# New Conceptions of Musical Time



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

*Linear time:* Music that imparts a sense of linear time seems to move towards goals. This quality permeates virtually all of Western music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras. This is accomplished by processes which occur within tonal and metrical frameworks.
*Nonlinear time:* Music that evokes a sense of nonlinear time seems to stand still or evolve very slowly.

Western musicians first became aware of nonlinear time during the late 19th century. Debussy's encounter with Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Exhibition was a seminal event.

*Moment Form:* broken down connections between musical events in order to create a series of more or less discrete moments. Certain works of Stravinsky, Webern, Messiaen, and Stockhausen exemplify this approach.

*Vertical Time: *At the other extreme of the nonlinear continuum is music that maximizes consistency and minimizes articulation. Vertical time means that whatever structure that is in the music exists between simultaneous layers of sound, not between successive gestures. A virtually static moment is expanded to encompass an entire piece. A vertical piece does not exhibit large-scale closure. It does not begin, but merely starts. It does not build to a climax, does not set up internal expectations, does not seek to fulfill any expectations that might arise accidentally, does not build or release tension, and does not end, but simply ceases.
*Minimalism* exemplifies vertical time, but instead of absolute stasis, it generates constant motion. The sense of movement is so evenly paced, and the goals are so vague, that we usually lose our sense of perspective.

This inclusion of Minimalism strikes me as somewhat ironic, since Boulez (a proponent of the Messiaen-style of coloristic timelessness and event/gestures) is openly scornful of Minimalism (note his ironic musical mcomments in the* Eclat *DVD); yet, he lives on the same time-continuum as his "enemies." All is one, all is one.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Everything (music and the reception of the listener) is inevitably linear, so I suppose it's about managing the pace of information to give the listener the feeling of a different kind of experience.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

starry said:


> Everything (music and the reception of the listener) is inevitably linear, so I suppose it's about managing the pace of information to give the listener the feeling of a different kind of experience.


Well said, the temporal nature of the beast makes the linearity of its presentation and reception inevitable.

You can, like the minimalist aesthetic, play around with musical events and information spaced differently than previous expectations would have held it to, but still have those strung / hung on the line of a constant pulse.

Obfuscation or obscuring of both pulse and bar-line became a preoccupation of the later romantic era: this allows for a plasticity of shape, and inevitably messes with the listener's normal expectations of time as well.

Morton Feldman ~ Piano and String Quartet -- beautifully static





John Adams ~ Common Tones in Simple Time, pulse pulse pulse, but events in time spaced, evolving...




The earlier very prime example of this sort of play,
Steve Reich ~ Music for Eighteen Musicians





Elliott Carter ~ A Symphony of Three Orchestras (poly temporal, still with a strong sense of forward motion)





Earliest strong example, slow, pulsed, interjections of polytemporal material, and their placement in time thereof still have me marveling at how spacious, and "timeless" this actually short running in real time piece is.
Ives ~ Unanswered Question





P.s. @ Million -- Great thread!


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Not to say the obvious, but the 1st movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is one of those Vertical time pieces. We talked about it in music history class last week, and our teacher was saying that Messiaen only made it 4 minutes just to find some place to stop, but the continuum that the piece works on is so large scale that it could go on for hours before it starts repeating (potentially an eternal continuum). There are so many cycles of pitch and rhythm going on at the same time that just like pi=3.14159etc, it's a piece that has the potential to just keep on going forever and never repeat a single moment. That was Messiaen's point, after all.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

starry said:


> Everything (music and the reception of the listener) is inevitably linear, so I suppose it's about managing the pace of information to give the listener the feeling of a different kind of experience.


Hmm...there are those who would say that linear time does not really exist except as a cognitive series of "now"s; moments. The only thing there is, is now. "Now is the time."

That reminds me of some film footage I saw of John Cage; he looked directly into the lens at the cameraman and smiled, saying, "I see you're interested in history."

The past has already happened, and the future is yet to be. All we are left with is "now." I think that's what all these modernists, even Messiaen and Debussy, are saying. Sorry if that sounds too "hippie" for some of you.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Rainbows:
Have any citations for those terms? I first encountered them in Jonathan Kramer's _The Time of Music_ (well, actually, in the manuscript for the book before it was published.) Don't remember if he invented any of them though.

So-called linear time should be broken down further. Philosopher Susanne Langer (in her _Feeling and Form_) spoke of _virtual time_, which is linear but incommensurate with any external metrics. Moreover, the sense of subjective time in Romantic music, versus that in Classical Era music, is completely different. Classical programmatic pieces, characteristic symphonies and battle pieces, for example, unfold in something like external clock time, which is obvious when one considers onomatopoeic effects like cuckoos, storms, artillery, etc. One also hears imitations of dancing and dialogues in real time. By contrast, Romantic programmatic pieces tend to encapsulate the elements of literary plots, for example, in no relation to the time they would require in the real world. Tchaikovsky's _Romeo and Juliet_ plays off elements (strife and combat, love, etc.) in the manner of an allegory, with no connection to clock time. See also works like Liszt's _Les Preludes_, the first movement of Berlioz's _Symponie fantastique_, or Strauss's _Also Sprach Zarathustra_. All of these unfold in virtual time. The obvious exceptions to the rule are Strauss's most blatantly pictorial works like _Til Eulenspiegel _and _Don Quixote_, which take place in something akin to clock time


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> Rainbows:
> Have any citations for those terms? I first encountered them in Jonathan Kramer's _The Time of Music_ (well, actually, in the manuscript for the book before it was published.) Don't remember if he invented any of them though.
> 
> So-called linear time should be broken down further. Philosopher Susanne Langer (in her _Feeling and Form_) spoke of _virtual time_, which is linear but incommensurate with any external metrics. Moreover, the sense of subjective time in Romantic music, versus that in Classical Era music, is completely different. Classical programmatic pieces, characteristic symphonies and battle pieces, for example, unfold in something like external clock time, which is obvious when one considers onomatopoeic effects like cuckoos, storms, artillery, etc. One also hears imitations of dancing and dialogues in real time. By contrast, Romantic programmatic pieces tend to encapsulate the elements of literary plots, for example, in no relation to the time they would require in the real world. Tchaikovsky's _Romeo and Juliet_ plays off elements (strife and combat, love, etc.) in the manner of an allegory, with no connection to clock time. See also works like Liszt's _Les Preludes_, the first movement of Berlioz's _Symponie fantastique_, or Strauss's _Also Sprach Zarathustra_. All of these unfold in virtual time. The obvious exceptions to the rule are Strauss's most blatantly pictorial works like _Til Eulenspiegel _and _Don Quixote_, which take place in something akin to clock time


Yes, it sounds like you have broken down linear time, or "narrative time," into a "metaphorical time" category. One narrative comes to mind which dramatically embodies this "time compression:" Wendy Carlos'* Timesteps*, from the CD *Music from Wendy Carlos' A Clockwork Orange,* in which the whole span of time from primitive man to modern is covered.

But here, we are talking about a cognitive conception of time, rather than an experiential time. I hope nobody gets lost in a time-warp.

I got the idea for this thread from a college theory textbook, New Ideas in Contemporary Music, or something. It's not within reach presently.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

When it comes to "vertical time" or some of these others, all philosophical notions of time apart (how many angels can dance on the end of a pin sort of worthless fun) the fact that the listener, attendant of music running in -- no matter what -- real and linear time, is dependent upon listener memory to perceive any of these other sorts of defined "times."

Without memory, and without it only, are any of us wholly 'in the now and now only."


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

The op reminds me of Stravinsky's distinction between "psychological time" and "ontological time," and the different formal principles--"contrast" and "similarity"--that evolve from a composer's preference for one or the other.


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## pluhagr (Jan 2, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> Rainbows:
> Have any citations for those terms? I first encountered them in Jonathan Kramer's _The Time of Music_ (well, actually, in the manuscript for the book before it was published.) Don't remember if he invented any of them though.
> 
> So-called linear time should be broken down further. Philosopher Susanne Langer (in her _Feeling and Form_) spoke of _virtual time_, which is linear but incommensurate with any external metrics. Moreover, the sense of subjective time in Romantic music, versus that in Classical Era music, is completely different. Classical programmatic pieces, characteristic symphonies and battle pieces, for example, unfold in something like external clock time, which is obvious when one considers onomatopoeic effects like cuckoos, storms, artillery, etc. One also hears imitations of dancing and dialogues in real time. By contrast, Romantic programmatic pieces tend to encapsulate the elements of literary plots, for example, in no relation to the time they would require in the real world. Tchaikovsky's _Romeo and Juliet_ plays off elements (strife and combat, love, etc.) in the manner of an allegory, with no connection to clock time. See also works like Liszt's _Les Preludes_, the first movement of Berlioz's _Symponie fantastique_, or Strauss's _Also Sprach Zarathustra_. All of these unfold in virtual time. The obvious exceptions to the rule are Strauss's most blatantly pictorial works like _Til Eulenspiegel _and _Don Quixote_, which take place in something akin to clock time


Thank you for bringing up Langer! I would argue that all music has virtual time though.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I think the contrast between "vertical" and "linear" (horizontal) is being lost here. Is *vertical time *even possible? Yes, if you give consciousness itself first priority, and consider the "horizontal, linear passage of time" to be illusory. In this vertical sense, all we have is "now," and conscious experience becomes a "moving point."

Of course, to get to this vertical point, one must give up the_ objectification _of time into a linear passage. This illustrates quite clearly the difference between Eastern (subjective) thinking and Western (objective) thinking.


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## Minona (Mar 25, 2013)

The perceptual 'now' is regarded by some experts as being about 2 seconds, which in practice, corresponds to the time-span of most rhythmic clave bell patterns such as the Rhumba, African Gahu, etc.


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