Music is the art of time. This much we know from aesthetic debates ongoing for much of the last two hundred and fifty years. From the latter part of the eighteenth century onward, music has repeatedly been singled out as having a peculiarly intimate connection with the nature of time and the temporal experience of our lives. Time, so it has often been thought, is a mysterious, perplexing entity. As we will see, it is indeed debatable whether we can even speak of time as a single concept at all. It is also something that historically has been viewed as an increasing problem for the modern world.
The nineteenth century is a particularly pertinent locus for concerns about time and how music may play a role in articulating or responding to them. The present chapter examines some of the debates around music and time from this period (understood here as the “long nineteenth century,” stretching broadly from around the time of the French Revolution to the First World War), and the influence of such discussions on more recent thought. Arranged thematically around a series of conceptual issues, it moves fluidly between different decades and cultural contexts to show that if the nineteenth century did not have a single answer as to what music had to do with time, a limited range of concerns nonetheless continued to recur over this period.
Looking first at the strength of the critical tradition that viewed music as closely bound up with the nature of time, we go on to explore some of the reasons given for this purported connection, including the ways in which music was justified by writers throughout this period as endowed with a remarkable capacity to articulate time. Yet our sense of time, as many realized, manifests itself in different shapes and forms. The inquiry is deepened by examining more closely the links that were proposed between our subjective experience of time and that of music, before looking in turn to the use of music as a metaphor for the temporal course of human history by thinkers and poets in this era. Such was the power of this metaphor that its proponents were not confined to the poetically minded, and we subsequently examine the ways in which music became an important instrument for the explication of temporal conundrums on the part of philosophers and the redemptive potential of the promise it seemed to suggest in overcoming time.
Departing slightly from the historical orientation of the intellectual ideas espoused in the preceding sections, the section “Musical Genres and Temporal Signification” then questions some of the assumptions made by thinkers in this age, suggesting that what the music of this period seems to be doing may appear—at least to us—richer and more diverse in temporal implication than what some contemporary commentators may have allowed. In effect, the evidence seemingly offered by the era’s music is here given priority over the verbal testimony favored in the preceding sections. Finally, an epilogue looks at the legacy of nineteenth-century thought on music and time in the last hundred years, and the impact some of these arguments still have on us today.
“Time is a strange thing” the Marschallin informs her lover Octavian in Act I of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (Hofmannsthal 1979, 5:41). Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s text, dating from the first decade of the twentieth century, expresses sentiments that were by then aesthetic commonplaces. Time has been a source of wonderment and critical confusion for as long as humans have been aware, but there are substantial reasons why this concept was seen as more of a problem by the nineteenth century than it had been before. It is widely accepted by modern scholars that the later eighteenth century witnessed a “temporalization” of experience in Western Europe, with the notion of time—and the human experience of time—becoming a concern for the new age in a manner not previously apparent. Around 1800, claims Michel Foucault, “a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time” (Foucault 1970, xiii).1 Reasons for this change are numerous. Widespread social upheaval, scientific and technological developments, the increasing secularization of history, and the growth of the idea of progress all contributed to a perceived acceleration in historical passage—the notion that the future was newly open to unforeseen alteration with old truths ever more mutable, and a renewed focus on time as a concept. Coetaneously, music revealed an increased capacity to evoke this new temporal sensibility. As the most “temporal” of arts (according to contemporaneous accounts), music seems to have offered privileged ways of articulating the experience of time.
Time is seemingly inapprehensible; as has often been observed, in contrast to space, we possess no organ by which we may directly sense time. Yet, if time cannot be seen or felt, authors in this period repeatedly suggest that it might—on rare occasions—be heard. We might think of Tennyson’s “The Mystic,” a character described in a poem published in 1830, who, “Remaining from the body, and apart / In intellect and power and will, hath heard / Time flowing in the middle of the night, / And all things creeping to a day of doom” (Tennyson 1968, 839). Echoing Tennyson eighty years later, Hofmannsthal’s Marschallin will similarly confess that “sometimes I hear time flowing—inexorably. In the middle of the night I get up and stop all the clocks” (Hofmannsthal 1979, 5:41).
Obviously the assertion that time can be heard is, taken in a literal sense, a poetic fiction, but it is one that is revealing of deeper aesthetic views that were prevalent in this age. Common to both these accounts is the setting at night, a time of darkness with the resulting downplaying of the visual and material, conventionally associated with spatiality, and the corresponding concentration on the inward, subjective quality of our own temporal existence. Latent here is an aesthetic understanding prominent in the nineteenth century—that, as Arthur Schopenhauer put it, “perceptions through hearing are exclusively in time.” And just as music is considered the art of time, so can it even more evidently be held up as the art of hearing. This aural basis leads Schopenhauer to assert that “the whole nature of music consists in the measure of time” (Schopenhauer 1969, 2:28). Indeed, in more extreme formulations such as his, music practically negates any spatial or material element (“music is in time alone without any reference to space,” he concludes [453]).2 G. W. F. Hegel, in holding that time is the kenosis, or emptying out of space, provides similar support for equating music and hearing with time, and placing this in opposition to the visuality of space and its associated arts. “In sight,” holds Hegel, “the physical self manifests itself spatially, and in hearing, temporally” (Hegel 1970, 383). Thus in music “a note wins its more ideal existence in time by reason of the negativing of spatial matter” (Hegel 1975, 2:795). From this position, Hegel is able to claim that time is the “universal element in music” (2:907).
Now this is not to say that the pronouncements of two post-Kantian philosophers necessarily influenced the views of their contemporaries, and no doubt Tennyson and Hofmannsthal would have expressed the same sentiments whether or not such earlier thinkers had made their (sometimes dubious) justification for equating hearing and time on one side of a divide separating them from sight and space. But both Schopenhauer and Hegel are trying to formulate an important aspect of how our experience of music seems to be bound up so closely with our perception of time, the quality also sensed by the later writers.
Music is seemingly intangible. While sound is necessarily produced in space by some material object, music as such is not a physical object: it cannot be seen, there is nothing visual about it, with a corresponding downplaying of the element of space. Instead of which, it is perceived as pure temporal succession. By removing the visual and spatial, music enables us to concentrate our attention on the perception of succession without any apparent object mediating between us and the element of time (as, for example, would be the case with a moving visual object, where time would be inferred via spatial displacement). Throughout the nineteenth century, music is frequently allied with movement (Eduard Hanslick, with his tönend bewegten Formen, is only the most famous example [Hanslick 1854, 32]), yet it is a movement that does not occur in physical space and thus comes as close to the sense of pure succession and change as we can probably conceive. It is no surprise that by the end of the century music is being used as the exemplary temporal object by a new generation of psychologists, philosophers, and phenomenologists. Music’s immaterial manifestation seems most akin to the abstract, intangible nature of time: both are bound up with a sense of continuity that passes away even as it appears, and a corresponding reliance on memory for its constitution.
In such accounts, music is received as letting us hear or even shape time, a mode of temporal understanding and apprehension. How was this remarkable quality achieved? One can point to both philosophical and technical reasons, to changes in compositional style and shifts in aesthetic paradigms that allowed music to be conceived as a relatively unmediated instantiation of time. This is partly a case of new modes of listening and social structures, including the rise of the work concept, the emancipation of music from social function and its concomitant claims for autonomy. Moreover, the rise in status of instrumental music (above all in German-speaking countries) and the increasing size and scope of instrumental forms produced had a clear impact on such aesthetic shifts. Without the formal prop of a text, instrumental music has to create its own meaningful temporal structure, and free of the referential signification of words, the listener’s attention is focused on the temporal immediacy of the sonic flow. More technical reasons can also be proposed, and on these contemporary writers often left evidence as to their effect.3
It would be commonplace now—and has been since at least the mid-twentieth century—to put forward tonality as the primary agent in investing music with its power to articulate time. By being written in a hierarchical system of organization where future events (harmonies, melodic pitches) are to some extent foreseeable from previous ones, in which a sense of causality is conveyed by dissonances that point to eventual consonances, tonal music offers an especially powerful medium for stylizing our perception of temporal succession. In combination with a constructed logic resulting from an increased use of thematic working and the interaction with meter and phrase rhythm, tonality sits at the center of a complex amalgamation of elements that enable music to structure the listener’s experience of time with immense power. Yet it is worth observing that nineteenth-century accounts consider tonality much less than we would now in describing music’s temporal effect; instead, we read much more often of melody and, especially, rhythm. It is arguable that tonality was seen as so natural in this period as not to require explicit addressing (it should be remembered that the very term was introduced by Fétis partway through the century); it is perhaps only when tonality is set into relief by its negation, atonality, that its constructed basis becomes most apparent. To be sure, a tonal underpinning is normally implicit from the favored example of a melody, whose course through time is clearly directed by tonal expectations. When Schopenhauer, in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1835), provides a four-bar melodic phrase to illustrate the nature of music’s mirroring of our temporal striving, he comments on the directionality provided by a central tonic. But it is noticeable that this “harmonious element” is treated as a subcategory of melody, alongside the “rhythmic element” which itself “has the measure of time” (Schopenhauer 1969, 2:455). Harmony as such is considered by philosophers and philosophically minded music theorists at this time as a vertical phenomenon, often with slightly mystical implications of timeless fusion of elements, a quasi-eternity in the moment, whose emanation out into the temporal succession of a melody is akin to the condition of human time.4
Whereas some philosophers and poets tended to prefer the metaphor of melody, other philosophers, particularly at the start of the century, used the concept of rhythm as demonstrating a potential harnessing of and even mastery over time. One of the most prominent of these figures is F. W. J. Schelling, whose 1804 Philosophy of Art provides a forceful argument for musical rhythm or meter as capable of controlling time (based in some details on a late eighteenth-century account by Johann Georg Sulzer). For Schelling, rhythm is “the transformation of an essentially meaningless succession into a meaningful one … whereby the whole is no longer subjected to time but rather possesses time within itself” (Schelling 1989, 111). In his view, poetry and especially music possess this quality of temporal mastery. Later twentieth-century views of music controlling or subjugating time find an eloquent precursor in his account. And just as here in Schelling, since the early nineteenth century the notion that music structures our experience of time, redeems empty time by filling it with meaningful content, and may even do this so powerfully as to suggest an overcoming of time has been in popular currency.
We find a fanciful literary expression of this idea contemporaneously in a short story by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder. In “A Wondrous Eastern Tale of a Naked Saint” (1799), Wackenroder tells of a hermit driven to despair by the ceaseless whirring of the “wheel of time,” which only he seems able to perceive. “Forever and ever, without a momentary standstill, without a second’s rest, so it sounded in his ears” (Wackenroder 1984, 304–305). Yet all this changes one beautiful summer night, when two lovers come floating down the moonlit river in a little boat. In archetypical Romantic fashion, an ethereal music wells up around them and a song can be heard. “With the first note of music and song the whirring wheel of time vanished for the saint … the unknown longing was stilled, the spell broken” (308). The hermit is liberated from his bondage to time and his spirit rises transfigured into the heavens.5 Music, in this account, possesses the power to organize and aestheticize the empty passing of time. The wheel of time presents an objective, unyielding framework of an external time that consists solely of successive moments empty of any content or worth: yet music fills out their vacant potential, connects them causally together, and introduces a meaningful subjective grouping to these beats.
So far, time has been spoken about as if it were one thing or had a single unitary definition. However, this understanding is controversial. “Time,” as Rainer Maria Rilke put it in 1899, “is a many-shaped being” (Rilke 2006, 220). The nineteenth century inherited a range of often contradictory understandings of what time actually was, one that has only further splintered down to the present day. Already by the start of the eighteenth century, divisions had emerged between a scientistic, objective understanding of this concept (most famously in Isaac Newton’s positing of an absolute, invariant, and universal time at the start of the Principia), relativist conceptions which saw time as conditional upon events in time (of which Leibniz is the most prominent advocate, an argument sustained in his controversy with the Newtonian Samuel Clarke), and more subjectivist or idealist accounts that saw time as bound up with consciousness (characteristic of the British Empiricists and exemplified most clearly by George Berkeley). At the end of the century, Kant had attempted to reconcile the subjective understanding with the objective, but his arguments for the necessity of understanding the latter as intuited from the former did not fully convince his successors, and many post-Kantian philosophers take a subjectivist stance. By and large, accounts of musical time from the nineteenth century relate to this subjective understanding, though elements of an older, Pythagorean or Platonic conception remain in figures such as Schelling and many Romantic poets.
In the fifth volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (1909–22), Marcel Proust reflects on the peculiarly intimate relation between music and the temporal course of our lives. Music, for Proust’s narrator, seems “something truer than all known books”: its “sounds seem to follow the very movement of our being, to reproduce that extreme inner point of our sensations” as its themes return in different and unexpected forms, “the same and yet something else, as things recur in life” (Proust 1981, 3:381, 261). Such ideas, far from being original or unique to Proust, are in fact utterly characteristic of the preceding age, being especially prominent in German and British Romanticism from the early decades of the nineteenth century and finding an unlikely new lease on life in scientific discourse around the turn of the twentieth. It would not be too much to claim that for many thinkers, poets, and writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, music formed the closest mirror of the self, and when they came to conceive of the subjective experience of time, it was most often through the idea of music.
The most favored figurative expression of lived time in the nineteenth century was probably the idea of melody. Human life, it was held, possesses a continuity and meaningful temporal succession, one that irresistibly calls to mind the musical metaphor. Often this takes the form of what we could call the “inner melody of life” trope, though another, related metaphor often encountered is of the “keynote” or “fundamental tone” that sounds throughout and binds together the varied experiences of our lives. To take one example, in an episode from an 1815 novel by Joseph von Eichendorff, the two protagonists are perched in a tree looking in through the windows of a rustic house where a dance is in progress. The movements of the dancing figures can be seen, but the windows are closed and the sound of the accompanying music does not reach their ears. “Is it not a strange feeling,” muses one of these observers, “to look from outside into the colourful pleasures of humanity, without recognising their inner connection; how people move to and fro like marionettes? … Do you not fundamentally have this play-show daily?” he continues in philosophic vein; “aren’t all mankind gesticulating, struggling and tormenting themselves to externalise their own individual fundamental melody, which is given to each in their innermost soul?” (Eichendorff 1998, 64). Music here provides a metaphor for the inner identity and meaningful temporal continuity that characterizes human life. Schopenhauer will similarly utilize the metaphor of music to explain the unity across time in our lives: “The course of life itself retains throughout the same fundamental tone; in fact, its manifold events and scenes are at bottom like variations on one and the same theme” (Schopenhauer 1969, 2:35).
Around 1800, the analogy between music and the temporal being of the self becomes highly pervasive throughout German and British thought. Much of the reason for this purported connection owes to a perceived ontological affinity between music and self-consciousness stemming from their mutual temporal basis and lack of any obvious physical object. For many thinkers in the early nineteenth century the self was conceived as temporal in nature—“the self itself is time conceived of in activity” (Schelling 1978, 103), that “life is only by being a process” (Hegel 1975, 120)—and herein lies the link with music, that much-touted art of time. In Schelling, both self-consciousness (“the principle of time within the subject”) and music are forms of temporal articulation, and thus he argues there is a “close relation” between music and the self” (Schelling 1989, 109). Likewise, in Hegel’s opinion, music’s “own proper element is the inner life as such” (or “subjectivity”), which like music can manifest itself only in time—“an external medium which quickly vanishes and is cancelled at the very moment of expression” (Hegel 1975, 626). As with Schelling, it is rhythm that provides the source of unity and consistency across events distended in time, and thus what speaks to us in musical notes “is this abstract unity, introduced into time by the subject, which echoes the like unity of the subject” (Hegel 1975, 249).
As demonstrated here, music’s intimate association with the subjective experience of time is conspicuous in philosophical positions that might be characterized broadly speaking as Romantic or Idealist, dating from the opening years of the nineteenth century. But similar concerns reemerge later, near the end of the century, in intellectual traditions that are quite distinct. This renewed interest in the reality of internal or subjective time on the part of artists, thinkers, psychologists, and sociologists was in part a reaction to the claims of absolute or world time, which became more prevalent through such events as the standardizing of time zones in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the possibility of virtually instantaneous communication provided by the new technology of radio transmission. As Stephen Kern sums up, “The thrust of the age was to affirm the reality of private time against that of a single public time and to define its nature as heterogeneous, fluid, and reversible” (Kern 1983, 34). In fact, the most prominent psychological and phenomenological attempts to explain the subjective constitution of lived time in this era insistently return (like an idée fixe or Leitmotiv) to music to illustrate their case.
One of the most important of such figures was the American philosopher and psychologist William James. In pioneering discussions of the psychological notion of the experienced or “specious” present from the 1880s, James uses the apparent temporal wholeness of a melodic phrase to serve as the perfect exemplification of the permeation of the past within the present that belongs to experienced time. In this view, “all the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present” (Kelly 1882, 167, quoted and popularized by James 1890, 1:609). A melody appears as a melody and not merely as a collection of notes presented successively across time, which indicates that the listener must be able to sense succession as succession, and thus that the atomistic view of time as consisting of durationless instants is not applicable for the subjective experience of time. Though James’s pragmatic empiricism might seem far from the fanciful flights of Romantic and Idealist thinkers, his links with earlier thought are nonetheless in evidence; in fact, the lines from Tennyson’s “The Mystic,” quoted earlier, serve James as a starting point for his musings on the temporality of consciousness.
Undoubtedly the most famous philosopher of time from the final years of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth was Henri Bergson—an admirer and friend of James (and cousin by marriage to Proust)—and melodic metaphors are omnipresent throughout his writing. As early as 1880 he had argued for the reality of durée—subjective, lived time, qualitative, continuous, and indivisible—against the scientistic abstraction of an objective, clock time. “Pure duration” he claims, “forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another”, whose “totality may be compared to a living being” (Bergson 1910, 100). Music is indeed the closest thing he can conceive to the lived experience of time: “A melody to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner life” (Bergson 1922, 44). Even the sober German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl starts his 1905 account of the phenomenology of subjective time with the apparent self-evidence of temporal continuity and flow provided by a musical phrase: “We assume an existing time; this, however, is not the time of the world of experience but the immanent time of the flow of consciousness. The evidence that consciousness of a tonal process, a melody, exhibits a succession even as I hear it is such as to make every doubt or denial appear senseless” (Husserl 1964, 23). Music for such authors provides the ideal temporal object for explaining the continuity and organic cohesion of subjective time, assuming a power to illustrate seemingly intractable problems in the metaphysics of time. Indeed, it is arguable that without music such investigations would find themselves without any illustrative example.
Although music is most often used in the Romantic era to explain the flow of subjective time and the temporal course of our individual lives, it may also stand as a metaphorical expression of a wider collective time, of the time of the world or human history. In fact, that most misanthropic but musically munificent of nineteenth-century philosophers, Schopenhauer, tends toward the objective view (given that the subject, in his opinion, is merely an illusory individuation of the single Will). For him, music “refers to the innermost being of the world,” but this is a world of transience and destruction in which he elsewhere explains “there is no stability of any kind, no lasting state is possible but everything is involved in restless rotation and change” (Schopenhauer 1969, 1:256; 1974, 2:309). Thus “a symphony by Beethoven presents us with … a true and complete picture of the nature of the world, which rolls on in the boundless confusion of innumerable forms, and maintains itself by constant destruction” (Schopenhauer 1969, 2:450). The early nineteenth-century philosopher who espouses this view most fully is Schelling, however, in whom the legacy of Pythagoreanism and Platonism leaves an unmistakable mark.
Despite linking music with self-consciousness through their shared temporal nature, Schelling also sees music as reflecting the rhythms and proportions of the objective universe (a clear reference to the ancient doctrine of the harmony of the spheres). “Music … is nothing other than the primal rhythm of nature and of the universe itself,” he claims in the 1804 Philosophy of Art (Schelling 1989, 17). What music, crucially, is claimed to do in his early account is thus link subjective time—the time of the individual human—with cosmic time, the connection that ancient philosophy had once posited between the individual soul and the world soul. Moreover, since he points to music’s mastery of time through rhythm (“the transformation of the accidental nature of a sequence into necessity … whereby the whole is no longer subjected to time but rather possesses time within itself”; 111) the implication seems to be that the very temporal nature of the universe is itself musical. In other words, music does not merely connect the internal times of all individual subjects into a single collective (more strongly, cosmic) time, but in a sense might even be a means of articulating or controlling this time.
“Music” here is clearly being used as a general idea rather than referring to a specific piece or repertory. Schelling’s argument is also far from watertight, and he later came to revise the positions espoused here in his early writings from the 1800s, emphasizing in his later The Ages of the World the “universal subjectivity of time” (allgemeine Subjektivität der Zeit; Schelling 1946, 78). But the general ethos of such speculations were appealing for Romantics, especially philosophically minded poets and writers. One thinks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (later an admirer and translator of Schelling), who uses the idea of music as that which interconnects all beings in a pantheistically conceived world. In “The Aeolian Harp” (1795), it is music that makes audible the oneness of nature, its permeation by a common animating spirit:
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill’d;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument. (Coleridge 1967, 101)
Coleridge’s close friend, Wordsworth, similarly speaks of music as the unifying temporal thread that runs throughout the course of worldly life. In his famous “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798), Wordsworth tells how he has “learned / To look on nature”:
hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
… A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(Wordsworth 1940–49, 2:261–262)
This idea of the “song of the world”—that the temporal course of the world and world history is best symbolized by the continuity and harmonious interconnection of voices given by music—is particularly prominent in Shelley. In “Alastor” (1815), the voice of the individual is taken as just part of a larger pantheistic music:
Moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre …
I wait thy breath. Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air.
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.
(Shelley 1970, 16)
Likewise, Shelley hears the course of worldly time as something capable of sonic manifestation:
That seldom-heard mysterious sound,
Which, driven on its diurnal round,
As it floats through boundless day,
Our world enkindles on its way.
(Shelley 1970, 672)
Similar sentiments can be found half a century later in the American poet Walt Whitman, for whom discerning the course of world history is analogous to hearing a secret, inner music:
from that Sea of Time,
Spray, blown by the wind …
Murmurs and echoes still bring up—Eternity’s music, faint and far
(Whitman 1996, 695)
In true Platonic fashion (the allusion is to book X of the Republic), this sonic reverberation of the cosmos normally goes unnoticed to the uninitiated:
That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear,
But now the chorus I hear and am elated.
(Whitman 1996, 563–564)
But the poet can hear the stream of music that is human history, and joyfully participates in furthering its course:
Strains musical flowing through ages, now reaching hither,
I take to your reckless and composite chords, add to them, and cheerfully pass them forward.
(Whitman 1996, 182)
In such accounts as these, music is used to describe the intangible sense of guiding spirit behind time, of historical providence, a way of making sense of the events of world history. Throughout the nineteenth century, the idea of musical harmony stands as a potent metaphor for human society, the coexistence of individuals as part of a larger collective, and music’s continuity and flow can thus serve not only to exemplify the time of the individual subject but also the larger “time of times” of a whole people.6
Perhaps the most famous discussion of music and time left by a philosopher in the nineteenth century is Søren Kierkegaard’s account of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in his Either/Or (1843). Despite his antagonism to his predecessor, Kierkegaard (or his pseudonymous “A”) adopts a distinctly Hegelian position in this essay. Hegel had argued that music is the quintessentially temporal art owing to its ephemerality and transience, that it leaves nothing behind:
Unlike buildings, statues, and paintings, the notes have in themselves no permanent subsistence as objects; on the contrary, with their fleeting passage they vanish again and therefore the musical composition needs a continually repeated reproduction, just because of this purely momentary existence of its notes. (Hegel 1975, 909)
Kierkegaard’s author takes up a similar aesthetic starting point to argue that Don Giovanni is the greatest expression of musical art since its medium—music—is that most perfectly suited to expressing its subject, erotic love. “Love from the soul is a continuation in time, sensual love a disappearance in time, but the medium which expresses this is precisely music” (Kierkegaard 1992, 101). The reason that Don Giovanni needs a constant stream of new amorous conquests is that his life (an example of what Kierkegaard would call the aesthetic or sensuous life) has no substance of any kind, but “hurries on in a perpetual vanishing, just like music, of which it is true that it is over as soon as it stops playing and only comes back into existence when it starts again” (107–108). (The implication is that Don Giovanni is doomed when the past catches up with him—when repetition intrudes into the sequence of constant novelty—as indeed happens in the opera.) Music, in this account, forms the non plus ultra of sensual immediacy, but this comes at the heavy cost of its transience. Music exists only in the moment, and this moment never points to more than itself. “The moment,” Kierkegaard writes elsewhere, “signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and precisely in this lies the imperfection of the sensuous life” (Kierkegaard 1981, 87).
Music would seem to be as far from the abiding and enduring as is conceivable, at least in this view. Yet many Romantic authors see music as preeminently suited to expressing the trans-temporal, despite—or even through—its temporality. Music, in fact, provides one of the best examples of the notion of “eternity in the moment” from this period. We might provide some context for this in Hegel’s discussion of time in the Encyclopaedia: “in the positive meaning of time, it can be said that only the Present is, that Before and After are not. But the concrete Present is the result of the Past and is pregnant with the Future. The true Present, therefore, is eternity” (Hegel 1970, 39). Expressed more poetically by Goethe, when “the past is still abiding” and “the future lives on before us,” then “the moment is eternity” (Goethe 2006, 1:442).
Kierkegaard’s “A,” like Kant before him, neglects the role of memory in accounting for music (or conversely exaggerates the difference between musical and verbal art on this matter). But music is nothing if not constituted from memory. For other writers at this time, music provides a perfect medium for temporal epiphany, and this is achieved through the necessary recourse to the listener’s sense of memory and anticipation—to the temporal modalities of past, present, and future—in its perception (this is the point that later psychologists and philosophers like James and Bergson were onto in its use to illustrate the “specious present”). As Coleridge explains,
the present strain still seems not only to recall, but almost to renew, some past movement. … Each present movement bringing back as it were, and embodying the Spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems trying to overtake something that is to come: and the Musician has reached the summit of his art, when having thus modified the Present by the Past, has at the same time weds the Past in the present to some prepared and corresponsive future. (quoted in Rosen 1996, 74)
Similarly, for Jean Paul, music seems to possess a temporally ecstatic quality: “a note never sounds alone but always threefold, blending the Romantic quality of the future and the past with the present” (Jean Paul 1959–63, 5:466). Elsewhere, in a slightly altered formulation that alludes to many of the themes discussed in this chapter, he remarks “no tone has the present and stands still and is. … Lacking the present which separates the two, in tones the heart’s past and future flow together; thus they are the earthly echo of eternity, and man hears nothing external, but only his inner and eternal self” (Jean Paul 1840–42, 32:316–317).7 And in a letter from 1832 to the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe makes the comparable observation that “the character of your talent relies on tones, i.e., on the moment. Now, since a sequence of successive moments is always itself a kind of eternity, it was given to you to be ever constant in that which passes” (Goethe 1987, 3:639).
Music indeed provides for the Romantics an exemplary case of what Goethe would call “permanence in transience” (Dauer im Wechsel). In early German Romantic writing, the introduction of music or verse structures may serve to articulate a sense either of timelessness or a fantasy-like interplay between time and timelessness, the prose broken up by poetic lines that organize time through their varied metric structure and use of rhyme (Brown 1979, 210ff). Music also provides authors such as Novalis with an image of the fusion of temporality and eternity, a marriage of past and future in the present, with which his symbolic spiritual homecomings are often characterized. For the thinkers mentioned here, the temporal nature of music, its ability to suggest an immanent unity within a multiplicity of temporal events, predisposes it to encapsulate eternity in the moment. Music thus held out a possible utopian promise, offering a conceptual instantiation of temporal transcendence that suited the Romantic tendency to imbue art with content once thought the preserve of religion. Not all would agree with such conflation of the aesthetic and religious, of course, but there were still many people at the time that did—and plenty more since then.
Neither Kierkegaard nor, for that matter, any of his pseudonyms would have been likely to follow such arguments, however. Indeed, for Kierkegaard’s “A,” it is its sensuous immediacy that makes music so potent an art of the vanishing present: “music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy,” whereas “in language there is reflection and therefore language cannot express the immediate” (Kierkegaard 1992, 80). But the apparent corollary of this is that unlike language, “what music cannot express is the historical in time” (70). There is a purported lack of detachment between music’s medium and its ostensible message. This may prove to be both music’s strength and its failing when articulating the concept of time—or so some commentators have thought.
“Can one narrate time?” asks Thomas Mann eighty years later in his self-styled “time-romance,” The Magic Mountain (1912–24), a novel which sums up both the epoch that ended with the First World War and its temporal fixations. Mann—or his narrator—appears at first to think not: “that would surely be an absurd undertaking” he quickly responds. But on reflection, he proposes that narrative—in many respects akin to music in its temporal being—might meaningfully “tell a tale of time,” that is make time its content as well as its medium, whereas music cannot. This is owing to narrative’s possession of two types of time—the time of its presentation and the time of its content—while in contrast, Mann believes, “the time element in music is single”: music is confined to the time of its performance, to its presentation (Mann 1999, 541–542).
This may be moving too quickly—though in answering this point we might finally turn from what was said about music in this era to what its music appears to demonstrate to us (evidence that is no less subject to present interpretation than written testimony)—in other words, from discussing an intellectual culture that is verbal to one that is musical. One might immediately think of Mann’s Munich contemporary, Richard Strauss, who in Der Rosenkavalier (1910) offers a striking musical articulation of different temporal levels quite distinct from the time of the music’s performance through his melange of historical styles from the Viennese past (see Lockwood 1992, 243–258). Indeed, in a letter to Hofmannsthal, Mann ironically concedes this very point, in criticizing Strauss’s music for its historically anachronistic—i.e., temporally significative—quality (“Where is Vienna, where is the 18th century in this music? Hardly in the waltzes. They are anachronistic” [quoted in Kennedy 2006, 172]). Certain historical styles are marked or salient with respect to their origin and historicity (in works like Louis Spohr’s Historische Symphonie of 1839, this historicity can become the subject of a whole composition), while music may be able to imply a differentiation in levels between qualities of past, present, and future. A sense of syntactic placement may appear present through cultural association (the use of beginning, middle, or end gestures; antecedent and consequent phrases), and certain passages may appear marked with respect to temporal modality—what later phenomenological accounts would term their “designated time.”8 It is true that compared with language, music is comparatively unsuited to denoting the concepts of “earlier” and “later,” with detaching its “designated time” from the “performance time,” but the distinction is not absolute. However, in practice music is often found in conjunction with the signifying medium of language; and here, the relationship between the two modes of articulating time may often be held in a productive tension.
To take an obvious example, we might look to song. Music’s combination with lyric poetry allows a complex interaction of musical and verbal forms of temporal signification. In Schubert’s Winterreise, for instance, music can underscore the changes between the warmth of past memory and the desolation of present reality, physical activity denoting the passing of time (such as the omnipresent walking figures in the accompaniment) or accentuate the freezing of the protagonist’s sense of temporal passage (for instance, Muxfeldt 1997, Barry 2000). Similarly, in the opening song of Dichterliebe, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” Schumann’s equivocation between the tonal centers of A major and F# minor mirrors the interplay between the earlier moment of happiness and the more melancholy present state from which this past is viewed. Heine’s poetry is written in the past tense; yet music’s apparent expressive immediacy continually threatens to bring this past to present life, as the memories come alive once more.
More complex is opera. The use of music alongside the unfolding of drama on stage offers one of the most readily interrogable examples of how music may contribute to an understanding of temporal passage (albeit one bound up with manifold extra-musical aspects). Perhaps most celebrated in the eyes of posterity is the mature musical-dramatic technique of Wagner (see, for instance, Grey 2008), with the use of Leitmotiv creating an associative web of temporal modes (recollections of the epic past, dramatic foreshadowing of the future), though the use of reminiscence motives in opera in fact extends back to the end of the eighteenth century. In one sense, however, Wagnerian music drama eschews a rich source of temporal articulation, in that the focus on dramatic continuity arising from the breakup of earlier set-piece and recitative structure brings the dramatic time into more direct and regular proportion with the time of the drama. This type of (predominantly) linear dramatic trajectory common in the late nineteenth century from Wagner and the later Verdi has become normalized as a model for what dramatic time should be like. Yet reconsideration of the earlier bel canto repertoire and the earlier conventions of opera seria from which it grew suggests an equally sophisticated means for controlling the unfolding of dramatic time through its greater means of distinguishing between the time of representation and represented time. In the “dilemma” ensemble, for instance, represented time can virtually come to a halt as characters continue for some minutes through performance time.
Still, the differences between texted or dramatic music, on the one hand, and instrumental music, on the other, are not absolute. A similar interplay between temporal intentionalities can be heard in instrumental music across the nineteenth century. Instrumental music may convey a stylized process of remembering through the recall of earlier themes, as found in several works by Beethoven, where earlier movements are recalled at the start of the finale (see Sisman 2000), or as if forming a nostalgic telos and collapsing of time, as exemplified in a number of cyclic works by Mendelssohn (see Taylor 2011). As Proust identifies in the lines cited earlier, throughout the nineteenth century instrumental music may suggest a complex permeation of the past in the present, a present that perpetually presses on toward the future, that makes it highly suggestive of the complexity of human temporality, of the multiplicity of lived temporal experience.
When in the middle of the twentieth century Gisèle Brelet states that music is “the temporal art par excellence” (Brelet 1949, 1:25), or Susanne Langer proposes that “music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible” (Langer 1953, 110), they are both continuing lines of thought that stem, as we have seen, from intellectual positions exposited in the previous century. Discussions around music and time initiated in the nineteenth century have in many cases proved highly influential, and many current views on this topic are foreshadowed in arguments set out earlier. This final section looks at a few of the more important ideas that still have currency today, and especially the changes or modifications which they have undergone.
To start with one of the most notable examples, claims for music as not merely being “in” time but making or controlling time become far more prominent, both from theorists and from composers, across the course of the twentieth century, though the origins of this idea lie in the nineteenth century, if not earlier. We might point to Theodor Adorno’s notion of structural listening in which “time is abolished and, as it were, suspended and concentrated in space” (Adorno 1998, 165–166), or Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous remark that music serves as an instrument “for the obliteration of time” (Lévi-Strauss 1983, 16). Similarly with composers, Igor Stravinsky will claim that “music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present,” in which he is “able to give substance, and therefore stability” to his life (Stravinsky 1936, 54); in Olivier Messiaen’s opinion, “music is not in time, but rather time is in music”—“without musicians, time would be much less understood” (Mari 1965, 59; Samuel 1994, 34)—and comparable formulations concerning music’s temporal mastery have been made by many postwar composers, such as Stockhausen (1959) and Xenakis (1989) (but see also Grisey 1987). Such ideas are not new, but are expressed with a newfound confidence. When Adorno claims that “musical time is really musical—in other words not just the measurable time of the duration of a piece—only as time that is dependent on the musical content and in turn determines that content” (Adorno 2002, 143), he is simply providing a more sophisticated formulation of the idea expressed over a hundred and fifty years earlier by Wackenroder’s eastern hermit.
It is noticeable, however, that composers in the nineteenth century did not generally make such strong claims for music as articulating or controlling time in the manner that would become commonplace in the twentieth century—this despite many of the philosophical foundations being in place. In some ways, this situation appears counterintuitive, insofar as a considerable body of the music now involved is atonal or at least post-tonal, and thus negates the significant role played by listener expectations in constructing a regulative temporal order from a common syntax. New theoretical understandings of time, from the perspective of Einsteinian relativity and from quantum physics, also make little headway against the seemingly ineradicably subjective experience of time given by music (indeed, the legacy of Bergsonism endured for a long time in artistic circles, especially in France). Perhaps the acceleration in the last century of the temporalization begun in the late eighteenth century, the ever-greater splintering of our time-sense in the modern world, has intensified our bewilderment faced with the curious concept of time and left a gap in which we are ever more receptive to the role played by art in articulating (an argument made by Kramer 1973).
One apparent corollary of this increase in music’s claims to articulate or control time is its reflection back onto an earlier repertoire, onto the music of the nineteenth century, where such claims find their philosophic origin. In an earlier study (Taylor 2016), I have pointed to how the now commonplace assertion that Beethoven controls time, or takes us to a state of timelessness in his later music, seems in documentary terms to be a manifestation of twentieth-century reception, not something that was demonstrably perceived by his contemporaries (even though this reading was arguably available to them, in that the epistemic conditions existed in this period). Another argument that has proved very popular at the start of the twenty-first century is that the temporal quality of a specific historical style reflects its culture’s temporal sensibilities. As Lewis Rowell put it some time ago, “the organization of music, in a conscious or unconscious way, reflects the preferences, habits, and thought patterns of its parent culture. And nowhere is this more evident than in music’s temporal domain” (Rowell 1979, 97). Even if (as Kierkegaard believes) music is not the best suited to expressing the historical, it nonetheless has been received in recent decades as an ideal mode of accessing a historical culture’s understanding of time.9
Music’s intimate connection with the subjective experience of time has proved a potent model for other art forms to imitate. Long after Friedrich Schlegel proposed that “every art has musical principles, and when completed itself becomes music” (Schlegel 1958–2002, 16:213), and a few decades after Walter Pater’s equally famous dictum (Pater 1986, 86), we find other arts “aspiring to the condition of music” not least in their temporal organization. In the stream-of-consciousness novel we find a counterpart to the musical interweaving of themes and memories in the late Romantic cyclic style (sophisticated examples might be given by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or The Waves). Musical forms are introduced into other, normally narrative arts as a model for structuring time—their temporal succession of events—in an abstract, nonnarrative way (as seen, for instance, in the purported allusions to fugue in Joyce’s Ulysses and Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, or sonata form and a specific Beethoven symphony in the novels of Anthony Burgess). Music’s status as an art of time remains intact, but the last century or so has seen the rise of other art forms, most notably cinema, about which related claims have been made, and thus music finds competition on a new front for the title of “the temporal art par excellence.”10
Probably the most significant factor in changing attitudes toward musical time, however, has been the rise of recording technology since the end of the nineteenth century, which—in the apparent repeatability of a particular musical performance—in certain ways profoundly altered the nature of how we view this art form (Kramer 1981, 1988). One might also point to the rise in palindromical and retrograde structures in music of the twentieth century (as found, for instance, in Berg or Messiaen), a feature that for centuries had remained the preserve of contrapuntal homage but now may imply an altered perception of time as something capable of grasping and reversing. To be sure, a new freedom from tonal requirements has helped create a musical style that more easily supports such designs, but the idea that time is in a sense reiteratable, reinforced through recording technology, surely helped shape the aesthetic environment for this development. Yet new technologies can also reinforce Romantic notions of music’s ineffability and immateriality and hence underscore its perceived link with time. In early German Romantic authors it is commonplace to read of a mysterious and wondrous music emanating from the ether, without any players in evidence for producing it; now we are far more accustomed to hearing a disembodied background music all around us. Whether writers like Novalis would find Muzak sufficiently mystical may, however, be doubted.