Introduction

Music does not necessarily hold a privileged relationship with the question of time. All of daily life shares with music the basic temporal structure that philosophers have puzzled over since the pre-Socratics. An unsympathetic interpretation would point out that ‘time’ in the discussion of the avant-garde represents a strategic intellectual posturing. This negative interpretation might point out that ‘time’ for these composers can often easily be reduced down to a simpler discussion about various musical elements within time. If there is one perspective that precedes and motivates these diverse theorizations on time, it would be Gisèle Brelet’s two-volume work Le Temps Musicale published in 1949. Brelet’s work was an encyclopedic critique of ideas on music and time. Brelet’s goal was to offer an aesthetic study of music from a philosophical perspective oriented on time, the first volume covering melody, harmony, and rhythm; the second volume organized around problems of form.