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

by Natalie Hodges

“La Campanella” is written as a rondo, a form “in which the leading theme recurs between sections and then returns to complete the composition.” 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. That pattern of predictable return, that consistent cycling back, simultaneously constitutes the piece’s linear progression through time. It has the effect of changing and yet not, of bringing you back to where you started and transforming that music into something both new and familiar.

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 music, time is inseparable from sound itself. A piece of music is a multidimensional entity, a creation molded from time’s clay.

entrainment, the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat, “a perceived periodic pulse that listeners use to guide their movements and performers use to coordinate their actions.”

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.

a real biological advantage that increased their chances of survival. 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 study suggests that a cross-cultural or “universal” purpose of music was to synchronize group actions, because a bonded, cooperative group—on the hunt or on the move, learning to fight and gather and build in tandem—was more likely to outcompete a discombobulated one.

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

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

As far as Western music is concerned, that began to change around the eighth century C.E., when Roman Catholic clergy invented a notation system for the modal, single-voiced Gregorian chants sung in church. From that first system, invented for the purpose of preservation and dissemination of those early airs, grew the encompassing metagenre of classical music as we know it today, whose primary, unifying, and distinguishing trait is its literacy—“perhaps the West’s signal musical distinction,” as the historian and musicologist Richard Taruskin has put it.

The difference between memorized performance and improvisation, it turns out, lies in an aspect of the brain called the default-mode network (DMN), a sprawling system of functional connectivity between regions of the brain that, loosely put, modulates the many facets of the self.

During the scale and memory trials, these areas of Montero’s brain lit up with interconnectivity, as though her senses of time and space and memory were all talking to one another, working together to re-create these tasks that, together, they had been preprogrammed to execute. But each time the researchers asked Montero to switch to improvisation, the light of that interconnectivity was suddenly, substantially dimmed.

If the regions of the DMN, working together, represent a unified sense of self, upon which Montero draws when she is playing music she has learned in the past, the act of improvisation somehow disbands that cohesion, requires her to draw on something else.

The DMN—not its individual regions, but as a multimodal network of interaction—tends to quiet down when the brain is involved in a task that requires deep attention to something external. An improvised musical performance provides a perfect example.

The DMN is also the seat of conscious memory, responsible for remembering the past and anticipating the future. In the intense unfurling present of improvised performance, it makes sense that thoughts of those other spheres of time might, for the moment, be abandoned. And yet the study suggests that a deeper kind of memory and anticipation may be at work.

Montero’s, then, is a transcendent kind of muscle memory—not one to which her musicality is bound, but, rather, which she bends to her whim and will, memory that opens up an infinity of possibilities in the present.

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.”

That idea of an instantaneous, prescient memory—of remembering the future, as it were—has a strange, surprising corollary in the natural world, in the universe’s order of things. It’s called the path integral, and it occurs in the realm of quantum mechanics: the sphere of the uncertain and statistical, with its tensions and overlappings between the finite and infinite, form and void.

That a wave-particle intuits all the possible paths it could take through space and time, given the basic constraints on its movement—the time and position from which it starts, and that at which it ends—and then chooses one that is based on the sum of all those paths.

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.*

Similarly, when Montero improvises, it seems almost as though she is remembering the future, entraining to something that doesn’t yet exist. She intuits all the possibilities contained within a single theme, between its notes, inside its silences … and then picks one path to follow, plucks one shimmering thread from the tangle of possibilities and follows where it leads. The principle of least action manifests itself in her improvisations, then, not in that she plays what’s easiest; rather, that she plays what occurs to her to play, what comes as she lets herself drift along with time. She doesn’t think or resist; she just does, leaning into the predestiny of form.

The fact that systems, people, memories can be symmetrically translated in time doesn’t alter the fundamental asymmetry of time itself, whereby a known and immutable past plunges headlong into an uncertain future, one where we will be haunted both by what we have done, and what we have left undone.

The Chaconne is the fifth and final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, which itself is the second in his cycle of six sonatas and partitas for solo violin.

Bach’s Chaconne revolves in the conventional triple meter, with a deep emphasis on each second beat; but there is a terrible sorrow weighing it down, as though the music itself is dancing a heavy-hearted waltz, almost staggering with grief.

Stages implies a progress through time, gives the illusion of linearity—but this is not my experience of grief. Even when I listen all the way through to the end of the Chaconne, I don’t have any sense of having worked through the grief it makes me feel. The sadness is still there, as raw as it ever was. What I do have, or have had in that moment, is a complete experience (perhaps even embrace) of the feeling in all its myriad forms, its painful variations. I have let myself feel; I have let myself remember.

You don’t move on from loss so much as move away, further out in time. But in a sudden instant you can remember everything again; the past comes alive, and an entire chaconne is unleashed within the emotional arrest of that moment, a spiral of related memories and buried feeling.

To grieve is to experience these painfully expanded moments over and over again, often without warning … to think you’ve gotten away from the past only to awaken to it, to get the wind knocked out of you all over again, to feel the omnipresence of that loss.

The only way to keep the dance flowing in time is for each partner to intuit how the other will move, even if you don’t know exactly what you are intuiting: communion without direct communication, intimacy without knowledge; the simultaneous leaping of entangled minds.

the temporal structures of improvised music differ from the current of time that constitutes composed, prepracticed pieces, where you always have to be thinking downstream, remembering ahead, in a sense.

To improvise one must be wholly, almost ecstatically present, and reaffirm that presentness in each moment.

To improvise with others, then, is to experience something more than the infinite subjectivity of time: It is to know that those individual subjectivities can be unified. In order to move with your partner perfectly in time, you have to know you are both feeling time in the same way. In short, it’s entanglement: the certainty of simultaneity, the eternal act of creation in the infinite we are.

“Invierno Porteño,” or “Winter,” the last movement of Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. (The allusion is to Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons; Piazzolla, who helped incorporate tango into the classical canon, took snatches of Vivaldi’s themes and inverted and transposed and otherwise renovated them—the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed, after all.)

“Cafe 1930,” the second movement of Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango (which is a survey of tango’s evolution through the twentieth century, beginning in the bordellos of Buenos Aires and ending with an avant-garde concert d’aujourd’hui).

we didn’t need to know what would come next because it didn’t matter, whatever happened would be right; that we were free, creating time; indeed, that we didn’t exist in time, but, rather, time lived in us.

the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective, then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it. But isn’t it because time lives in us that we can shape it, sculpt it into phrases and cadences and giros and ochos; still it if not stop it, bend it if not vanquish

As for the dance itself, our brief timelessness, I cannot say how long it will last, cannot place it in time—because it is within the stillness of our close embrace that time, at last, ceases to matter.

And writing about time in music, in particular, opened up to me a world of scientific research that I had never known: In order to write credibly, I had to dig into the physics metaphors and biological responses that connect musical temporality to something larger and more fundamental about the human experience. Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other.

The discussions of music and science are holograms of a kind, encodings of experience and information that offer different projections for how to understand time from inside one world, which, in turn, might shed light on how time passes in another.

This is also what makes writing frightening, at least to my mind: the fact that it can change the past so effortlessly, and solidify that change into reality.