Time could be said to be what defines music: it is the 4th dimension that separates it from other forms of art. Prompted by another recent walk (see previous blog), as well as reading Tolkien’s more-detailed-than-expected explanation of how time works in Middle Earth in the latest publication of his extra-narrative details surrounding the diegesis of The Lord of the Rings, I got thinking about temporal perception in life and in music (the latter of course being an integral part of JRRT’s creation story). This is something I’ve spoken about in my work before, writing the following passages in the programme note of an undergraduate orchestral composition, Eschatos:
The title comes from the Greek word ἔσχατος meaning "last". It explores themes of ending, the apocalypse and of human thought about these things. It also explores ideas of the mortality of art and it’s perceived worth over time. Some pieces of art (music, paintings, etc.) have such power to allow one to imagine them lasting not just until the end of time and space, but literally surviving or even being the soundtrack to the apocalypse itself. I am not claiming that this piece itself is such a work, but am instead using its connotations to explore and present this idea in musical form.
The representation of such large concepts in a brief piece like this also references the fluctuating perception of time; for example, how one week to the next of one’s life can seem notably short or long, or how each passing year feels shorter (despite containing more memories, feelings, experiences, etc.) as it becomes a smaller fraction of a total lifetime so far and yet to come.
It also came up in another undergraduate module, ‘Analysing 20th Century Music’, in which I did a (somewhat mediocre, crying-over-it-in-the-bath-of-my-student-digs) analysis of Arvo Pärt’s Festina Lente, which is constructed as a prolation canon, i.e. one in which the different voices play at different speeds, the resultant textures, harmony and melodies defining the soundscape of the piece.
By its very nature, music has different scales of time within it: movements, sections, long harmonic sequences, microrhythmic detail within melodies, etc. These different levels were reflected in the things I saw and felt while on that aforementioned walk. From the massive geological scale of the valley I was walking along, to the (much, but next) smaller industrial scale of the abandoned railway line at the valley’s floor that follows the river and the long forgotten rusted axle I found buried under leaves, to the more recent human scale of a pair of broken glasses left in a tree by an unseen fellow walker of the route I chose, to the immediate, current brevity of snowdrops on the path’s edge, their delicate white points of light reaching skywards as if trying to join the stars (see instagram post for pics, on the homepage of this website).
So time it seems is integral to both the realisation (for example, a conductor keeping time for the duration of the work, see cover image for this blog) and nature of music, as well as to its creation in terms of inspiration, the actual composition process and to the reflection on how music we hear relates to and fits into our lifetimes.