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Reflection: Music and Eternity (rev. 5/26/13)

Music is often considered one of the most temporal—if not the most temporal—of the arts. Music unfolds in time and can only be experienced sequentially. Musical notation is an attempt to fix or capture that temporality, to render it graphically visual and reproducible. Yet, although we can take in a page of music at a single glance, we still need to hear or perform the piece in real time. Moreover, notated musics are a relatively small portion of all the musics that have existed or exist in the world today. Although temporality and eternity are clearly not the same concepts, it is perhaps not surprising that creators of music have associated the two, since temporality extended can become eternity. Musicians have long sought to reflect ideas of eternity, both within the structural processes of music and in relation to the kinds of extra-musical ideas (such as texts and images) often associated with music. The topic of music and eternity calls for a cross-cultural, global approach, since these concepts are at play in many traditions. In this brief essay, I will deal only with Western art music, the tradition with which I am most familiar. I will focus on five pieces created across two and a half centuries that I believe exemplify (but by no means exhaust) the ways composers have sought to convey or at least engage with the idea of eternity in music. The composers are