Music, Time, and Its Other : Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music’s affective power. Taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage relates music’s power of expression to the disproportion between our temporally finite existence and eternity. By showing how works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass give voice to time’s deficiency in relation to the nonbeing of time, Savage sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles played by judgment and imagination.

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music’s affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music’s power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.