Jacob Parker

Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dancigers, Mark

Area of Concentration

Music

Abstract

In the context of experiencing a piece of art, time splits into two distinct phenomena: gestural and literal time. While literal time passes evenly as seconds and minutes, gestural time is experienced subjectively. Gestural time is the way we distinguish the beginning from the middle, or the way time seems to stand still in a moment of deep focus or fly by on an afternoon at the beach. As such, music has taken for granted that both gestural and literal time be experienced linearly, each moment following the next, for the better part of the past millennia or more in the West. In developing this as a didactic theory I explain the idea and present it with examples pulled from Western Art Music. In these examples I analyse how the idea of nonlinear and discontinuous temporalities factor into the meaning, the structure of the music, and intertextual information of the music as a reference for composers interested in harnessing this idea in a coherent musical form.

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