Progressive Temporality in Music

Abstract

perience; yet it manifests such a remarkable range of variation in its prominence and its quality that at times it seems to be absent altogether. Temporal progression or temporal process is hardly evident, for example, in the first movement of Webem's Symphony Opus 21, where we seem to perceive a pattern of tonal interrelationships for which a presentation in time is almost incidental. And again, is not the revery of Debussy's Nuages or the lassitude of parts of the second act of Tristan without any conspicuous property of forward progress? Or what are we to say, to take still more extreme types of music, about compositions renouncing tone altogether as a material in favor of sounds undefined or ill-defined in pitch, or in favor of various kinds of impulsive sounds. Here we may find a series or succession of audible events, to be sure, but often very little feeling of temporal progress or flow. Indeed the successive sonorities may seem instead to move backwards into the past, a process to which the sounds are subjected, not one which they generate. Before trying to account for the genesis and significance of musical motion in time, let us examine it with respect to its perceptual dimensions, since an analysis of such a kind will not only provide insight into tte basic organization of music, but will also serve as a guide to any explanatory hypothesis. A distinction can doubtless be made between the sheer forward propulsion of music and the presence of a logic of continuation: the first is composed of continuity plus some degree of inertia or insistence; the second is more a matter of consecution, of the degree of conviction or necessity with which phrases or parts of phrases follow one another. And we can perceive music as moving forward, whether languidly and passively or with determination, without the feeling of a logicality or necessity in the sequence of musical events or phrases, although to be sure, the reverse is not true-that the experience of logic can arise in music without some basis in temporal succession. These two types of temporal progression would seem to be grounded in a contrast of musical style, in the contrast, namely, between a continuous style and an articulated one, between a section of an Ockeghem mass, let us say, and a movement of an 18th-century symphony. But continuity and articulation in themselves do not give rise to propulsion and to necessary consecution. There is little propulsion in Debussy's Nuages; and the successive phrases of a song, for example, or its successive strophes, may succeed one another without any feeling of logical necessity. Additional