# "..." before and after the titles in contemporary music. Why ?



## Praeludium (Oct 9, 2011)

I've seen piece by Lachenmann, Jarell, Mark André, Kurtag, and there are surely many others, entitled this way.
For instance : Mark André's "...Un fini, I....".

Is it a kind of code ? Does anybody know why they do that ?

thanks


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## Guest (Mar 26, 2012)

Ask 'em.

They're all still alive.

In the meantime, my best guess is that punctuation like this is congruent with the idea (see both Thoreau and Indian music theory) that music is continuous, only our listening is intermittent. The ellipses align the piece so designated with this idea. (A lot of contemporary music purposely does not have either big splashy openings or big splashy endings for this very reason. They arise imperceptibly out of silence and return just as imperceptively. That's partly why I would date the beginning of the first era of the twentieth century at 1906, the year of Ives' _Unanswered Question._) Or they just seem to start and stop arbitrarily, no "opening" or "closing" feel. For an early example of this, listen to Sibelius' fourth symphony.

By the way, I could find no reference to _Un-Fini I_ that punctuated it this way.


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## Praeludium (Oct 9, 2011)

About Un-Fini 1, I couldn't either ^^ I made a mistake, since other pieces of him have those "...".

Thanks for the reply.

Asking them ? That sounds great, I should do that one day, but I'm not sure I've the nerves to do it *now* (being a second-rate music student, even if I'm sure they'd answer the question even if I wasn't even playing music)


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

I always imagined that they were sentence fragments or representing a broken thought, something like that.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

It's a cliche.
However Birtwistle's _...agm..._, in which fragments of Sappho are set, is droll.


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Because it's cool.


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## tgtr0660 (Jan 29, 2010)

Because it makes it look avant-garde. Much more so than "piece for 12 instruments with no dominant key".


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

It's not exclusive to modern classical either - Genesis even did it in 1976 with one of their instrumentals which was split into two: "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers...' and '...In That Quiet Earth." However, rock bands tend to use parentheses i.e Neil Young - Running Dry (Requiem for The Rockets), Stranglers - (Get A) Grip (On Yourself), Pink Floyd - Pigs (Three Different Ones) etc...


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