Forms of Time in Nineteenth-Century Music: Geology, the Railway, and the Novel

Abstract

European art music in the nineteenth century was characterized by both an expansion and a contraction of the timescale typical of earlier periods. On the one hand there was an outpouring of miniatures, primarily for piano; on the other there was a proliferation of instrumental works, especially symphonies, lasting anywhere from 40 minutes to over an hour. Although it is possible to refer these changes to developments in compositional technique, their wider significance derives from the era’s production of several new and epoch-making forms of time––that is, of ways to conceive, order, and experience time. Time literally changed during the nineteenth century, and music changed along with it. The long span of geological ‘deep time’, the compressed and precisely measured time of railway travel, and the temporal complexity of the multiply plotted novel all have musical parallels. Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor Op. 120 (1841), César Franck’s Symphony in D minor (1888), and Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude No. 18 in F minor Op. 28 (1835–9) provide pertinent examples.