13º Simpósio Internacional de Cognição e Artes Musicais

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ISSN: 2236-4366

23 a 26 de maio de 2017
Curitiba-PR/Brasil
A NAIS DO XIII S IMPÓSIO I NTERNACIONAL DE C OGNIÇÃO
E A RTES M USICAIS

23 a 26 de maio de 2017

A SSOCIAÇÃO B RASILEIRA DE C OGNIÇÃO E A RTES M USICAIS

U NIVERSIDADE F EDERAL DO PARANÁ
U NIVERSIDADE E STADUAL DO PARANÁ

editado por
Luis Felipe Oliveira

C URITIBA – 2017
Anais do XIII Simpósio Internacional de Cognição e Artes Musicais 2017

Concepts of time and music

Marcos Mesquita
Instituto de Artes da Unesp
marcosmesquita@yahoo.com.br

Abstract: The concepts of cyclic and linear time influenced and still influence time experiences of
all mankind. The text discusses if it is possible to apply these concepts to musical studies and
comment opinions on time of some twentieth-century composers.
Key-words: cognitive psychology, cultural theory, enculturation, cyclic time, linear time, musical
time cognition.

Conceitos de tempo e música

Resumo: Os conceitos de tempo cíclico e linear influenciaram e ainda influenciam as vivências
temporais de toda a humanidade. O texto discute se é possível aplicar estes conceitos aos estudos
musicais e comenta opiniões sobre tempo de alguns compositores do século XX.
Palavras-chave: psicologia cognitiva, teoria cultural, aculturação, tempo cíclico, tempo linear,
cognição do tempo musical.

1. Cyclic and linear time

The chronometrical time is not only a measurement system invented by the European culture,
it is also, and more significatively, a consequence of a conceptual construction, developed
within millennia. This construction influenced all temporal experiences of occidental culture
and governs today, so to speak, the life of almost all mankind. This conceptual construction is
called linear time. We have to go back in history in order to follow its gradual development.
In a previous stage, as result of observations of natural phenomena – for instance the
cycles of day/night, of moon phases or of seasons of the year –, human beings of earliest
civilizations created a cosmogonic system which reflected the same temporal order of these
phenomena. The temporal aspect of this system is called cyclic time. In the view of Gerald
James Whitrow, the initial contribution to the development of the linear time concept came
from the first known eschatology which was conceived by humans. This eschatology was
disseminated by Zoroaster – or Zarathustra – in sixth century BC and later influenced
Judaism, Christianity and Islam:


[…] at death God passes judgement on man and that this decides his fate when the

world is finally transformed into the same state of perfection as when it left the
hands of the Creator. At the last, immortal glory will be the reward of those who
adhere to the Truth, whereas the followers of the Lie will be condemned to ‘a long
age of darkness, foul food and cries of woe’ (Whitrow, 1988, p. 34).

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This teleological view of time determined definitively the occidental mentality.

Approximately from this epoch on Jews began to see history as the gradual revelation of
god’s intention. Later, attaching a universal dimension to their belief, Christians saw Christ’s
crucifixion as an unrepeatable event. This led to the conclusion that “time must be linear
rather than cyclic. This essentially historical view of time, with its particular emphasis on the
non-repeatability of events, is the very essence of Christianity” (Whitrow, 1988, p. 57). Short
and to the point: it can be said that from this moment on the soil was already fertile for
concepts like progress, evolution, free will and even history – here is meant that these
concepts were developed over the course of many centuries of the occidental civilization. The
linear time experienced its scientific justification in seventeenth century through ideas by
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz:
Despite the difference between Newton’s and Leibniz’s views concerning the nature
of physical time, in other respects their ideas about the concept were similar. Both
believed that time was universal and unique, the universe comprising a succession of
states, each of which exists for an instant, successive instants being like the order of
points on an indefinitely extended straight line. This was the concept of time which
was to dominate physical science until the advent of Einstein’s special theory of
relativity early this [twentieth] century (Whitrow, 1988, S. 130).

The concept of linear time did not simply oust or replace that one of cyclic time.
Nowadays time experiences are ideed a mixture from both concepts with preponderance of
the linear one. Time experience of most human beings point out as a reciprocal, not always
peaceful, relationship between inherent human characteristics and learned concepts from a
given culture: “although our awareness of time is a product of human evolution, our ideas of
time are neither innate nor automatically learned but are intellectual constructions that result
from experience and action” (Whitrow, 1988, p. 5-6).

2. Cyclic and linear music?

The possible musical reflections on the above exposed concepts are vast, widespread. On the
one hand, it can be said that repetition and recapitulation in music – until a certain extent of
variation or transformation – can be associated with the concept of cyclic time, for they create
a bond with something that was heard in the past – recent or distant –, and the human capacity
to perceive this bond induces the perceiver to “close the cycle” of this process, establishing a
relationship between events distant in time; on the other hand, contrast and development can
be associated with the concept of linear time, for they cut – not completely, however – the
connection to the past sound events and, so to speak, compel the perceiver to the present or to

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imagine what comes next in the future. Of course this is not that simple, because music is a
multiparametric art: it is possible that one parameter undergoes a change or a variation, while
others ones do not. The countless possibilities in this concern create ambiguous events which
are tremendously difficult to measure in simple psychometric tests. In Example 1, it can be
easily seen and heard that the melodies played by first and second violins – indicated
respectively as A2 and A3 – in measures 3-4 have the same rhythmical structure of that one
which viola has played in measures 1-2 – indicated as A1 –, with different intervallic
structures, however. Note, nevertheless, that the melodic range of viola and second violin is
the same, a minor 9th actually – G3-Ab4 and B3-C5 respectively):

Example 1. Joseph Haydn, String Quartet, op. 64, No. 1, Trio from 2nd movement, ms. 1-4

In this case, the rhythmical structure is the decisive agent which establishes a cognitive
relationship among segments A1, A2, and A3. Arnold Schoenberg was aware of the
multiparametric possibilities in music, when he defined variation “as changing a number of a
unit’s features, while preserving others” (Schoenberg, 1948/2010, p. 287).
In a broader approach, Olivier Messiaen speculates about endogenous – personal,
psychological – and exogenous – social, cultural – aspects of time perception and
measurement:
For the musician and the specialist in rhythm [rythmicien] the perception of time is
the source of all music and rhythm. […] Bergson claims that the duration is an
“immediate assumption [donnée immédiate] of the consciousness”: this is the title of
his first book. As a matter of fact, the duration presents itself to us with tempo
fluctuations, speed changes: it is the experienced duration [durée vécue],
heterogeneous duration, whose judgement depends essentially on the number of
exterior and interior events which have filled it for each of us in the present and in
the past. In face of the experienced duration stands the abstract time or structured
time [temps structuré] (Messiaen, 1995, p. 9). 1

He compares the characteristics of experienced duration and structured time and place them in
a didactic table:

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Experienced duration Structured time

The duration is concrete. The time is abstract.

(estimated in comparison to us – it mistakes (like an empty frame, in which we put the
for the succession of our conscience states) world and ourselves)

The duration is heterogeneous. The time is homogeneous.

(sometimes fast, sometimes slow – with (all its parts are identical)
thousand tempo nuances, a prodigious
variety of different slownesses and speeds)

The duration is qualitative. The time is quantitative.

(dependent on our nature – no measurable) (measurable, numbered – relative to the
phenomena which serve to its
measurement: if these phenomena change,
our time structuration changes with them)

The duration is subjective. The time is objective.

(in ourselves) (outside ourselves)

Table 1. Comparison between experienced duration and structured time after Messiaen (1995, p. 12)

The structured time manifests itself in music through, among others, beat – regular or
irregular –, meter – ditto –, tempo and its fluctuations, the density of sound processes, the
chronometrical duration of segments, movements and works, and the proportion between
sections and the whole. But all they shape the surface of musical events, from which the
perceiving beings get a cognitive depth. The predominance of a teleological form conception
in the tonal western music during the so called Viennese Classicism and great part of romantic
music reflects exemplary the acme of the linear time concept in music. This time view was
and is still questioned in varied tendencies of new music from the first decade of the twentieth
century on. Bernd Alois Zimmermann writes about the diversity of human time experience:
Past, present and future are bound to the succession process, as we know, merely in
their appearance as cosmic time. In our mental reality, however, this succession does
not exist, what possesses a more real reality than the to us well familiar clock, which
actually indicates us nothing else than there is no present in strict sense. The time
bends into a sphere form [Kugelgestalt]. From this picture of the sphere form of time
I have developed, based on the philosophical term, my pluralistic compositional
technique, which takes the polystratification of our musical reality into account
(Zimmermann, 1968/1974, p. 35). 2

In the beginning of the 1950s, many composers pleaded for an idealized

desemantization of music – either adherents of integral serialism or of aleatory music.
Absorbed in this attitude, John Cage wrote: “[…] what will be done is to more and more
completely liberate sounds from abstracts ideas about them and more and more exactly to let
them be physically, uniquely, themselves” (Cage, 1952/1975, p. 100). This desemantization

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had a significative consequence for the time experience in music, especially what concerns its
mnemonic aspect. Imploding the notions of thematic or sound material, some composers of
this periode created musical works which do not establish clear tematic or sound relationships
during their performance/listening; hence the listener can hardly relate the thematic/sound
events which other, an occurrence that in general brings confusion or amazement to the
listener's memory. In the case of Cage, aleatory processes played a crucial part in this context:
It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of
individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and ‘traditions’
of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded
by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite
play of interpenetration (Cage, 1952/1976, p. 59).

Having this in mind, one can understand Cage’s strategy in relation to sound material and his
rejection to any kind of development of sound material. Similar questions in the case of
integral serialism were discussed in Mesquita (2012 and 2016). An idealistic inflection is also
noticeable in the considerations by Zimmermann:
In the possibility of interval projection into vertical as well as into horizontal, time
seems […] also projectable in both directions. Thus we experience sound as “one
after another” of tones in time distance zero, tone sequence as “simultaneous”,
shifted in time […]. In this point of view, the idea of time unity as unity of present,
past and future [...], this as modern as also immemorial idea, takes a new perspective
in the music as “time art”, as art of temporal order within the continuous present of
the all comprehensive basic structure, which we must establish as order principle of
all relationships within a composition (Zimmermann, 1957/1974, p. 11-12).

The connection with the concept of “perpetual present”, as it is understood by mystics, is not
to deny here: composers imagine that the listener is transported into an atemporal experience
which resembles vaguely a mystical trance. In this condition, one experiences a kind of
abolition of time transitoriness. Years later, Pierre Boulez uses in his writings similar terms
like Zimmermann, naturally liberate from mystical content: “these dimensions [vertical,
diagonal, horizontal] are only one characteristic, modified by the internal time which governs
the organizations, going from zero (vertical, simultaneous) to a determined number
(horizontal, successive)” (Boulez, 1963, p. 133). If sound processes are conditioned by these
three dimensions, than two more embracing categories determine way and manner, how
sound processes can be projeted in time:
[…] we will distinguish [...] two categories in musical time: [...] In pulsed time,
duration structures refer to the chronometrical time in function of a marking, of a
landmark [...] regular or irregular, but systematic [...]. Amorphous time refers to
chronometrical time just in a global way; durations, with their determined
proportions (not values) or with any sort of proportion indication, manifest
themselves in a time field. Only the pulsed time is susceptible to be affected by

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speed, accelaration or decelaration [...] the relationship between chronometrical time

and the number o beats will be the index of speed. The amorphous time will be only
more or less dense according to the statiscal number of events which will happen
during a global chronometrical time; the relationship of this density to the
amorphous time will be the index of accupation. [...] The amorphous time is
comparable to the smooth surface, pulsed time to the striated surface; that’s the
reason why, by analogy, I will call the two defined categories as smooth time and
stried time (Boulez, 1966, p. 99-100).

There are also two relationships which are, for Boulez, the fundamental laws of musical time.
On the one hand, time is filled without counting it. Here the sound processes are statistically
distributed in time, and their groupings shape different possible densities (smooth time). On
the other hand, one counts the time in order to fill it. Here the sound processes are
rhythmically ordered, and their groupings reflect different speeds (stried time). Some sound
processes form clues in chronometrical time and these are internally ordered by the perceiver.
This relationship between sound processes and cognition is a multistratified process that can
be observed under varied points of view:
[…] we grasp [the time] only with the aid of sensitive reference points, so indirectly,
and on the condition that these reference events engrave themselves somewhere, do
not disappearing without trace. [...] It is essential that the reference events leave their
mark on my memory, otherwise they will not exist. In fact, the underlying postulate
is that the time, in the sense of impalpable Heraclitean flow, does not have any
meaning, unless in reference to the man who observes, to me. [...] In order that this
image-mark of the phenomenon becomes a reference point, it is necessary the notion
of anteriority. But this notion seems as circular and impenetrable as the immediate
notion of flow. It is doubtful a synonym. We change slightly the point of view. When
the events or phenomena were synchronous, the universal time would be abolished,
for anteriority would desappear. The same, if the events were completely smooth,
that is without beginning and without end, and even without “perceptible” internal
modification or roughness, the time would be abolished as well. It seems that the
notions of separation, bypass [contournement], difference, discontinuity, which are
very connected, are preconditions to the notion of anteriority. In order that
anteriority exists, it is necessary to be able to distinguish entities which so allow to
“go” from one to another (Xenakis, 1988/1994, p. 98-99).

The sound flow is shaped in many respects by composers, for example he/she decides
about the sound materials and their projection strategies on the chronometrical time or a total
duration, as well on the relationships among one sound material and others – here the
different degrees of affinity among sound materials play the most important part. But as
aforesaid, musical time has a subordinate relationship to chronometrical time, and in this
context the perceiver has also a formal/creative function by finding clues during the sound
flow which is proposed by the composer.

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3. Last remarks
The concepts of cyclic and linear time, allthough just partially applicable in musical
theory and analysis, can guide an embracing approach on music both as a cognitive and
enculturated product of human ingeniousness. As multiparametric art, music is able to
relativize contrasts between tematic or sound unities, blurring the differences between cyclic
and linear events. But this kind of difficulty should not hinder us in the search of new possible
analytic ways, of new kinds of inquiries of old subjects, and of new kinds of psychometric or
image tests with human participants.

References
Boulez, Pierre (1963). Penser la musique aujourd’ hui. Geneva: Editions Gonthier.
Cage, John (1952/1975). Juilliard Lecture. In A Year from Monday (new ed.). London: Marion
Boyars, 95–111.
Cage, John (1952/1976). To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes
and Imaginary Landscape No. 4. In Silence (3rd print). Middletown (Connecticut):
Wesleyan University Press, 57–59.
Gruhn, Wilfried (1983). Integrale Komposition. Zu Bernd Alois Zimmermann Pluralismus-
Begriff. Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 40. Jahrg., H. 4, 287-302.
Mesquita, Marcos (2012). Duração e cálculo: reflexões de alguns compositores entre as
décadas de 1930 e 1960. Música em perspectiva, vol. 5. nº 2, 48-64.
Mesquita, Marcos (2016). Serialismo integral e defasagem temporal de parâmetros sonoros.
In Subversões de protocolos: uso impróprio. Niterói: PPGCA-UFF, 7-18.
Messiaen, Olivier (1995). Le Temps. In Traité de rythme, de couleur et d’ornithologie. Vol. 1.
Paris: Éditions Musicales Alphonse Leduc, 7–36.
Schoenberg, Arnold (1948/2010). Connection of Musical Ideas. In Leonard Stein (ed.), Style
and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Translated by Leo Black. Oakland:
University of California Press, 287-288.
Whitrow, G. J (1988). Time in History. The evolution of our general awareness of time and
temporal perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Xenakis, Iannis (1988/1994). Sur le temps. Kéleütha. With preface and notes by Benoît
Gibson. Paris: L’Arche, 54–66.
Zimmermann, Bern Alois. (1957/1974). Intervall und Zeit. In Christof Bitter (ed.), Intervall
und Zeit. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 11-14.
Zimmermann, Bernd Alois (1968/1974). Vom Handwerk des Komponisten. In Christof Bitter
(ed.), Intervall und Zeit. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 31-37.
1 Translations from French and German by the author.
2 About his pluralistic style and the concept of Kugelgestalt, see Gruhn 1983.

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