Still Point of the Turning World

Schubert’s late instrumental music evokes a distinctive time-sense which not only expands the expressive potential of stylistic norms, but also invites deeper reflections on the relationship between the self and the world through his multilayered construction of temporal consciousness. The sense of now, towards which past and future gravitate, is particularly salient. In this article, I examine the formal, harmonic, topical processes through which Schubert constructs a vivid sense of the now in two movements from his late period, D. 956/ii and D. 959/ii, through the lens of phenomenology, drawing on conceptions of time as formulated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I aim to bridge two fields together: first, the general theory of musical time, as has been delineated by Kramer, Barry and Clifton, which examines concepts such as linearity/nonlinearity, silence and stasis; and second, the scholarship on late Schubert, with key conceptual tools such as landscape, late style, lyricism, songfulness and interiority, formulated in the works of Adorno, Burnham, Mak and Taylor. I will also provide the cultural context of musical time in the early-nineteenth century, focusing on the wider paradigm shift from form-as-architecture to form-as-process in music. My analysis reflects a phenomenological orientation within a hermeneutic, narrative mode. I highlight the often disorienting subjective experience of time as evoked by moments that deflect from norms and expectations, specifically the tension between the transient nature of music and the sense of permanence evoked through Schubert’s cyclic, paratactic procedures. I then show how Schubert’s construal of temporal consciousness acquires a historiographical import and resonates with the broader intellectual world by framing it in terms of Schlegel’s three stages of history. I conclude by promoting phenomenological approaches in analysing Schubert’s works and nineteenth-century music at large.

The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music

As the art that calls most attention to temporality, music provides us with profound insight into the nature of time, and time equally offers us one of the richest lenses through which to interrogate musical practice and thought. In this volume, musical time, arrayed across a spectrum of genres and performance/compositional contexts is explored from a multiplicity of perspectives. The contributions to the volume all register the centrality of time to our understanding of music and music-making and offer perspectives on time in music, particularly though not exclusively attending to contemporary forms of musical work. In sharing insights drawn from philosophy, music theory, ethnomusicology, psychology of performance and cultural studies, the book articulates a range of understandings on the metrics, politics and socialities woven into musical time.

Here at the Bottom of the Sky…: Negotiating Time through Phrase, Form, and Tradition within a New York Performance Network

While improvisational interaction is often understood as the momentary give-and-take between musicians in performance, this chapter considers ways in which relationships between improvisers function at a range of different timescales. Organized around extensive conversation with drummer Tom Rainey, bassist Drew Gress, and other members of their performance network, the chapter reveals ways in which this group of musicians employs shared cognitive schemas, collaborative approaches to composition, and common musical histories to shape small- and large-scale musical time at the levels of gesture, form, and tradition. Through analysis of musical examples from several of Rainey’s working ensembles, the chapter demonstrates specific ways in which those shared conceptions of time are realized in sound.

The Politics of Musical Time in the Everyday Life of Ballet Dancers

This chapter discusses disagreements and misunderstandings about musical time in the context of ballet classes and rehearsals, and the degree to which musicians’ metric-counting is regarded by both musicians and dancers as more correct than ‘dancers’ counts’. Metrical anomalies in music by Tchaikovsky, Bizet, and Verdi used in children’s ballet classes are examined in the light of research by William Rothstein on national metrical types and Franco-Italian hypermetre, and found to be less anomalous than they might seem at first. The problems of representation and human movement in these examples are discussed with reference to debates about dance in non-representational theory (NRT), and conceptual and disciplinary boundaries in music and dance scholarship.

Introduction

The work of this introductory chapter is twofold; first, to provide a brief historical overview of the changing nature and conception of musical time over the last 2,000 years, and second, to set out the arc of the volume through detailing the central points of each chapter. While the individual pieces of writing bring vital and varied perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, psychology, and sociocultural work, what unites them is their attention to music of the modern period, with a strong focus on the multiplicities of contemporary practice, while also pointing to their nineteenth-century antecedents. In introducing the main themes of the book, the introduction calls attention to the burgeoning scholarship on time in music, ranging between the immediate feelings and socialities of being in time with others and the broader imaginings of the cultural politics of time in music.

Music as Time, Music as Timeless

This chapter presents a framework for parsing differing conceptual and analytical positions on time in music, focusing specifically on two contrasting ideologies. The first perspective views music as an art form that exists only in and through the unfolding of time; the second views music as capable of evoking a static temporality, referred to by many scholars as a sense of stasis or timelessness. Discussions on the relationship between time and music typically engage with a subset of overlapping and interacting positions on time. Time is sometimes analysed as external and objective, but can also be construed as internal and subjective. Finally, time is also understood to be created or represented by music, an idea encapsulated by the term ‘musical time’. References to timelessness in music engage with these latter two views on time, specifically music’s ability to represent temporal concepts associated with specific structures (musical time) and perceptual mechanisms related to certain musical features that result in a subjective experience interpreted as timelessness. Using the dual lenses of psychology and philosophy, I argue that timelessness is an inherent part of the multiple systems of temporal production and perception that underlie the way we experience and discuss time in music.

Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.

Musical Time in a Fast World

In this chapter Wilson addresses the relation between musical temporality and dominant conceptions of time under recent or ‘liquid’ modernity. He argues that the sonic arts (music, sound art, etc.) variously withdraw from and/or embrace normative time-making—thereby critically calling into question our assumptions about lived temporality. Wilson engages two examples, both intimately connected with the city of New York and the year 1983: Morton Feldman’s minimal yet durational String Quartet No. 2, and Bill Fontana’s Oscillating Steel Grids along the Brooklyn Bridge, the latter of which involved sounds from this bridge (traffic, the metal strut work, etc.) relayed live and broadcast in downtown Manhattan. Both works criss-crossed different temporalities and lived rhythms that contrasted with the speed implicit in 1980s hypercapitalism, forming dialogues between musical time and the cultures of its production.

Rhythm, Time, and Presence

Repetitive rhythm-oriented or groove-based music is specifically designed to usher the listener into a state of absorption or presence in the music. This chapter argues that this particular form of musical time originates with the repetition of a certain inner dynamics within the basic rhythmic pattern of the groove. The first part of the chapter presents structural and microrhythmic features that seem to be particularly impactful upon the listener’s state of groove absorption. The second part discusses the consequences of the fact that it is impossible to describe such an experience of musical time without stepping outside it. An initial observation is that in the very moment one starts to consider the state of being-in-the-groove, one’s state of being is changed.

Politicking Musical Time

Beginning with four irreducibly interrelated themes—that musical time is active, performative, relational, and political—this chapter develops a theory of musical time as an ongoing nexus of events that unfold between performing, listening, and sonorous bodies. It examines the temporal implications of how these different body categories relate affectively, how they co-constitute one another, and how musicking contexts are enacted through their intra-action. The theoretical framework draws upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of political enunciations or enactments and Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, reading these two conceptual apparatuses productively through one another.