"Chapter 1 first surveys general concepts of closure in everyday life, gestalt psychology, and literature, and then turns to how some recent theorists conceptualize closure in music. Some principles of perception and cognition (e.g., "laws" of proximity, similarity, and continuity) are applicable to musical closure, as well as the general distinction between stopping and ending. Closure is further characterized by many writers as either a temporal or atemporal (or spatial) phenomenon, the former being most applicable to the sense of ending in music. Especially important are two concepts suggested by Barbara Herrnstein Smith for poetic closure: the use of "terminal modification" following a series of repetitions and the idea of formal circularity, created by bringing back opening lines to conclude a poem. The chapter shows how all of these ideas resonate in discussions on closure by music theorists. Some of their formulations are relatively abstract, while others are more pertinent to the topic of cadential closure specifically. Leonard Meyer discusses how closure is created foremost by syntactical parameters (harmony, melody, meter); Kofi Agawu differentiates between closure (a global phenomenon) and ending (a more local one): Robert Hatten proposes a notion of "dramatic" closure, while Patrick McCreless relates musical closure to a more general sense of narrative closure. Finally, Mark Anson-Cartwright offers three definitions of musical closure all of which characterize it as expressing ending and finality"--