Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time

by Natalie Hodges

One hypothesis holds that the wave represents a multiplicity of potential locations for the particle at a given moment in time, and in a given moment the particle inhabits all of those at once. Somehow, though, it is the act of recording that forces the atom to fix on a single path.

In the act of recording, writing, remembering, we chart our stories onto a particular path—one way, perhaps, that from our limited human perspective we can come to terms with the infinity of past paths not taken.

Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.

If all is truly said and done, if there is to be no more playing and the rest really is silence, why, then, does the past insist on returning in theme and aching variation, offering itself for memory and reinterpretation?

It didn’t matter what it was: Once my mind had sentenced a passage to execution—or rather, to my failure to execute it—that particular spot in the piece was done for. This was the only thing I could be sure of, going into that performance: where and when I was going to have my big botch.

Rondos have the mesmerizing effect of moving you linearly and circularly through time, at the same time: By progressing from theme to theme through the development sections, the rondo consistently brings you around and back again to the music with which you began.

I felt at the same time how each section engendered the next, how they progressed into and referred back to and complicated one another; and how, in always circling back to the theme, they shaped a globe of time, a sphere of sound.

Why is it that one’s sense of time, so supple inside the music itself, seizes up and cracks beneath an audience’s expectant gaze (or as soon as one becomes aware of that gaze, that expectation)?

Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events.

Even at the level of pitch, which is really the speed of a given sound wave’s oscillation, we are really hearing the rhythmic demarcation of time, a tiny heart whirring at a beat of x cycles per second.

Yet pattern is pattern, and the music of all cultures, each with its own unique rules to be followed and broken, both weaves and rends the tapestry of audible time.

There’s more to musical time than the ticking by of a beat, just the way the perceived length of an hour is determined less by the passage of sixty minutes than by what happens to us within those minutes.

When it is sculpted into music—tinkered into rhythms, colored by harmonic intensity, and buoyed or burdened by human emotion—time somehow becomes plastic and malleable, expandable and contractible. There’s a term for that interplay of stretch and compression: rubato, literally the “robbing of time.”

In other words, humans don’t just hear beats—we feel beats, internalizing them in our bodies and using our bodies to express their time.

In other words, our motor coordination affects our ability to keep in time as much as our sense of time affects our motor coordination. Rhythm engenders movement, and movement in turn becomes rhythm.

Knowing what’s to come—and, more importantly, feeling secure in that knowledge—allows you to let go and focus intensely on communicating, on keeping the piece’s time and yet making its expression feel spontaneous.

Performance anxiety has been shown to profoundly affect the motor-planning regions of the brain, the same cortexes responsible for coordinating the body’s response to a beat in ASAP.

The performers’ nerves, in other words, disrupted the feeling of the music as a natural flow in time, both for them and for the listeners.

Speech—which, like music, connects sounds in time to express emotion and create meaning—has its own performed element, predictive yet improvisatory: You think as you speak, your words have to keep up with your thoughts in time. It’s a stunning capability, automatic and instinctive and miraculous.

No matter how well I know the music, the certainty that I will mess up checkmates any musical conviction I have, even about a piece I know inside and out. It doesn’t always happen; but when it does, there is nothing I can do to stop it.

The music wants to flow, but my ego wants to stop all the clocks: As much as it demands to be the center of attention, it flies into a panic at the thought of everyone looking at it, a frightened demon-child that doesn’t know what it wants yet clamors to have its way.

Performance embodies the paradox of losing yourself and yet asserting yourself, the way an actor takes the stage in order to become someone else entirely (or, perhaps, how he becomes someone else entirely in order to take the stage).

Performance anxiety is, in part, the anxiety of re-creation, inherent in any temporal art (or sport, for that matter); and for me the anxiety of re-creation is the fear of losing what I once had.

The certainty that I had set myself an impossible task would make me tense up—and that’s when perfection was more likely to slip through my fingers.

The thought I’ve never been able to get past, the thought that trips me up every time, is: Just because you did this before doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it now, in front of all of them.

During the performance, they had endeavored to entrain themselves to the patterns of not only their own parts but mine, too, to anticipate what help I would need and preemptively provide it.

The uncanny ability to entrain one’s own body to a beat translates into the equally uncanny ability to sync one’s movement with the movement of others.

The desire to make music is as much a desire to assert the individual self as to connect with others.

That is what is at stake in performance: nothing more or less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them.

Some people get to experience a timeless, out-of-body, Nike-ad moment of transcendence when they perform, in which they relinquish their anxiety and forget the audience and trust their preparation and Just Do It. I imagine such moments to be like a globe of time, blown glass expanding.… But the shattering reality is that, for me, it has never happened that way.

Time didn’t dissolve in a triumphal moment of transcendence, but neither did it come to a halt because I’d seized up. Instead, I felt myself moving along with

Every moment was constantly being added to the next; neither past nor future existed, only a continuous present. I had this time, it belonged to me, it always would.

He is a consummate improviser, and was always encouraging me to try: “Just relax!Just have fun! It doesn’t matter if you mess up.”

While classical music is about repeating, analyzing, controlling, and re-creating, improvisation necessitates a kind of surrender to time itself.

Music itself begins with improvisation. Wayne Shorter, the American jazz saxophonist and composer, famously quipped that, fundamentally, “composition is just improvisation slowed down.”

By this argument, it was a kind of cultural performance anxiety at large that led musicians to turn away from improvisation and toward re-creation—of the styles of famous teachers, performers, and, later, recordings—as the holy grail of classical performance.

To some extent every performance involves elements of improvisation, although its degree varies according to period and place, and to some extent every improvisation rests on a series of conventions or implicit rules.”

The model classical performer is ultraprepared and yet infinitely spontaneous, the ideal performance improvisatory but never improvised.

I dreaded never making something tangible; I was afraid of the way the music passed away, that I held it for one moment only to realize it was gone.

Improvisation seemed to me a different, more frightening thing entirely, because the very substance of the music—here inseparable from the act of performance itself, unlike a score—belongs only to the moment of its creation and therefore must die in that moment also.

The Montero study corroborates previous analyses of improvising brains, mainly those of jazz performers, which found that the “decreased self-awareness and feelings of control” that constitute a flow state are “associated with decreased activity within regions of the default-mode network.”

The improvisation task in Montero’s trial, the researchers found, resulted in decreased connectivity between the regions of the DMN overall—a momentary fracturing of the self, a temporary dissolving of its margins consistent with Montero’s assertion that she “gets out of the way” when she improvises, that she loses herself in the present, that she turns on the tap and lets the music flow.

Reading the study results reminded me of Saint Augustine’s idea of memoria, put forth in Book X of his Confessions: that some things must have been there in his memory “even before I learnt them,” but “remote and pushed into the background, as if in most secret caverns”;

Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows.”

Thus it is as though the particle, in the singular instant when it commences its motion, intuits every path it could take and then sets off along the one it is destined to take.*

“So it was almost as though music was a language that didn’t require a second language to describe it,” McElroy said. “It just was.” Montero smiled. “Yeah, exactly. It always was. It always was.”

The knowledge that anything could happen pulls against the deep convicted sense that it has to be this way only; from within the infinite dark parameters the choosing of this one true thing.

In physics, our ability to remember the past but not the future has a name: the “arrow of time,” famously described by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

Thus the direction in which we remember our lives is the direction in which entropy increases; every point in our psychological past corresponds, always, to a time when the universe, in its entirety, was more ordered than it is now.

An act of improvisation is not only irreversible but unrepeatable; once it’s been played, the music cannot exist in the same way again. This seems particularly true when it is juxtaposed against the canon of precomposed classical music, whose very existence seems constructed to defy entropy, to enclose time and seal it off so that it cannot trickle linearly away, to ensure that we remember.