I find, in the end, that I come to the same general conclusion that eighteenthcentury composers, theorists, and performers did themselves: except for didactic purposes, it is not, after all, desirable to insert directly into musical notation the punctuation marks of language; these are, in effect, already implicit in the notation. The more specificity and detail we demand from our notation, the less helpful it becomes, rigidly prescribing that which is animate and spontaneous, and sometimes so subtle and intangible that any attempt at written expression renders it essentially ineffectual. Ironically, it is our arrival at such a seemingly negative conclusion regarding the usefulness of our analogy, which is the great lesson that the concept of musical punctuation has been able to teach us.

The concept of musical punctuation, like punctuation itself, is inextricably bound up with the history of the written process. The great pains we have taken to learn to read our musical notation—to rediscover its implicit conventions— has enabled us to identify the many rhythmic, metric, accentual, affective, melodic, and harmonic clues of musical punctuation. These indicators, in combination with a composition's expressive dynamic and articulative information, give us real insight (if not the precise semantic content) into where the pauses of punctuation occur, the nature of the material they divide, and where they fall on the scale from scarcely perceptible to highly conspicuous. We have observed that very often long musical lines are achieved not by maintaining a continuously sustained sound, always leading forward over bar lines toward the resolution of dissonant harmonies, but instead by creating a sense of prolonged expectation through the skillful manipulation and punctuation of multiple short phrases, which frequently stop on the dominant and leading-tone structures (in essence, the way eighteenth-century sentences are themselves constructed).

The conventions of eighteenth-century notation teach us not only about the kind of voice we should use in executing the pauses of musical punctuation, but also their accompanying gestures: the elegant stance of the head and body and becoming attitude at one's instrument; the changes in countenance demanded by frequent shifts in affect, so characteristic among eighteenth-century compositions; and the all-important movements of the arms and hands (the sweep of the violinist's bow, the pianist's arm poised to strike the keys).