Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an account of music's expressive power that highlights the relation between music's temporal features and its affective attributes. It explains how the feeling of motion is a function of the operation that transforms the temporal succession of a work's heterogonous elements into meaningful, patterned complexes. The book focuses on music's temporal and affective features within a philosophical consideration of two competing conceptions of time. It explains how the conflict between a cosmological concept of time and phenomenological time gives rise to the enigma of time's ultimate unrepresentability. The book explores how Johann Sebastian Bach's music marks out a region of religious aesthetics. It takes up the question as to how music revalues time in response to time's inscrutable character. The book explains how music's communicability rests on the listener's capacity to draw patterned figures from successively sounding events.