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Creative Time-Organization Versus Subsonic Noises

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Albert Mayr
Albert Mayr*
Affiliation:
Academy of Music, Florence
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Extract

Much has been written and said about music's time, much less— at least in recent epochs—about time's music. Today this most subtle, yet most powerful form of music finds fewer and fewer listeners. It has become, in fact, harder and harder to listen to. The “congruent melodies,” i.e. “the rhythms of times which were given to us to alleviate our labors” (as the 13th-century music theorist had put it) have long since been silenced and drowned by subsonic noises.* In its organization of time, Western civilization has, to an appallingly large extent, replaced rhythmic aliveness with abstract measures, reducing it to a “functional mechanism” (Baudrillard 1974). The main tools by which these measures are set, the clock as we know it and the modern calendar, are obviously, taken as such, remarkable achievements, but in their impact on our lives they are not so much companions enabling us to be “in harmony with things at the right moment” (see the Chinese shih, Larre 1976) as they are hostile guardians “watching our steps.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 31 , Issue 122 , May 1983 , pp. 45 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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