2 - Music's time

Summary

Einstein's eldest son once recalled: ‘Whenever [Einstein] felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.’

What must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur?

Victor Zuckerkandl

[If music] is the most contemplative of the arts, it is not because it takes us into the timeless but because it obliges us to rethink time.

Rowan Williams

Music is a temporal art through and through. Inevitably, if we are asking about what we might learn theologically from music's temporality, we cannot avoid asking questions about what we might mean by ‘time’.

Time, of course, has been a topic of perennial fascination to humankind, and perhaps never more than in the last hundred years or so, when it has been subject to sophisticated treatment in various fields – scientific, cultural, philosophical, literary as well as musical. The character of time has proved stubbornly resistant to comprehensive explanation or description. Philosophical treatments quickly lead to multiple perplexities due to the radical elusiveness of the subject in question. As Alasdair Heron observes, a large part of the problem is that ‘reflection upon time by those who are themselves in and of time cannot extricate itself from the inevitable limitations imposed upon it by its own condition’.