The task I have set myself in the following pages is the examination of certain problems concerning time in music from a phenomenological standpoint. Husserl's treatment of time carries on from that of Hume and Kant in the sense that, like them, he sees that our awareness is not merely successive. There is something in the very structure of consciousness which enables us to go beyond the moment, to stretch the span of the “now.” Without this capacity there would for us be no such thing as unity, identity and continuity of perceptual objects. It was with our awareness of ordinary sensible objects that Hume's and Kant's epistemology was mostly concerned. Moreover their analysis continued the stress on visual awareness characteristic of the western tradition. Kant's step forward as far as his analysis of time was concerned was to see time as the formal structure of all our experience. All that we can ever experience is seen through the lens of time. Kant, however, was equally concerned to show how our temporal consciousness entered into the constitution of the real world. He encounters difficulties on this score in so far as temporality is built into the structure not only of our experiences which claim to be objective but also into that of our merely subjective awareness. The problem of “reality” does not arise for Husserl in that the phenomenological method itself explicitly excludes this consideration. He is at one with Kant, however, in treating temporality in terms of the structure of our consciousness and, like Kant, insists on the importance of retention in perception. He goes on to specify that temporality is in common the form for not only perception but for phantasy, imagination, memory and recollection as well.