Abstract

Debates about the nature of ‘time’ permeated a staggering range of scientific and artistic endeavours in fin-de-siècle Europe. This paper attempts to trace conceptualisations of time in philosophical and psychological works by Bergson, Guyau, and Proust among others, through their counterparts in physical and mathematical discourses with the rise of Einstein’s special theory of relativity in early twentieth-century popular literature. Though the influence of philosophical and/or scientific notions of time in the visual arts has been a major focus of historical research to date, particularly in the fields of art history and philosophy of science, there is no seminal work exploring how similar questions about temporal subjectivity shaped articulations of time in musical modernism. How composers conceived of temporality is thus an area ripe for historical inquiry. Drawing upon personal correspondence as well as critical reviews of pieces by Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, and Olivier Messiaen, this paper combines approaches in cultural history and music theory to demonstrate how time was expressed in French classical music of the first half of the 20th century. It concludes that the treatment of time, imbued with philosophical and scientific understandings of temporality, was at the forefront of musical innovation during this period.