A video of the installation "time puddles" and different pieces of music are presented together in a video installtion. Therefore, some reflections on the role of time in music.
Music is a time medium par excellence. Like everything else in time, a piece of music develops and follows its own time structure. A certain tone is not supposed to sound at 21°:03':12" and be replaced by another tone at 21°:03':14". Although filled with (proper) time, music is paradoxically "timeless" for us. The declared anti-thesis, the piece 4'33" by J. Cage:
While 4 minutes and 33 seconds pass on the clock, not a single note is heard. This piece of music by the "sound organiser" has no proper time, but only foreign time; with this absolute reversal of the understanding of music that has been valid since time immemorial, it is a negation of music.
The proper time of music manifests itself through melody, harmony, and above all through rhythm, of which even archaic cultures, of which even every child, without having the concept, "knows".
Even the unborn child "hears" the mother's heartbeat. But even later, humans live with the rhythm, usually without consciously perceiving it. Much (everything?) recurs in the same or similar way. Rhythm and periodicity belong to the primordial experience of time.
The fact that we perceive a melody, a rhythm, that we perceive music as music and not as a punctual noise, is due to our ability to synthesise individual events (e.g. tones) into a now-form. A melody only survives the now because we have memory, holding on to what has just passed in the present as duration. Like many other experienced and lived times, the proper time of music is not compatible with an understanding of time according to which an atomically small point of now wanders into the future and leaves the past behind
Nevertheless, there is a piece of music in which the proper time of music is reduced to this atomic now. The piano composition "Music of Changes", again by J. Cage, has no tempo, no beat, no rhythm, no melody, nothing to hold on to as past, nothing to expect as future. What manifests itself as music (pauses, lengths, pitches, tone clusters, etc.) is determined by flipping three coins several times, i.e. exclusively by chance. If one wants to transfigure this positively, then a state is achieved in the here and now in which one does not "long for" what is coming and does not "dwell on" what is past, as a temporary revolt against or escape from time.
One can also see it differently: Such an "experience of time" (without past, without future, thus actually without time) would have to lead to neurosis, would probably not be compatible with our life at all.
From a completely different, not simply opposite understanding of time, music can and is experienced as "outside of time": our modes of time then flow into each other without the ideas of past, present and future being suspended. Rather, they are suspended in an Other.
Already the dissolution of any kind of impulse sequence in favour of "standing sounds" in the music of the Renaissance leads us out of time. And many a person had his rendez-vous with "eternity", e.g. at the sound of the head theme of Schubert's B-flat major sonata, which can be grasped neither conceptually nor imaginatively, but which perhaps opens the door to art - for a little, a tiny moment?
But even without rendez-vous: wouldn't music, one might ask, be the paradigm par excellence for "fulfilled time", which is characterised by the "transition" in which both passing and genesis are together, the transition which, according to Gadamer, is ultimately time ?
By exposing parts of the (original) puddles of time and music together, the video installation relates, among other things, a symbol of "vulgar", i.e. physical and biological time, thus also our everyday time, and the experience of timelessness (or of moments of eternity?).
Mimesis of time ?
*Translation: William Tobin and deepL.com