The opening of the two new railroads, one of which is to Orleans [sic], the other to Rouen, is causing a startling electric sensation which every one experiences, unless he stands apart upon his insulated glass stool. The whole population of Paris forms at this instant a chain in which one communicates to another the shock. … What marvellous changes must now enter into our methods of perception and action. Even the elementary ideas of space and time are tottering; for by the railway space is annihilated, and only time remains. Oh, that we had money enough to kill the latter properly!¹

Somehow, the enormity and intractability of a subject such as time seem not to have deterred countless authors ancient or recent, but rather to constitute a stimulus especially to those invested in puzzling philosophical problems and knotty conundrums. Benedict Taylor is one whose interest in time has remained thus undeterred for a while now, and The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era represents an extension of the field of his earlier endeavors to bring questions of the nature of time to bear on the analysis and interpretation of music, “the most quintessentially temporal of the arts” (p. 7). This book shares some features of Taylor's previous monograph Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge University Press, 2011), including not only its hermeneutic methodology but its focus on philosophical thought and argumentation, and its tendency toward a broad historical spread of philosophical reference. But the present volume's widening of scope to include non-Germanic repertories—French, Russian, English—spanning a full “Romantic” century is welcome and appreciated (though one might very reasonably protest the extension of a concept of “Romanticism” to include an entire “long century” ending as late as 1914).

No special justification is required for a particular interest in nineteenth-century time and the century's varied cultural accounts and aesthetic manifestations of the human understanding of temporality. Indeed, the perennial preoccupation with time and temporal experience took on a particular color in the so-called long nineteenth century, a notably self-reflexive age shaped globally by numerous phenomena: industrial and political revolution, changes in the understanding of nature and the human relationship with the natural world, the rise of historicist consciousness across disciplines, the growth of cities and cultural institutions and their lasting representations of cultural life, shifts in the economies of labor and the diversification of capital, new psychological notions of the subject (especially in terms of memory), and transformations of time and space wrought by new media and technologies—telegraph, steamship, railway—and by the national and colonial workings of power.² The above quotation from Heinrich Heine's Lutetia invokes multiple conceptions of temporality interwoven with references to the economic and technological environs of his mid-century, including the instantaneousness of electric shock, a sense of acceleration and resultant collapse, and the instrumental relation of time to capital. These are a number, though not all, of the “cultural phenomena” that are “crucially interlinked” with “the historical rise in significance accorded to time during this period,” phenomena of which Taylor highlights just two: “the role of subjectivity within nineteenth-century philosophy, art, and culture,” and “the establishment of instrumental music as an art form capable of serious aesthetic claims” (p. 6).

Making due note of such an undeniable plurality of manifestations—and discourses—of temporal understanding, Taylor describes his project as a “constellation” (p. 8) of approaches to the investigation of selected nineteenth-century instrumental works “from the standpoint of temporality” that, he suggests, “offers one of the most rewarding perspectives on music's role within society and human experience” (p. 12). The commitment expressed in the introduction to an analytical-interpretive engagement with musical temporality that exhibits connectivity with society and cultural embeddedness is one of the more exciting promises of the book. It succeeds fairly well in adhering to this commitment much of the time, so long as the “culture and thought of the age” (p. 12) are considered to be adequately represented, if not entirely circumscribed, by philosophy; but many readers who are interested in understanding music's meanings in relation to a wider, more diverse account of culture and society will consider this promise only partially fulfilled.

Each chapter of the book—with the exception of Chapter 2, which constitutes a lengthy philosophical excursion—explores a particular way of considering time, in relation to select musical repertories. An examination of the late piano music of Beethoven in light of the theme of temporal transcendence is Taylor's starting point, and in fact it soon becomes clear that melody per se is not the author's sole or even primary musical focus, nor as dominant a factor as might be expected given its presence in the title of the book and the introductory argument concerning its invariability as a metaphor for the nineteenth-century understanding of time (p. 7); this study is just as concerned with other parameters, not least with questions of form. In Chapter 1, then, a deft analysis of rhythm, texture, and form in the last three sonatas, interwoven with reflection on an impressive range of Beethoven literature both historical and recent, highlights the capacity of Beethoven's music to create for the listener the experience of multiple temporalities, and ultimately to invoke timelessness.

The organization of the book is somewhat distinctive in that its stage-setting is deferred to Chapter 2, entitled “Music, Time, and Philosophy.” Exceptionally long and expansive, it constitutes the conceptual core of the study. Granted, a reader of Taylor's previous monograph who wondered at its conjunction of Mendelssohn and Proust is likely to feel that this historically divergent (if not to say miscellaneous) chapter, in its philosophical sweep from Augustine to Ricœur, seems to have abandoned its resolution to present an account of Romantic music “embedded within the culture and thought of its age” (p. 12) in favor of a transcendence of historical time. Indisputable, however, is the erudition on display here: the skillful command of this extraordinary compass of philosophical thought is admirable, to say the least. As Taylor develops his basic premise that music may reveal elements of the nature of time, it becomes clear that much of the argument rests on a fundamental analogy between music and time on the grounds of their shared resistance to representation, and subsequently on an understanding of music, a temporal art, as exhibiting what Taylor refers to as a structurally “homomorphic” relationship with time.³ In the wake of a nuanced consideration of the challenges posed by previous philosophical conceptions of music as either an “expression” or an “image” of time, Taylor is able to avoid the problematic of representation by offering instead the book's central, generally convincing postulation: that music may be understood as an “instantiation” of time (pp. 63–65).

Memory and nostalgia thematically frame an investigation of temporality in selected instrumental works by Schubert in Chapter 3, focusing principally on the A minor String Quartet D. 804 (“Rosamunde”) and interacting with an impressive range of literature constituting the historical reception of Schubert's music as concerned with temporal consciousness. Early on, Taylor is astute enough to raise the question, typically passed over, of “what differentiates memory from mere formal repetition, if anything” (p. 132), and the remainder of the chapter is similarly careful and nuanced in its employment of different philosophical perspectives to interpret the means of invoking a sense of yearning for an imagined past through musical allusion.

Proust is the recurrent point of reference in the analyses of cyclic sonata structures in chamber and orchestral works by French (and Belgian) composers including Saint-Saëns, Franck, and d'Indy in Chapter 5. Revisiting his prior interest in cyclic form, Taylor describes the significance of a musical discourse that combines and switches between themes and layers “in a kaleidoscope of temporal intentionalities” (p. 240) in terms of a sense of modern subjectivity. And the briefer sixth and final chapter turns a lens on Elgar's cantata The Music Makers (1912), reading its music and poetry (an ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy), with their many allusions, through various philosophical and poetic notions of an ineffable “spirit of [historical] time” (pp. 261–63), and staging an interpretive recuperation of the work from its past reception. But Chapter 4, which turns to Russia, is at first more suggestive of other directions for considering music and temporality within contemporary cultural and societal contexts farther from the sphere of formal philosophical or literary thought. Its argument for the difference of Russian musical time from that of Germany—a difference, Taylor argues, that is deliberately enacted by composers’ distinctive distancing from Germanic developmental procedures (p. 175)—departs from a discussion that makes note of Russia's measurable historical and temporal distance from Western Europe. Nineteenth-century Russian society was, as Taylor remarks, “outside the Western European sense of time” (p. 177), owing to such distinctions as a unique calendar and the enduring predominance of a pre-industrial way of life.

It might have been especially exciting to have considered, not only briefly at the start of Chapter 4 but throughout this wide-ranging study, the potential relationship of nineteenth-century musical repertories to some of the other sociohistorical and cultural factors that made the understanding of time and temporal experience into issues of such pressing concern in that century. For instance, if a sense of acceleration is the quality that defines modernity, the threshold for which Reinhart Koselleck (also cited by Taylor in his Chapter 4) compellingly sets at 1800,⁴ how does such a sense of acceleration—as invoked, for example, by Heine's witty meditation on the railway—shape lived temporal experience in the nineteenth century, and are there ways in which musical temporality instantiates this kind of experience? Or is there a contradictory sense that some music, with its special capacity to effectively create its own time scale, might have constituted a mode of resistance to the accelerating pressures of modernity? What about the century's new awareness of and growing preoccupation with the almost unfathomably slow, deep spans of geological and evolutionary time: is there an argument to be made for Romantic time as evolutionary as much as revolutionary? How about the phenomenon of seriality in the realm of cultural distribution? Do any of these time technologies of the nineteenth century find correlates, or instantiations, in the forms of musical experience—music's rationalization of time via rhythm and meter, its segmentations of its own temporal spans via formal repetitions or divisions into movements (or the lack thereof), its sense of flow, its modes of recurrence?

In its investment in philosophical accounts of musical temporality, The Melody of Time misses a number of opportunities to achieve a greater degree of the societal and cultural embeddedness to which it aspires, but what it does offer includes depth and sophistication of philosophical thought, strong musical analysis, and creative, richly informed interpretation. Taylor's ability to incorporate such an extent of philosophical, literary, and musical knowledge into his study is remarkable. His work constitutes a distinctive and nuanced contribution to a long history of inquiry into the enduring—perhaps even timeless—puzzle of the nature of time and music's mediation of our experience of it.

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