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Raymond Monelle observes the belief that there are simultaneously plural cultural temporalities, which musical temporalities exemplify. This is distinguished from the impression of natural time, as a flow that is uniform and singular.

One could hardly exaggerate the importance of temporality – cultural time – in musical decisions, because music is predominantly an art of time. Although we live in the “monochronic” west, where time is imagined to be uniform and linear, we nevertheless possess a musical culture that reflects several forms of temporality.

It is important to distinguish time from temporality. These two aspects, the first natural and the second cultural, have quite different functions in music as well as in perception. Natural or “objective” time is a condition of life, a “transcendent form” in the expression of Kant. It is continuous and irreversible, the present always poised between a past and a future…Apparently, natural time flows at a uniform pace in one direction and penetrates all that occupies it…It is the time in which events can be placed, the tabula rosa on which the temporal forms of life are written.

It is argued nowadays that natural time is itself a cultural convention…A musical writer confesses that natural time is “little more than a social convention agreed to for practical reasons” (Kramer 1988, p.5)…Nevertheless, for ordinary purposes we base our serialities on a conception of linear and uniform time. But it is impossible to live in natural time; in order to perform any of the ordinary functions of daily life, we must somehow grasp time imaginatively, either in the present or in the longer scope…

The unifying imagination which enables us to grasp time is furnished by culture. As was realized by Henri Bergson, our freedom and our power to act are founded in imagined or experienced time, not in natural time. But different cultures furnish different times, and culture normally offers several simultaneous times. Every anthropologist stresses this, but nevertheless one sometimes hears of “monochronicity.” Modern western culture is apparently governed by one time alone, the time of the clock…

If we adopt “temporality” as the term for cultural time, then we are obliged to make a further distinction. Sign systems may proceed in time; however, it is not necessarily the case that the levels of content and expression acknowledge the same temporality, or that pertinent juncture occurs correspondingly on the two levels. In other words, the levels of content and expression may be temporally nonconformal…Language and music are temporal signs, of course, but the time within which they are structured is not necessarily connected to the time they may mean.

For example, most linguistic and musical syntagms in traditional styles end with closure, the grammatical completion of the phrase…Of course, closure is not the only temporal feature permeating linguistic syntax and semantics. Yet the condition of music is even more complicated. As in language, there is a temporality of syntactic structure. But theorists have studied this sort of time, in its typical forms of meter, rhythm, and phrasing, with such profound attention that we forget that music can also signify time. There is a temporality of the signified, as well as a temporality of the signifier.

Unlike language, music usually signifies indexically, and every temporal feature of its syntax is available to signify some temporal meaning. We are apt to find often in music…that syntactic features acquire semantic load, by indexicality. But musical syntax does not necessarily carry semantic weight; the failure to distinguish syntactic and semantic temporality has led to much confusion in the temporal theory of music.

Monelle, Raymond. 2000. The sense of music: Semiotic essays. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Alex Pasternack describes how timekeeping is the measurement of the passage of a second, which equates to how long it takes for a certain amount of radiation to be given off by a cesium atom in the universe.

The primary aim of timekeeping is to measure the passage of a second. To be precise, that is equivalent to the amount of time it takes for the hyperfine radiation given off by a cesium-133 atom at its ground state as it transitions between energy levels, and its electrons oscillate exactly 9,192,631,770 times.

These days, counting a second depends upon firing a microwave beam at one of these cesium atoms and counting the effect on its electrons. At that scale, the slightest aberration can knock a clock off its count. And then there are the effects of gravity, which Einstein’s theory of special relativity showed can shift the pace of time.

“At the nanosecond level—a billionth of a second—every clock has its own personality,” Matsakis wrote in an email. Each clock will tick faster or slower at certain times, and generally, scientists can correct for this using software. The trickier part is understanding the rate–sometimes sudden, sometimes slow—at which a clock’s ticking may be changing. “We must be on the lookout for deviations from the predicted behavior, and be sure to predict well.”…

“Once I had this definition of time, that it’s a coordinate that you can measure the evolution of in a closed system,” Matsakis said. “Now, I think of time as something that, stripped down to its essence, is a measure of interactions,” an idea based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, which pins time and space to the relative motion of objects. “It’s an intriguing thought: if you don’t have interactions, time is irrelevant.”

He offers an example that begins at the end of time. “One way that time could stop is if the universe could reach a cold death. If our universe expands forever, and the suns die out, and they become black holes which evaporate over eons, what’s left is a rarefied gas, a cold gas that’s uniform across the universe. With everything the same, how can you have time? There’d be nothing to measure time. Time would stop, and not with a bang. It would just peter out.”

The relative interactions that govern the movement of time explain why events in the universe don’t easily fit along a timeline. “Imagine that people witness Al Capone robbing a bank in 1930,” he said. “Then, a supernova a thousand light-years away is observed somewhere on Earth in 1987. Did the star explode first, or was the bank robbery first? It depends on the observer.”

In an email later, I mentioned Nieztsche’s proposal of eternal return. Matsakis shot back: “It is very hard to define fundamental things. I haven’t tried to define ‘place.’ Socrates spent years trying to define justice. Maybe they were right about him corrupting the youth.”

It was Aristotle’s contemporaries who first mastered the calculation of the passage of time, or chronos, and it was they who also recognized another kind of time, kairos—the moments that define our pleasures and our pains and our deepest feelings and thoughts.In other words, the kind of time that can’t be metered by any clock.

Tensions linger between this sense of “time,” which Henri Bergson would later describe as “duration,” and the tick-tocks of “the time” overseen by the timekeepers. Now more than ever before, argues Douglas Rushkoff in Present Shock, distractions keep the latter version of time in a kind of tug of war with the former.

“We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day,” Rushkoff told David Pescovitz last year, “But a digital second is less a part of a greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.” The rush of the present and its seemingly infinite, hyperlinked possibilities means “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.”

But according to time, not everything is happening at once, as Wheeler joked. Could the Master Clock, I wondered, with its steady, orderly pace, remind us that the world isn’t moving any faster?

But not even this ticking will be the same in the future. With new clocks, the way that time is counted will change. And in time, the definitions of time will change too, if not the questions that endlessly circle it.

“What I tell people is, I can’t tell you what time is,” Matsakis said, “but I can tell you what a second is” (Pasternack 2014).

Pasternack, Alex. 2014. “How the master clock sets the time for the world.” Motherboard, November 7, 2014. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ 3dkd5b/demetrios-matsakis-and-the-master-clock

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Lewis Mumford posits that mechanical time and organic time are polarised, whereby the former inadequately represents the latter. Mechanical, mathematical time is comprised of separate, superposable, identical instants. Conversely, organic time states are cumulative, and qualitatively differential, in the way that organic functions change tempo.

In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood and action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. The shepherd measures from the time the ewes lambed; the farmer measure back to the day of sowing or forward to the harvest: if growth has it own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion and the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time – what Bergson calls duration – is cumulative in its effects. Though mechanical time can, in a sense, be speeded up or run backward, like the hands of a clock or the images of a moving picture, organic time moves in only one direction – through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death – and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to he born (Mumford 1934, 15-16).

Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and civilization. New York: Harcourt.