Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135
Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135
Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135
REFERENCES
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TIME IN
JONATHAN D. KRAMER
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2 Minute changes have been made in Exx. 1-4 in order to make connections
smooth.
3 This situation is unique to this quartet; other pieces that contain their gestural
end within their clock-time interior do not necessarily have events which occur after
(in gestural-time) the end.
4 The Beethoven String Quartets, Knopf, 1967, p. 355.
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12 As a body approaches the speed of light, its time slows down, approaching zero.
13 The ideas in this paragraph are necessarily oversimplified. For fuller discussions
of time and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see
Georges Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time, trans. Myrtle Korenbaum, D.
Riedel, 1964; G. J. Whitrow, The Natural Philosophy of Time, Harper, 1963;
Sadik J. Al-Azm, Kant's Theory of Time, Philosophical Library, 1967; Stephen
Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time, Harper and Row, 1965.
14 As Leonard Meyer once remarked (in a private discussion following his lectures
at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in October 1970), you can find music that,
because of its lack of referential syntax, seems to support virtually any hypothesis
about the culture in which it was written.
0 137 ?
0 138 ?
the eternal has disappeared from the horizon of... our everyday
life; and time thereby becomes all the more inexorable and absolute
a reality. The temporal is the horizon of modem man, as the eternal
was the horizon of man of the Middle Ages. That modem writers
[and composers, filmmakers, etc.] have been so preoccupied with the
reality of time, handling it with radically new techniques and from
radically new points of view, is evidence that the philosophers of our
S139
0 140 *
21 Priestley, p. 122.
22 For a discussion of how contemporary aspects of time relate to musical tempo
and rhythm, see Robert Erickson, "Time-Relations," Journal of Music Theory, Vol.
VII, No. 2 (1963), 174-192.
23 In a seminar at the University of California, Davis, 1966-67.
0 141 "
0 142 ?
moment puts into place a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle. (That the
totality emerges but does not grow suggests statistical processes.) The
whole is defined, but its individual parts are irrational. They have
tendencies, they have probabilities, but they are not individually pre-
dictable or understandable.25
Stockhausen refers to this global staticism in new music as a "direc-
tionless time-field, in which individual [events] have no particular
direction in time (as to which follows which)." 26 But he overstates his
case: localized direction need not add up to large-scale kineticism.
Multi-directional is not directionless. Apart from some recent com-
positions, Stockhausen's music does not lack directed motion. Nor does
that of Boulez, or Xenakis, or Messiaen. But the direction is generally
not goal-oriented, and therefore the totality is static.
In past ages life was directed toward certain philosophic, religious,
or material ends, and tonal music reflected this goal-orientation. Tonal
goals were possible because the parameters of tonal music are naturally
interrelated.27 Today, while we can feel direction within many mo-
ments of our lives, the existence of a large goal is harder than ever to
maintain. The direction felt in daily life is a mere molecule in a static
totality. Thus it is fitting that modem multi-directional music should
lack unequivocal goals.28
In the art of a society where life is without goals, where time is
fragmented, where past, present, and future interpenetrate each other,
where the order of events is arbitrary, what becomes of the traditional
concepts of beginning, middle, and end? Much of the power in tra-
ditional music lies in backwards and forwards hearing-hearing a
later event as clarifying an earlier one and hearing an earlier event as
implying a later one. What happens when the very concepts of earlier
25 This new attitude toward total musical time derives from Ives and Webern, as
demonstrated in James Drew, "Information, Space, and a New Time-Dialectic,"
Journal of Music Theory, Vol. XII, No. 1 (1968), 86-103. See also Donald B.
Anthony, A General Concept of Musical Time with Special Reference to Certain
Developments in the Music of Anton Webern, University Microfilms, 1968.
26 ,. . . . . how time passes .....," trans. Cornelius Cardew, Die Reihe, Vol.
III, p. 36.
27 Anthony, p. 161.
28 Local goals are possible, such as a cluster as the goal of an increasing chro-
matic density or silence as the goal of greater and greater time between events,
but these local goals, which work only in some parameters at a time, do not gen-
erally carry the rhythmic and articulative power of, for example, a return to the
tonic area in a triadic composition.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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