ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some temporal features of music and the debates about the nature and value of musical experience that they have engendered. In the course of constructing a definition of music, Jerrold Levinson claims that "music as people conceive it seems as essentially an art of time as it is an art of sound". A more likely strategy for anyone convinced of the necessity of temporal organization for music would surely be to reject these candidates for musical status on the grounds that they fail to meet the condition. Philosophers of music have disagreed about what is minimally required to account for our experience of rhythm and meter. Formalism – the view that understanding a musical work is primarily a matter of grasping relations between its far-flung parts – has dominated the study of "pure" musical works in the Western tradition for over a century.
