Music, Time, and Its Other

Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity

Roger Savage

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138679665
• eBook ISBN: 9781317191933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Music

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music's affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music's power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.

1 Music and time

Music, it has often been said, is the art of time. By ordering tones, rhythmic impulses, harmonies, and timbral colors, each work creates its own unique world. Within each world, the temporal succession of heterogeneous elements evokes feelings and moods to which the work gives voice. The power of this art of time thus takes root in the way that the successively sounding elements cohere. Hence, one of the first challenges for any inquiry into music’s expressive value is to account for the link between music’s temporal features and its affective attributes. In the course of this chapter, I will explain how music’s expressive character and temporal features are a function of the operation that draws together successive tones, harmonic sonorities, and rhythmic impulses. This operation gives rise to music’s expressive attributes; this synthetic operation, I will therefore ultimately say, produces the figures that possess these attributes through schematizing them.

The concept of time that has tended to dominate the way that we think about music’s temporal character presents a number of difficulties in this respect. According to the widely accepted concept, time can be represented as an infinite series of instantaneous “now” points stretched out along a line. The first question we should therefore ask is how an ordered progression of individual tones gives rise to figures and gestures that possess their own distinctive characteristics. This question, which I will take up at some length, marks the entry into my broader hermeneutical investigation into music’s significance vis-à-vis the difference between time and its other.

How, we could additionally ask, could a musical passage convey the sense of its progression if time were nothing more than an abstract measure of passing events? Correlatively, how could we apprehend a work’s expressive features if music consisted only of a series of isolated elements that followed one another in succession? The ordinary concept of time, the rectilinear order of which is evident in the metaphor of the arrow that travels in only one direction (from the past to the future), leads to identifying music’s temporal features with time’s inexorable advance. Yet, as I will show, representations of temporal movement in music and even its opposite—temporal stasis—are functions of the operation that transforms successively sounding events into temporally meaningful expressions.

Form in motion

The phenomenon of tonal motion is the gateway to my broader study in this chapter on the interrelationships between music’s temporal character, its expressive force, and its mimetic power. The question “How does music move in time?” provides a point of access to the initial difficulty of disentangling the feeling of motion from the ordinary representation of time. As an art of time, music takes shape through its unfolding movement. This movement therefore seems at first to consist in the succession of sounding events. Temporal succession is admittedly one aspect of a work’s temporal formation. Yet, in listening to a tune, we hear the melody through grasping together the individual tones. The idea that one tone leads to another reveres the relation between the melody’s temporal formation and the way that the succession of individual tones contributes to it. The feeling of motion that seems logically to inhere in the structured ordering of tones is thus a function of the process through which we draw the figure of the melody from a series of tones that follow one another in succession.

By asking whether music situates itself “in time” or has “time in itself,”¹ Carl Dahlhaus highlights the difficulty that arises when attempting to place the sensation of movement in music under the rule of the ordinary representation of time. Dahlhaus points out that if time is the medium for musical processes that take place within it, then time belongs to the order of motion and change (which I will explain, in the next chapter, is the order of cosmological time). If, on the other hand, time is itself “an occurrence, which advances from the past into the present or approaches the present from the future,”² the experience of time is one for which the phenomenology of time attempts to account (as I will also explain more fully in the next chapter). How, we might wonder, can we measure time’s passage without referring to an order of time that exists independently of our experiences of it? Dahlhaus rightly insists that, like claims that music is a “shaping of time” (Zeitgestalt), claims that music is a “shaped time” (gestaltete Zeit) fail to resolve the fundamental question concerning a work’s inner unity, on which the feeling of motion ultimately depends. If no one seems to doubt that “music is sounding motion,”³ it is by no means obvious how this sounding motion is grasped as such in view of these two competing concepts of cosmological and phenomenological time. To what degree, Dahlhaus therefore asks, is the work’s inner unity experienced passively, and to what extent is this unity the result of the spontaneous activity on the part of the listener in assembling and comparing constitutive parts in the process of listening to the work? By shifting the focus from the experience of time’s passage to the inner unity constituted by the succession of a work’s various component elements, he subsequently ties the one to the other by outlining their mutual implication.

Dahlhaus’s proposed solution to the enigma of tonal motion seems at first to be ingenious. Drawing upon Henri Bergson’s concepts of temps durée and temps espace, Dahlhaus sets the feeling of motion associated with a work’s formative processes against some “fixed” temporal backdrop. The temps durée, according to which time is experienced as passing, and the temps espace, where time is imagined as being extended spatially, work together to produce a sense of movement and change. Dahlhaus recommends abstracting the temps espace from the temps durée, since for him the “stretchings and shortenings of experienced time can be felt only against a backdrop of spatial time.”⁴ Held fast through its “spatial” retention, a phrase of music can therefore be “imagined as lying in a temps espace resulting from its original temps durée.”⁵ The temps espace and the temps durée operate in consort to constitute the temporal frame in which the sensation of movement arises. The temps durée is accordingly the generative source of a work’s spatio-temporal framework. Having first been heard in terms of its own temporal flow, each musical phrase passes into the temporal space that it progressively builds up. In this way, the temps durée engenders the framework within which a work’s temporal hesitations and now furtive, now strident advances flesh out the structure of the flow of time.

However convincing it might appear to be, Dahlhaus’s account gives rise to a number of paradoxes. The first paradox arises from the way that the feeling of motion (or of a forward-directed progression in the case of traditional tonal music) springs from the temporal unity of a sequence of tones that do not move but instead follow one another in succession. Musical gestalts, which consist of figures comprised by groupings of tones, are indicative of the way that the synthetic operation that transforms sequences of tones into expressive melodic figures resolves this paradox. The teleological thrust so widely attributed to tonal music is predicated on the way that successive thematic and harmonic elements contribute to a passage’s or a work’s formation. Even the cyclic recurrence of repeating patterns in minimalist repetitive music exploits the recurring succession of these cyclically repeating patterns to annihilate any sense of forward-directed movement. In this respect, music’s temporal character distinguishes it from a sculpture, a painting, or even a text, the meaning of which is fixed by writing.⁶ Not only is music’s performative expression irreducible to a series of pinpointed instances, but the feeling of forward-directed motion or its opposite (temporal stasis) are both effects of the way that figures drawn from tones, harmonies, and timbral combinations that sound in succession cohere. Dahlhaus’s solution to the paradox that sounds that follow one another in succession elicit a feeling of motion might suggest that a dynamic relation exists between the succession of sounding elements and a theme’s, passage’s, or work’s temporal configuration as a whole. But his account of the relation between a temps durée and a temps espace in the end overlooks the operation from which expressive figures, such as motives and themes, spring.

Second, it is difficult to see how Dahlhaus’s deployment of the concepts of a temps durée and a temps espace could account for the initial sense of movement of a work’s opening phrase. How could we hear the progression of the first tone to the next as animating the opening phrase’s first impulses when there is not yet any frame of reference built up by some prior phrase’s retention? How, in other words, could the initial sense of movement be set against some fixed referent if there is no musical unit that is held fast in the imagination? This second paradox follows from the first. The idea that music is a poiesis a se, and thus creates its own time through its self-shaping movement, underscores the problem that arises in setting the feeling of motion against some fixed temporal frame.⁷ Accordingly, this second paradox brings us closer to the problem at hand by pointing up the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of accounting for music’s temporal character based only on the succession of sounding tones.

The third paradox raises the question of this temporal character’s animating force. Dahlhaus’s allusion to the stretching and shortening of time highlights the elastic qualities of the figures that evoke perceptions of time as slowing down, broadening out, or speeding up. Consequently, these qualities are psychological rather than physical. Time can feel stretched out or shortened depending on the character of a musical phrase, passage, or movement. A series of long, sustained tones supported by a languid harmonic rhythm might create the feeling that the flow of time is being temporally retarded. In contrast, an accelerated harmonic rhythm where the succession of harmonies quickens could elicit a sense of temporal compression. We might be tempted to regard a musical phrase’s or passage’s temporal flow in terms of its spatio-temporal displacement or movement. Yet what fixed point of reference is there for registering this displacement or movement? Dahlhaus admits that the “ideal of tonal space represents an abstraction from the phenomenon of musical motion.”⁸ Accordingly, like this movement itself, the force that animates it is a function of the process through which expressive figures and gestures cohere.

Referring tonal motion to abstract representations of tonal space consequently voids the dynamic relation between successively sounding tones and the expression of the figures in which senses of motion or stasis crystallize. Dahlhaus hoped to rescue his solution from the abstraction on which it depends by singling out rhythm as the essential component of the feeling of tonal motion. Rhythm for him is accordingly more primordial with respect to the manifestation of the distance or space separating successions of tones than are chords (harmonic sonorities). Yet, just as a melody takes shape through the way that tones follow one another in succession, we grasp a rhythm through apprehending a pattern drawn from a structured succession of separate impulses. Despite his effort to differentiate between the rectilinear and vertical dimensions of tonal space, Dahlhaus did not account for the dynamic relation between successive rhythmic impulses or harmonic sonorities and their temporal configuration. Nor could he account for this dynamic relation’s inspiriting power. This inspiriting power reveals itself in the movement through which a work takes shape. Hence, as I will argue, the spirit of a work is the spring of its worlding power—that is, its power to augment our affective affinities with the world through evoking moods and feelings. The force that we might otherwise attribute to the movement of tones, the succession of harmonies, and rhythmic impulses thus proves to be a function of the process through which melodic figures and rhythmic structures crystallize.

Tones and impulses can obviously be plotted out, and the distances between them can be measured according to some standardized scale (quarter notes, eighth notes, seconds, or even microseconds in the case of “participatory discrepancies”⁹ in performance). The notion that time consists of a series of instantaneous points projected along a spatial axis in fact lends itself to these types of measurements. Metaphorical allusions to melodic movements and harmonic progressions reinforce the idea that music’s temporal features are amenable to ordinary representations of time. The idea that rhythmic movement can be set against a spatial referent redoubles the common-sense notion that quasi-physical accounts of music’s temporal movement suffice. In view of the doxa that tonal motion is a function of the way that the pattern traced out by successive tones moves through or across a tonal space, the task at hand is to show how tonal forms in motion give rise to music’s expressive power.

Eduard Hanslick, who has been widely regarded as the progenitor of formalist musical aesthetics, is an unlikely ally in this regard. Hanslick’s thesis—that music’s sole content consists of “audible tonal forms”¹⁰—aimed to discredit romantic conceits regarding absolute music’s ineffable essence. At the beginning of his treatise On the Musically Beautiful, he admonishes serious students of musical aesthetics to reject the dubious practice of subjecting music to poeticizing interpretations of feelings. By setting musical aesthetics on a scientific footing, Hanslick intended to distance himself from romantic aesthetics and its outworn doctrine of expression. For him, feelings could no more constitute the work’s idea than this idea could “attire… itself in the earthly body of physical sound in order that it may walk on earth here below as a musical artwork.”¹¹ In order to rescue musical ideas from their metaphysical trap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Music and time
• 2 The myth of Syrinx
• 3 To the glory of God
• 4 Hope’s despair
• 5 Figure of solicitude
• 6 The ends of time
• 7 Mimesis, aesthetic experience, and politics
• Bibliography
• Index