Basic questions

1. Basic questions • Does music exist in time or does time exist in music? • How does music structure time, and how does time structure music? • What different types of time are experienced during the listening process? • Is the temporal structure in the music, in the performance, or in the listening?

2. Types of time • Absolute time • real time of the perfomance • clock time of a soundfile • social time of concerts • biological time of the listener • Musical time • directed time: goal-oriented • gestural time: upbeats, endings and beginings • Durational time: proportions and perceived length • Vertical time: the extended now

3. For most of us, there is only the unattendedMoment, the moment of in and out of time.The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightningOr the waterfall, or music heard so deeplyThat it is not heard at all, but you are the musicWhile the music lasts. T.S.Elliot

4. Soundbytes • Arve Henriksen: White Gravel (2’12) • Olivier Messiaen: Regard XVI • How do we experience time in these excerpts? • What forces contribute to our sense of time here? • What is characteristic about the development of each piece?

5. Ingredients of Musical Time • Directivity • expectation, fulfilment, predictability; achievement, deferral or denial of goals • Continuity • succession and interruption of the order of events; discontinuity • Linear time • created when earlier events imply later ones, and later ones are consequences of earlier ones. Linear time is processive. • Nonlinear time • represents the consistent and immutable principles in any piece or section, which may be revealed gradually, but do not develop from earlier events or tendencies. Nonlinear time is nonprocessive.

6. Linearity • progression • motion and change • time becomes • timing of events is crucial • left brain hears sequences • horizontal listening Nonlinearity • consistency • stasis and persistence • time is • presence is more important than position • right brain creates patterns • cumulative listening

7. Research project • “Improvisation – Interaction – Composition: exploring feedback-systems as a compositional model”. • research models that describe the interaction between improvisers and composers • develop techniques for the creative exploration of this interaction • apply this knowledge to artistic co-operations, resulting in musical works. Peter Tornquist