Bernard Sève

Bords de l’œuvre musicale

Paintings are surrounded by frames, whose function is to separate canvases from worldly objects and to present them to aesthetic attention. Musical works as well as their public performances include “borders” analogous to frames. Some of these borders are anterior to the performance of a musical work (the musicians’ arrival or the silence preceding the first notes), whereas others are posterior to it (the silence following the last notes or applause). These temporal borders can be distinguished from properly musical borders (the beginning and the end) of a work; borders are either external to the work (an opera’s overture) or internal (the first two chords of Beethoven’s Third Symphony); they have to be clearly distinguished from the incipit and the explicit of a given work. Both musical and extra-musical borders aim to delimit a work, but above all to present it through a reflexive gesture, which is not always devoid of emphasis.