ABSTRACT
The music of the fin-de-siècle (roughly 1890-1920) has most often been treated as either post/late-Romantic, or as antecedent to 20th-century “contemporary” music. Nevertheless, this music has features that make it deserving of independent historical treatment which can benefit from a consideration of the overall cultural context. The following discussion will show that some of these features are related to a changed experience of time. This makes them relevant to cognitive studies, even though they are not investigated empirically, but rather with the tools of cultural analysis. The results enjoy the support of philosophical writings of the period, and a wide range of other contemporary cultural phenomena. Due to shortage of space, the latter are mentioned here only in brief 1 . Forthe same reason I shall not dwell at length on the analogies between issues of fin-de-siècle philosophy, discussed below, and many recurrent themes and dilemmas of more recent cognitive science, though undoubtedly they are conspicuous 2 . The main task of this paper is to discuss the experience of time as emerging in the music of the period. Before embarking on this, however, several aspects of time organisation that are perhaps so obvious that they are taken for granted, need to be revisited.
