ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how music's expressive character and temporal features are a function of the operation that draws together successive tones, harmonic sonorities, and rhythmic impulses. Representations of temporal movement in music and even its opposite—temporal stasis—are functions of the operation that transforms successively sounding events into temporally meaningful expressions. The teleological thrust so widely attributed to tonal music is predicated on the way that successive thematic and harmonic elements contribute to a passage's or a work's formation. Even the cyclic recurrence of repeating patterns in minimalist repetitive music exploits the recurring succession of these cyclically repeating patterns to annihilate any sense of forward-directed movement. By setting musical aesthetics on a scientific footing, Eduard Hanslick intended to distance himself from romantic aesthetics and its outworn doctrine of expression. The sense of inner appropriateness that Hanslick inadvertently placed at the center of his aesthetics marks a critical turning point in the discussion of music's temporal features and affective attributes.
