p. 1—this draft © 2014 Lawrence M. Zbikowski Musical Time, Embodied and Reflected Lawrence M. Zbikowski University of Chicago, Department of Music [this is a draft of a contribution to for Music in Time: Phenomenology, Perception, Performance, Harvard University Press, which is presently under review] To speak of time, in any substantive way, is to court madness. And our purchase on the slippery concepts through which we would grasp time is, if anything, made less secure by differences among our phenomenal experiences of time. There is the present, the time we occupy, which we use to orient ourselves within the world and from which all our journeys through time depart. There is the future, a realm independent of our existence that we know only through inference. And there is the past, which exists for us in wholly subjective memory traces that nonetheless can, to the extent that they are shared with others or anchored in aide-mémoire, serve as a yardstick to measure time and so provide the means through which we can project the present into the future. Things are hardly made easier by limiting oneself to musical time: restricting the domain only seems to multiply the problems of specification and definition, not least because music, especially as it is experienced through performance, is rarely complete in the moment but is instead a relentless stream within which present, future, and past swirl and bob like so much flotsam and jetsam. And yet I would like to suggest that the force of this experience—the sense of being immersed in an ongoing dynamic process—offers another way to think about time, a way focused less on the limitations of words and more on the resources of music. To paraphrase and re-purpose Augustine, time only becomes a problem when we start to speak about it. As a way to begin the exploration of this perspective let me turn to a musical example drawn from a set of twelve arrangements of popular songs for classical guitar that Tōru Takemitsu completed in 1977. Example 1 gives the score for the first seven measures of the eleventh song from the set; some of the points I will make in the following will be clearer if the reader takes a moment to imagine or play the sequence of sounds captured by the notation. Example 1: Measures 1–8 of Song 11 from 12 Songs for Guitar, arranged by Tōru Takemitsu