SMA Zoom Colloquium February 2026

SMA Zoom Colloquium Spring 2026

5 February 2026, 6pm GMT/BST

on Zoom, https://iu.zoom.us/j/9166804343?omn=83579029641

The concept of essential expositional closure (EEC) and essential structural closure (ESC) originate from Sonata Theory. The terms refer to the most conclusive cadence, normally a PAC, in the exposition and the recapitulation of a sonata form, respectively in a non-tonic key and in the tonic key. In this talk, I explore how Sergei Rachmaninoff approaches this Classic-Romantic norm throughout a half-century of writing concerti for piano and orchestra, with a focus on their fast movements. In his First concerto, these headstone cadences are standard with respect to the keys, formal placements, and rhetoric. All his subsequent concerti—the Second (1901), the Third (1909), the First revised (1917), and the Fourth (1926 and 1941)—depart from this standard in one or more ways: They offer deformational key choices at points of essential closure, ambiguate their cadential status, frustrate our rhetorical expectations, chromaticize the cadences’ harmonic content, and sometimes present alternative, non-cadential closure. While offering an overview of Rachmaninoff’s compositional evolution over fifty years, this talk is also a study of closure in late- and post-Romantic music from a variety of angles, particularly from a form-functional angle.  

In the process, I introduce the following  concepts: quiet success (a positive narrative outcome in an essential cadence that lacks the traditional rhetorical and/or modal signals of a “success”), substitute cadence (where a chromatic dominant-substitute chord replaces the V harmony), and the idea that, in late- and post-Romantic music, an EEC or ESC can function as such without necessarily displaying a familiar cadential formula.