One of the many paradoxes in the life of a music scholar is that music is said to be the quintessentialtemporalart form, whereas the far greater portion of the theoretical and analytical literature on art music deals withpitchindependently of temporal factors. Curricula in conservatories of music and university music departments have subjects such as harmony, counterpoint and ear training, with a focus on pitch intervals and chords, but it is hard to find a course on tempo, metre and rhythm. The roots of this disparity go back at least to the eighteenth century. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s and...

Artworks, both musical and non-musical, have many properties—a sculpture may have a certain size and mass, which makes it a good paperweight; a piece of music may have a soothing effect which is therapeutically useful, and so on—but these properties are not usually thought of as aesthetically relevant. What are the aesthetically relevant properties of a musical artwork? An aesthetically relevant property is one which appertains to our experience, understanding, and critical appreciation of an artwork qua artwork—that is, music as music, and not music as sleep-aid.

To sort aesthetically relevant from aesthetically non-relevant properties of an...

In his 1944 publicationTechnique de mon langage musical, Olivier Messiaen initially studied rhythm, then pitch. This seems to be an inversion of the usual approach in Western music theory since most theories until then were primarily based on considerations related to pitch-organization, be it melody, phrase-structure or harmony. For Messiaen, rhythm reached a degree of independence that allowed the consideration of this dimension on its own, even if in the first chapter, ‘Charme des impossibilités et rapport des différentes matières’, it is precisely the relationship between the dimensions of pitch and rhythm on which Messiaen focussed. Taking as examples...

John Cage might have said, “Time is time,” as he did say, “Sounds are sounds.” Of course, what he really said is: “Before studying music, men are men and sounds are sounds…”¹ He was riffing on what he said Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki said:

Dr. Suzuki said: “Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen things become confused: one doesn’t know exactly what is what and which is which. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains.”²

So, as Jacques Lacan said, on television: “I always speak the truth. Never the whole truth, because...

There is a certain narrative construction of Western musical history, concerning development of the composer-performer relationship and the concomitant evolution of musical notation, which is familiar and at least tacitly accepted by many. This narrative goes roughly as follows: in the Middle Ages and to a lesser extent to the Renaissance, musical scores provided only a bare outline of the music, with much to be filled in by the performer or performers, who freely improvising within conventions which were for the most part communicated verbally and were highly specific to region or locality. By the Baroque Era, composers had become...