part one

As each one of us experiences time in his/her/its own life and within any discrete medium, 1 like music or any other art, it seems that (recently?) within the field of this medium, authors often invest little time and efforts in recognizing that time has not only passed but also that it has somehow brought experiences to the fore. Experiences which have inevitably 2 marked both the single junctures in the lives of many persons 3 and many objects, and in the development of theoretical thoughts, models and practices, and salient signs and forms within a general anthropological idea of culture. 4

Though authors deal with time inside their media, 5 they mostly deal with a linear idea of time, a "quantity" of time, and with time as a vectorial element, 6 treating it just as a "white" component both of the structures and the experiences derived from those structures. 7 It is not inaccurate to say (I think), that it is substantially rare to find authors who analyze time in something else than a linear unfolding. 8 This is mostly due to the practical experiential needs, the superficial perception of "facts", where time, though contingent to the unfolding itself, is not considered as a qualitatively validating nucleus, but as a "metrical" signal. 9 Contextually, however, authors tend to treat time 10 just like a derivational factor within an inscrutable or fatalistic or finalistic (or whatever else) view of natural history, with cultural evolutions somehow relegated to a component side. They treat time as a bunch of memorial facts, which they may or may not adhere to, which they can or cannot discriminate against their ideal backgrounds. Memorial facts consequently drifting into principles and rules; and in their drifting they cohere with the notion of time itself.
Throughout the centuries within the reach of our observation, we see time (historical time) simply taken as groundwork for the notion of past, 11 or as a groundwork and platform for ideological "change" within the present or future; as a positive ("positivistic") or negative ("nihilistic") parameter to act with or to react against. This reduced idea of time has devoured the parallel or variously stratified differentiated notions of time, as devised within the many circumstantial spheres of local cultural galaxies: in cyclical seasonal patternings, in the conspicuous reversibility within the periodic character of biologic morphogenesis, 12 in the heterogeneous construction of "time" within oral narrative structures, and so on. This reduced and only quantitative idea of time has been progressively institutionalized within written codified history as a single developmental pattern, 13 and as each "generation" moves on along the path of the reproduction loop, 14 time has been secondarily considered either as a hindrance or as an outfit to the "generation" motion itself.

So time. It is so rare to see someone taking into some systematic consideration time as a non-linear evolutionary model, 15 as a multifarious unfolding, without falling prey to some extra-perceptual reaction to the consumed ideas of linear time within art-works. 16 These reactions often mistook linear time with continuity and tried to act independently from it by excluding continuity from their works or bowing to a simplified and quantitative idea of it. 17 Actually they only pay tribute to the dogma of time as linear chain of events.

While we observe authors acting with or reacting against previous authors, models, theories, practices, even when these actions or reactions are taken for granted by them or just considered as a form of respect for time, 18 we also see that these actions or reactions mostly remain within a relationship with time as a form of self-contained legitimation. 19 What we can easily observe, especially since time has been digested by western cultures as another marketable pattern, is that authors seem to deal with a limited amount of time 20 in many aspects of their practical experiences. 21 A limited amount of time both as a way to approach solutions to problems, 22 and as a way to observe past experiences, bygone practices and models that have led to where they are working into, i.e. to some of their funding paradigms, just as chain-steps in a "cumulative" idea of evolution, notwithstanding their own consciousness of the processes behind that. This legitimation of time as chain of events, has of course its negative, in all those mystical approaches to time and structure, trying to evaluate some form of golden age, attributing this to one or another "classical" paradigm within "History" 23 and expanding this to an eternal and immutable form. 24 This "negative" of time has been part of the modern music as well, especially in its "irrationalistic" post-expressionist currents and all those exotic (and esoteric) suggestions within them. 25

No culture persists without the acknowledgment of some legacy. A legacy of some specific past, some specific event in the past, or a dynamic elaboration of these within some "mnemonic" as well as structural medium, as oral literatures show us. 26 And no culture, as comparative anthropology seems to teach us, no culture has ever denied having some kind of past. 27 Moreover a culture is its past and present and future. 28 But past, time, is not a single linear evolutionary model; western cultures with their teleological formal character, think to recognize it as a unique model. Time is not History. We do not know, we do not deal with History. This, the conceptual category of History, is a superimposed model over our own real perception of time. 29 It is a product of historiography, but it is a model to explain world evolution, and though a western conceptual category it is all the same a funding category also in other cultures, 30 and as such it is a basic cultural category. But it is a category, it is a heuristic model to explain what we experience, and to treat it, one way or another, as a material knowledge we can deal with, as a space where we can place our own experiential practices (and theories). But there is no History as such. We all experience our single history, both as singles and as cultures, we all experience our own historical evolution, our singular unfolding as a unique pattern. At the same time, we experience history of relations, relational history, which intermingles with our own historical unfolding, yet it is a separate "continuity". All the more, within these basically homogeneous patterns, there are a lot of microfactual "unstable" times, 31 we perceive as parts and as a whole. Time, thus, is Histories, a multilevel and non-linear dynamics comprising all the possible (even some probable) historical unfoldings, placed within a space we do not deal with, directly speaking.

Time. I have mostly decided to contain my discourse within the range of "western cultures", as this definitely heuristic choice can be useful to underline the primary source of these historical paths. And even if this is not an absolute approach, 32 this limitation can only emphasize the peculiarities of the many amnemonic patterns in music practice and theory.33

These patterns now seem to be legal and all the more experienced as a value. They translate into quantity, into amounts of limited time. 34 And this small amount of time translates into a small amount of memory, not so much in the pure factual linearity, but more or especially in the idea of memory itself and in the discourse about memory as such. 35





notes:
1 any discrete cultural phenomenon. back
2 and I dare say irreversibly, if circumstances wouldn't confute me... back
3 authors, listeners and uninvolved persons. back
4 not necessarily connected to one or another specific world area and "socio-culture." back
5 be it music, sculpture or any other form. back
6 somehow inevitably, we must admit, due to the "natural" conventions of the perceptual "education." back
7 when they try to "colour" it, they mostly do it through literary tools or psychological agents.back
8 and in something else than a "quantity". «After all that, you should not think that a linear structure be a necessity to carry or store up the information (more exactly, the meaning)» Thom, Stabilità Strutturale e Morfogenesi, p. 161. See also for more options, time seen as part of the inner state of a system and time as operator in Prigogine/Stengers, Order Out of Chaos. back
9 tempo, duration, period... back
10 here meant as historical time. back
11 hence present and future, for the specific "socio-cultural" notion of time embedded in the Indoeuropean linguistic patterns. back
12 see Thom, Stabilità Strutturale e Morfogenesi, p. 314. back
13 linear and badly finalistic as implied in "teleologies" (Christian, Marxist, Liberalist etc.). back
14 see Thom, Stabilità Strutturale e Morfogenesi, pp. 335-336. back
15 unsystematic experiential consideration of time as "non-linear," as a multi-channel continuum, is simply part of the many historical times within single cultures (non-institutionalized forms of cultures, both within the western world and other "higher civilizations," and within 'native' cultures in the world). «Every complex being is constituted by a plurality of times, each one of these connected to the others by subtle and multiple articulations» Prigogine/Stengers, La Nuova Alleanza, p. 274. back
16 without falling prey to oversymbolic and indifferentistic reversions. back
17 also at the macrocompositional stage. back
18 i.e. for "past", which is not, as this form of "memorial" practice is closer to "pastiche" and transcription, than to any "condolence, elegy, praise." back
19 resorting to time as referential sign. back
20 again a "quantity" of time. back
21 and theoretical as well, since no practice exists outside some theoretical framework, practice itself containing it. back
22 answers to more or less fundamental questions within the work. back
23 and Geography, of course. For someone even outside history, with conceptual lines arriving up to historiographic irrationalism (see e.g. Oswald Spengler or Franz Altheim ideas about decadence and history as universal organic evolutions). back
24 some kind of Aristotelian "prime motor." back
25 the ever present chinoiserie of many composers (some time being "japonaiserie" like in Scelsi's Canti del Capricorno (1962-72), or the many 'indianerie' of La Monte Young, see e.g. The Well-Tuned Piano (1964); and then Cage, probably the "first" and most devoted to suggestions like these, in general). back
26 also space (and place names) has an alike role. See for Athabaskan cultures Cruikshank, Getting the Words Right. back
27 though elaborated, re-invested with new forms and signs, even somehow anticipated... back
28 provided these categories are the only possible ones, which I doubt, as at least comparative linguistics demonstrates. back
29 a perception, by now mostly obliterated by the structure of conventionalisms. back
30 with all the "obvious" structural and formal differences. back
31 the single events and the relational events, as discontinuities of the time-field. back
32 and it cannot be, because cultures do not develop in isolation, whatever some anthropology or linguistic school thinks about. back
33 wherever theory is explicitly understood or simply systematically conveyed. back
34 without entering "theological" questions, eternity is an amount of time, and a limited one. back
35 the quality of memory is a result of the quality of time implied. back