Time and Temporality

For the nineteenth century, music was commonly characterized as the “art of time,” and provided a particularly fertile medium for articulating concerns about the nature of time and the temporal experience of human life. This chapter examines some of the debates around music and time from the period, arranged thematically around a series of conceptual issues. These include the reasons proposed for the links between music and time, and the intimate connection between our subjective experience of time and music; the use of music as a poetic metaphor for the temporal course of history; its use by philosophers as an instrument for the explication of temporal conundrums; its alleged potential for overcoming time; its various forms of temporal signification across diverse genres; and the legacy of nineteenth-century thought on these topics today.