Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

4 –Time, Space and the Environment

49

become "now," and "now" turns into unalterable fact. Such passage

is measurable only in terms of sensibilities, tensions, and emotions;

and it has not merely a different measure, but an altogether different

structure from practical or scientific time.

The semblance of this vital, experiental time is the primary illusion

of music. All music creates an order of virtual time, in which its

sonorous forms move in relation to each other - always and only to

each other, for nothing else exists there. (Langer, 1953)

Langer's view is shared by Jonathan D. Kramer (1988) who states that "the
age-old idea that time is out there, is questionable. Events, not time, are in

flux. And music is a series of events, events that not only contain time, but

also shape it."
Music listening gives rise to three kinds of temporal experience, the

time of movement and events, the time of pulse, and the temporal ex-

perience; related to apparent musical stasis or slow, barely perceptible
changes of musical states, the time of being.

The time of being
The time of being is the kind of time we experience when no other sensa-

tions of time impose themselves on our consciousness. The time of being
is sometimes called timelessness, moment time or eternal time. It is the

time experienced in nature when we are not near a clock or watch, and we

are not expecting something to happen, and we are not impatient for a
change to occur. The time of being may be experienced as "timelessness"

because we lack a habitual sensation of time that runs or elapses or passes

by.
In a civilization governed by timekeepers, there is a prevailing tendency

to forget the time of being, consider it out of the ordinary, or ignore it

completely. But the time of being is recalled in the experience of nature, the
universe, and living beings. We know that a child and a plant grow and

that a flower opens and turns and closes itself, but we do not perceive the

minute changes constituting these processes. We see that the snow is
falling, but we do not discern the movement and direction of the single

snowflake. We know that the tide rises and falls, that the sun and the moon

move across the sky (or so it seems from our viewpoint), but we don't
sense the movement as such.

The core of this kind of temporal experience is that we realize or know

that something is changing or being transformed, but the process of
change is so slow or imperceptible that it escapes our immediate sensory

experience.

The time of movement and events
The sime of movement and events is derived from everyday experience. A

movement directed towards a goal is perceived as having a beginning, a

The Musical Timespace

50

course and an end; the experience of expectation, continuation and conclu-

sion evokes a sensation of duration.

The time of events is ambiguous. If successive events are experienced as

related, the continuity of their succession evokes a sensation of duration

akin to the duration of movement. If an event is experienced as a self-

contained entity without connection to previous or coming events, it may

evoke a feeling of unfulfilled expectation akin to the sensation of duration,

or it may, on the contrary, evoke a feeling of timelessness akin to the time

of being.

Pulse time

Pulse time emerges from the sensation of a regular succession of impulses.

Pulse time has qualitative properties arising from the experience of tempo,

acceleration and deceleration, and quantitative properties related to the

experience that impulses can be counted, grouped, added and divided.

This implies a crucial difference from other kinds of temporal experience.

Pulse time is quantitative as well as qualitative, contrary to the time of

being and the time of movement and events, which are not quantitative,

but qualitative experiences of time.

Pulse time can be related to the forward-directed time of movement, as

one impulse can evoke the expectation of the next impulse, and the ex-

perience of a group of impulses can evoke an expectation of a succeeding

group.

Continuous pulse time can be related to the omnidirectional time of

being, as continuous pulse has no definite beginning and end. This means

that pulse time can, and does, create relationships between the time of

movement and events and the time of being.

For some centuries, the art music of the Western World has been closely

linked with the time of pulse and the time of goal-directed movement. This

relationship was reinforced by the evolution of tonality. But in the begin-

ning of the twentieth century, musical works were composed which

loosened themselves from the relation to forward-moving, goal-directed

time. Works of this kind are found in the music of Charles Ives.