important way in which music differs from these other arts: it has no internal environment. A composition cannot be thought of as a delimited segment of a longer line. It has no antecedents and no consequents. Whatever music may be about—and I do not wish to raise that issue—the “whatever” begins only when the music begins, and ends when the music ends. This may be why musical finality is so complete, and why many people find operas more emotionally satisfying than plays.

One might try to argue that music—at least some music—does have a kind of internal environment in the form of its abstract system—be it tonal, atonal, or twelve-tonal—which in a sense existed before and continues after the concrete composition. But this is merely like saying that the grammar of a language, or indeed the language itself, pre-exists and survives statements in that language. If we accept this analogy, we see that we are confusing two different temporal dimensions. A grammar does not exist before, or during, or after any statement; it is essentially timeless. Like systems of mathematics or logic it is, so to speak, eternal. In the same way, a musical system may be thought of as subsisting independently of its embodiments, but not as existing in their time-continuum. (On the other hand, music that is intrinsically formless, in the sense of having no apparent musical reason for beginning and ending when and as it does, may sound like an arbitrarily framed segment of an indefinitely extending sound-continuum. This is indeed the effect of much “totally organized” serial music, and equally of much music composed by methods of pure chance.)

Edward T. Cone