What is musical time?

Time flows very differently in the musical experience than it does in everyday life. Much of music's magic comes from its influence on our perception of time. It is through the time of music that we can experience timelessness.

In this article series, I'll point specifically to the (supercool) phenomenon where relationships between tones in tonal music affect our perception of the flow of time. The ideas here in this piece are useful because you share a love for music, and because you're someone who has touched eternity.

Understanding time is such a deep question for musicians because time concerns everything we create. Everything exists in time, including our lives and the sound relations that make up the musical experience. Yet, the transcendent experiences of awe and beauty and truth live in a dimension outside of time, and relate to everything in time.

It is sometimes said that music is an art of time. The tones and rhythms that build a piece come and go, but the relationships between them left behind are long lasting and deep within. The time created by music is distinct from time in the ordinary world. Time is much deeper than what a clock or a metronome can show. Time itself flows.

Musical time is the flow of time specific to musical activities and during the musical experience. Listeners embody musical time. It isn’t external. The speed at which time seems to flow everyday is always subject to change. A cold shower is the only proof you need to alter time's flow through changes in the body.

The flow of time not only depends on our psychophysical state, but our degree of openness to the world. The historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, spoke about two versions of conscious reality. These two are the sacred and the profane. The Sacred is rich with significance and worthy of worship. In contrast to the Sacred, the Profane is meaningless and mundane. We can experience the profane as sacred had we but eyes to see it.

Each version of reality comes with its own quality, and flow, of time. Eliade identifies the Sacred with the Eternal, and the Profane with Time itself. He writes in Cosmos and History (1958): "If we pay no attention to it, time does not exist."

Music, a microcosm of the world, teaches that all we have is the present moment. Immediate experience, not things, is all that we have.

Music is great because we're free to move toward past and future realities by simply being open to the present. When we expand our awareness to include more of what appears in music, we find ourselves closer to discern the nature of musical possibility. And through music, we discover something significant about human living. I’ll demonstrate how in the next article, but for now, let’s dive into the nature of time.

I read a fascinating scientific journal article that reframes time. In "The quantum mechanics of the present," authors Lee Smolin and Clelia Verde construct our world as an "ever-changing band of present events." Their description says time doesn't progress from past to present to future. Rather, time flows where aspects of the world move "from the indefinite to the definite." The present moment itself is the transition between the two states. Past and future are not on the list of what exists. They write:

"The world recreates itself in every moment, as indefinites flash into momentary definites, after which they are nothing. Everything we see around us exists or did just exist, but was gone in the blink of an eye."

Their ideas are totally a description for how music reveals itself, how a piece unfolds. A score is like the world that can be experienced, by us, through the shimmering present of "its continual recreation, moment to moment." And because music involves the body, it creates its own time delivering itself through time, relying on our memory to hold itself together.

The listening ear is constantly creating past and future realities, inspired by what's in front of us. Even though the past is definite and can't be altered, we can change the way the past is perceived. Perhaps we, as individuals, create the past and the future because of our deepest desire to make a whole out of things.

Out of our desire to experience wholeness comes the free flowing, narrative-like, relational, embodied experience we call musical time. To view this concept in action, my next article demonstrates how musical time changes direction during the climax of a phrase.

References

Eliade, Mircea, and Willard Ropes Trask. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Harper and Brothers, 1959.

Smolin, Lee, and Clelia Verde. “The Quantum Mechanics of the Present.” https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.09945.