Materials of Music - Points of Arrival

This is a generalized term for something that occurs in several distinct ways and at various levels in musical form. It is is some sense the thing with defines what form is. I had heard the term used by Leonard Ratner, emeritus of Stanford University to refer to some kind of important climax within a piece, but it could be generalized to speak about harmonic cadences or even just the way in which a musical phrase is concluded. We have to not be limited to talking about melodic line or harmony here, for every time the drummer in a jazz ensemble gets his solo, he is doing a variation of the form, most jazz improvisation is a variation form, but only with rhythm and a much reduced pitch vocabulary that my have nothing to do with the key of the piece, and what about atonal or serial music which has no key ( but usually centers around a pitch )?

So point of arrival can be suggested by any musical material, not just harmony or melodic line, and it has something to do with the origin and history of form.