Listeners and musicians have intense aesthetic opinions regarding the degree to which a particular musical ending sounds satisfying. "Closure" is the oft-used term to describe the listener's feeling of satisfaction or completeness. Although the concept of musical closure is ubiquitous in the scholarly discourse, the exact meaning of closure can vary widely among authors. Despite these different meanings, similarities in closural metaphors speak to our shared experience of finality. One such metaphor describes closure as marking the achievement of a musical goal. Musicians like Leonard Meyer and others suggest that a musical process driving towards this goal is a necessary component of musical closure. Besides the obvious problem of defining what exactly constitutes a goal-directed process, there are musical styles where a listener could experience finality without a theoretically defined goal-directed process. This paper reconceptualizes this concept of a goal-directed process as an artifact of a listener's musical expectations in order to account for the perception closure in music. Supported by empirical data, I develop a listener-based cognitive model for musical closure, a model that transcends stylistic boundaries. I then explore how a listener's musical expectations could guide the perception of closure in the opening phrase of Schumann's Myrthen, "Widmung" Op. 25, No. 1 before turning to an analysis of Copland's Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, "The World Feels Dusty."