Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music. By Mariusz Kozak

Abstract

In his extraordinarily ambitious Enacting Musical Time, Mariusz Kozak aims to weave many complex threads into a cohesive account of how the subject of the book’s title operates. As was the case for many before him, time for Kozak is first of all not a noun but a verb—temporalizing—and is fundamentally situated, enacted, and interactional. Specifically, musical time—“the form of the listener’s interaction with music” (4)—is a co-constitutive relationship between what he calls the “skillful bodily activity” of a perceiver and worldly-situated stimuli (that is, sounds in an environment that is apprehended as musical) that “solicit certain actions” from the perceiver, who in turn “reconfigures the environment by virtue of those solicited actions” (11). I will come back to this below, but as a spoiler, I will suggest that what Kozak is theorizing in this book is actually not time at all, but the experience of time, which is very different, and which might amount to a “human, all-too-human” understanding of time that casts phenomenological questions as ontological ones. But first, how does Kozak set about to accomplish his project?