Abstract
Retention, protention and intention in musical expression. St Augustine’s perception of the parameters of time (music as the science of good movement) (scientia bene movendi): the manifestation in sound of time felt internally. Musical events: a transition from one contextual situation to another (A. Benditskiy, M. Aranovskiy). Rejection of the static approach to time in favour of the real flow of time (V. Sesemann). The goal of musical expression is to give intonational—temporal—movement to the form of a work. Musical time is the movement of sound structures dictated by the spirit of the work understood by the interpreter.
Music is the art of time, and musical form is primarily a temporal form.
—Aleksei Losev (Музыка как предмет логики [Music as the Subject of Logic], 735).
Every change is a transition of being from a possibility to an act, […] or the actualisation of an existing possibility.
—Stanisław Kowalczyk, (Metafizyka ogólna [General Metaphysics], 141).
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The main subject of musical interpretation is the text of the work. One can call this its spatial dimension, which has to be accorded a temporal—tonal form. The sound is a line drawn in time. “Time means moving from what is to ‘what should be’. […] To change from what is to ‘what should be’ involves time. […] Time implies effort in that interval between what is and ‘what should be.’”Footnote 1 This is related to the concept of tempo.
Music flows in time, and is distributed in space which sounds or is given sound by it. It was not the upwards and downwards motion of the melody on the staff which gave rise to the sensation of this motion as horizontal, but, rather, it was from the sensation of the horizontal that the visual fixation of melody as a line came into being. The concept of horizontal as a melodic becoming led to the insertion of new terms: line, design, linear, […] mode, melodic fabric. […] It was necessary to divert thought from the customary, narrowly scholastic associations connected with the terms, melody, voice, counterpoint, tonic, note, etc. […] The concepts of line and design suggest a feeling of plasticity in melodic motion and its direction; they impart a nuance of independence to the motion of the voice and, very importantly, stimulate dynamic perception of the musical horizontal as incessantly changeable. […] Each melodic line is conditioned by breathing (of the human voice or an instrument), that is, by a certain coefficient indicating the maximum durations and extents of intonations in relation to a given reserve of breath, a given length of the bow, the smooth motion of the hand, and so on.Footnote 2
Space and time are the main forms of experience through which we perceive the world. They are directly created by efforts of movement. If there were no movement, there would be no time. Movement presupposes the movement of moving bodies. In music the subject of movement is sound, intensified by its controller and dispersing in space. Each moment of time is a relationship between a certain activity, speed and emotionality, that is, between parameters of a quantitative and qualitative character.
St Augustine, in his eleventh book of Confessions, offered a very broad and “musical” concept of time. When we talk about time, we usually have in mind three dimensions: the past, present and future. But Augustine, in reformulating this assertion, says that
neither future nor past actually exists. Nor is it right to say there are three times, past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things future. For these three exist in the mind, and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation.Footnote 3
“Only the man who has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past […] can achieve full consciousness of the present. […] To deny the past for the sake of being conscious only of the present would be sheer futility. Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow. It is a process of transition that forms the link between past and future. Only the man who is conscious of the present in this sense may call himself modern.”Footnote 4 A person’s cultural self-creation and the organisation of all kinds of activity must be based on such an orientation.
Applying this to musical expression, one can say that the present tone is formed according to an earlier one and there is already a concept and plan of what should be—the future sound form of the subsequent structure of the text. The psychological parameters of such a process can be described as retention (from the Latin retentiō meaning holding back)—the past perceived in the present for a certain time; protention—the future already perceived in the present; and intention—the orientation of the consciousness towards an object or towards an intention to perform an act—that is, the act of realisation in sound.
Such is the process of musical intonation (realisation in sound) and, as one can see, it correlates perfectly with Augustine’s inner perception of the parameters of time. This is nothing remarkable. After all, he calls music itself the science of good movement (scientia bene movendi), and this is nothing other than the manifestation in sound of time felt internally. Movement is a creative action, which creates emotional tension through dynamics. The impression of movement is enhanced by spatial parameters—distancing and approaching (diminuendo, crescendo).
Music is movement—a unity of discreteness and continuity. At all levels of the musical form, these attributive properties realize musical events. The event that moves the form should first be considered as a change in the function of a structural element, most often involving the change or inclusion of a new element. […] Not every change can be considered an event. So, for example, a simple, unmarked transition in a melody from one tone to another is unlikely to be perceived as an event, although the change is evident here. […] An event should be considered a transition from one contextual situation to another.Footnote 5
Meanwhile situationality is established by an intonational sense, which can be very varied. Since only through translation into action or sound the situation reveals its semantic potential. But this process is always guided by the inner hearing (musical hearing), which is able (or should be able) to penetrate the sign form of the text and feel its (i.e., the form’s—the idea’s) inner content. “The mind expects, attends and remembers: what it expects passes, by way of what it attends to, into what it remembers.”Footnote 6 But, in order to recall something and use that, one must have something to recall, to have experienced something necessary for meaningful action. We get bored in life when we don’t know what to do; time then passes slowly. The process of performance is boring and senseless when action is not based on understanding. Great music is never monotonous.
The philosopher Vasily Sesemann, who worked in Lithuania, following St Augustine, rejected the so-called static-mechanical approach to time in favour of the real flow of time, which depends on the movement of three variants of time of the internality.
The temporality of time is sensed by being in it or, more precisely, by going with it. […] Being in it or going with it means real participation (intonation of the music, organisation of its time—J.R.). […] Every work or action, when it happens, brings together the past, the present and the future into a single meaningful whole, where not only the preceding moments justify and support the consequences, but also the later moments, as the anticipated continuation or goal, determine and form the subsequent ones.Footnote 7
What has been said about the procedural purpose of the action is also fully relevant to the tasks of the interpretive action. Consequently, a philosophical approach to this activity should not deter, but rather facilitate, access to more meaningful expression. It is important to desire to go beyond the limits of one’s present perception of the subject and to believe that a higher level of possibilities is attainable. “Belief is the possibility of knowledge, and knowledge is the reality of belief.”Footnote 8 After all, broadening the horizon of knowledge, and not retreating into the narrow zone of one’s craft should be the artist’s aspiration. Existence manifests itself as the reality of the continuous link between the future and the past. “The past is always wiser than the present: what is old is always wiser that what is new.”Footnote 9 Such is the holistic link between sound creation and cultural self-creation. After all, culture enters us most from examples of the past. Hence the line from the anthem, “Let your sons draw strength from the past.”Footnote 10
Our minds are the product of many yesterdays and the present is merely the passage of the past to the future. […] Without time we cannot think, because thought is the result of time, thought is the product of many yesterdays and there is no thought without memory. Memory is time; for there are two kinds of time, the chronological and the psychological. […] Is there time apart from the mind? Surely time, psychological time, is the product of the mind. Without the foundation of thought there is no time—time merely being memory as yesterday in conjunction with today, which moulds tomorrow. That is, memory of yesterday’s experience in response to the present is creating the future—which is still the process of thought, a path of the mind. […] The thought process brings about psychological progress in time.Footnote 11
In many other places in this book it is recalled that external reproduction—intonative realisation in sound—has to happen through perception of the inner form—the idea—based on the links between the time parameters mentioned above. After all, the goal of musical expression is to give intonational—temporal—movement to the form of a work. By performing movements fixed by the inner form, the tonal quality is released from its dependence on the quantity (the signified form) and submits to the process dictated by intonation.
We can say that music is time organized, which means “made organic”. We can say that this act of organization is one of essential freedom, that it liberates us from the enforcing beat of biological and physical-mathematical clocks. The time which music “takes”, and which it gives as we perform or experience it, is the only free time granted us prior to death. We can speculate […] on possible concordances […] between bodily rhythms and subliminal cadences on the one hand, and the structural conventions of music on the other.Footnote 12
Musical time is to be understood as the movement of sound structures dictated by the spirit of the work being interpreted, and felt and understood by the interpreter.
Notes
- 1.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, ‘March 29’, in The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti (New York: HarperOne, 1995).
- 2.
Asaf’ev, Musical Form, 3:546–47 (translation amended).
- 3.
The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. Francis J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), 276.
- 4.
Carl G. Jung, ‘The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man’, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, vol. 10, Civilization in Transition, tr. Richard F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 76.
- 5.
A. Benditskiy and Mark Aranovskiy, ‘К вопросу о моделирующей функции музыки: музыка и время’ [‘On the question of the modeling function of music: music and time’], in Aranovskiy, Музыка как форма [Music as Form], 149.
- 6.
The Confessions of St. Augustine, 284.
- 7.
Vosylius Sezemanas, Laikas, kultūra ir kūnas: šių dienų kultūros uždaviniams pažinti [Time, culture and the body: exploring the challenges of contemporary culture] (Kaunas: Spaudos fondas, 1935), 8.
- 8.
Šliogeris, Būtis ir pasaulis [Being and the World], 228.
- 9.
Ibid., 548.
- 10.
A line from the Lithuanian national anthem (‘Tautiška giesmė’), by Vincas Kudirka (1858–1899), Lithuanian writer, translator, publicist, critic, musician, and leading social figure.
- 11.
Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (HarperSanFrancisco, 1975), 131–32.
- 12.
Steiner, Real Presences, 196–97.
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Rimas, J., Rimas Jr, J. (2024). The Parameters of Time and Expression of Music. In: Etudes on the Philosophy of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63965-4_8
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