Transcending Time and the Self: The Shared Political
and Social Potential of Contemporary Composition 
and Historically Minded Performance

PRIYA SATIA

Stanford University

Imagination is part of a musician’s practice, whether composing anew or recovering a historical mode of performance. Different kinds of musicians produce different kinds and forms of music (e.g., composition versus performance), and the differences are important to study and debate. But, the present publication asks, leaving distinctions in artistic product aside, what can we learn about the shared imaginative process of musical production, regardless of form and style? How does it in both cases depend on seeing, dreaming, or fantasising about events not directly accessible in one’s immediate surroundings? And what can we take away from knowledge of this shared process? To get at this question, I want first to pick at the assumptions underlying it: that we apprehend the present differently from the way we apprehend the non-present and that imaginative work transpires within an individuated self. Finally, I will try to articulate the shared social and political function of the work of contemporary composers and historically minded performers.

*    *    *

First, let’s examine the assumption that our apprehension of the present is different from our imaginative apprehension of the non-present. I’d instead invite us to assess the extent to which our perception of even our immediate surroundings is also mediated by imagination. Is the present in fact different from the past and future in being accessible without the imagination? As it turns out, because it enfolds within it notions of and infinite traces of the past, the present is never just the present. We also know that “the past does not exist independently from the present,” in the words of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. The past exists only in relation to the present; the present makes something be the past: “In that sense, the past has no content.” ¹ The terms through which we, as subjects, summon the past belong to the present. We are constituted as subjects through our continuous (present) creation of the past. We do not succeed the past but are its contemporaries. We live among the fragments of worlds that have passed, and this contemporaneity is what allows us to conceive of the past as a past. The very writing of history assumes a plurality of coexisting times, which, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has explained, is the condition under which we are able to treat the past as intelligible to us. ² We live, in the “present,” in “time-knots,” which historians straighten out into a chronology. We might also recall here Walter Benjamin’s characterisation of history as “the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.” ³ The present publication’s awareness of the entanglement of subject and object that results from the bodily empirical undertaking of historically informed performance of music is also testimony to this contemporaneity of past and present: recovering others in the past is a process that simultaneously produces us in the present.

The present also enfolds the future in so far as the actions we undertake in the present are always simultaneously producing the future. If past and future are accessible only via the imagination, their imaginative reality is integral to our experience of the present. As the Indian poet Javed Akhtar writes in his poem “Waqt” (Time), it may be that:

In short, rather than start with a linear (mis)conception of time, in which past, present, and future are distinct and experienced separately, we might instead recall the actual fullness of time, the contemporaneity of past, present, and future. When historians talk in the present about how to heal something from the past, that very conversation is creating new possible futures: past, present, and future simultaneously produce one another.

It follows then, that if, as the conference description states, past and future are difficult to “know” because they are fundamentally imagined, so, too, is the present. ⁵ Our knowledge of it is also mediated by imagination. Your conversation with someone in the present is mediated by your memory of past conversations with the same person and a sense of the new place—the future—at which the conversation is continually resettling you. Your very sense of self is founded on your sense of your past and the past of your people, and other imaginative things like nation and race.

If our experience of the “real” present is mediated by the “unreal” past and future, our capacity to translate that experience artistically introduces its own deviations from the real. Take the most well known and elementary injunction for literary creativity, “Write what you know,” the lesson of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Toni Morrison. On the one hand, what we “know” is always already mediated by imagination, by fantasies of gender or national identity, for instance. On the other hand, the very desire to write what we know informs what we come to know. The British archaeologist T. E. Lawrence wanted to write a literary epic, and the conceit of writing what you know drove him to shape actual historical events—his participation in the Arab revolt—in a way that he felt would support his later epic exposition of them, what became the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922/1926). ⁶ The literary mimesis of real life also depended on his imaginative presumptions about the “Arabia” he sought to transform—including the very notion that it was the ideal backdrop for an epic narrative. Lawrence’s contemporary George Orwell likewise took the idea of writing what you know seriously for non-fiction, putting himself through poverty to be able to write about it truthfully, to eliminate the mediation of imagination as much as possible. As these two examples illustrate, the effort to write what you know does not necessarily mean faithfully channelling your sense of self but often depends on disrupting selfhood altogether: both Lawrence and Orwell went undercover and tried to “pass” as what they were not.

Moreover, the language through which we express what we know is itself an anarchic force. Orwell was famously preoccupied by the tenuous relationship between language and reality—the worry that language can never accurately capture reality, that though we strive after prose “like a windowpane” ⁷ that provides immediate access to the truth without intruding on it in any way, language cannot but fail us in the end. For, language always mediates meaning, as Orwell explained in “Politics and the English Language.” ⁸ His non-fiction books are replete with laments at the inadequacy of words to the reality he is trying to describe. Because of this tenuous relationship with reality, writing always also creates a new reality of its own. Even the most empirically inclined representations of reality at some level rely on imagination.

Historians, of course, don’t write what they already know but what they have come to know, through research in archives and other historical accounts; but they too resort to imagination in weaving this material into a fresh narrative. Once we recognise that historians rely on the faculty of imagination to render the past in the present, it follows that our access to at least certain versions and impressions of the past depends on the historian’s present sense of self—which is in turn shaped by inherited notions of the historian’s role in the world. The rendering of the past is at once the invention of something new, mediated by imagination, language, and the historian’s point of view—her present—which is itself seeded with the past.

The misperception that some parts of life are “real” and not mediated by imagination is modern, a legacy of the Romantic era. After the Enlightenment asserted the empirically accessible nature of worldly reality—its subjection to discernible natural laws—the Romantics affirmed the compensatory role of imaginative work, as relief from this disenchanted worldly reality. If not in the real world, ghosts and fairies and other magical beings must continue to animate fiction, poetry, and music, where, the poet Samuel Coleridge explained, the audience engages in “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” ⁹ Nature, too, acquired a mystical quality as a space apart from the harsh reality of urban industrial life. The duality of modern secularism was a world bifurcated into real and imaginative realms, the latter existing only in books and the arts, as an escape from the “real” world. Romantic art was all about the non-present, escape from the harsh present; it defined creative expression as untimely, not of the present, by definition. The nationalism that nineteenth-century Romantic music expressed and helped forge was anchored in nostalgia for a folk past. Romanticism came to music somewhat later than other arts; but when it did, music held pride of place in this outlook, as the art form closest to pure emotion, indeed the language of emotion, blending the strange and the beautiful and expressing emotion’s primacy over reason.

But this is a false duality. Take history, an ecumene that Enlightenment philosophers conceived as real, governed by natural laws, but which nevertheless depended on the historian’s angelic powers of necromancy, inviting us to live imaginatively with the dead, and which rested on mythical guiding concepts like the nation, which kept the world enchanted in new ways—though disguised as fact rather than fantasy. In short, human experience is generally mediated by imagination, even in the present, even in the real world.

*    *    *

The second presumption in the conference rubric is that the process of imagination transpires “in and through the self.” ¹⁰ This too is a notion derived from the Romantic era—the idea that creative genius flows through individuals. Indeed, in a manner affirming history’s own imaginative proclivities, early histories of musical lineage connected genius to the divine fount of Apollo himself (and thus through his son Orpheus—for whom the institute hosting the conference this publication is based on is named). ¹¹ The Romantic movement in music strove to free the artist from the bonds of patronage, which produced endless artifice and convention, precisely so that they might instead express their own soul, their individuality, their subjective sentiments. The idea emerged from the broader social and political transformation on which Romanticism was based, as a revolution against an old order centred on inherited social distinctions. Its ethos was agonistic, self-critical, and egalitarian, even in terms of its audiences, all about freedom from hierarchies on which patronage structures depended, and yet it depended on a highly elite concept of genius.

Indeed, valorisation of genius shaped contemporary understandings of history, too. On the one hand, history was understood to evolve thanks to the actions of great men (something Lawrence, for instance, absorbed), just as music was now understood to evolve as the result of the work of great composers. On the other hand, the historian himself was thought of as a great man, an interpreter of muses—like the musician. Even during the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant affirmed that just as Nature had produced great scientists like Newton and Kepler to discern the laws of science for the rest of man, so she would produce a man capable of discovering and narrating the natural laws governing human progress. History’s progress might be continual, Kant writes, “if the diviner himself creates and contrives the events which he announces in advance.” ¹² Kant wrote his essay offering his philosophy of history, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), in the hope that it would help history reach the peaceful cosmopolitan end it theorised, that it might “direct the ambitions of sovereigns and their agents” to act in a manner that would fulfil its vision of how history ought to progress. ¹³ A half century later, Karl Marx similarly hoped that his philosophy of history would itself produce historical change. He wrote in 1845, “philosophers have only interpreted the world …; the point, however, is to change it.” ¹⁴

In short, European theorists of history ascribed history-making powers to historians themselves. Writing around the same time as Marx, Thomas Carlyle, who like Coleridge was deeply engaged with German Romantic thought, became perhaps most famously associated with the notion of great-man history, the idea that the history of the world is but “the biography of great men.” He, too, included historians among such great men, affirming that when it came to the archetypal Man-of-Letters Hero of the modern era, “What he teaches, the whole world will do and make.” ¹⁵ The idea here is that what we write will inform how others will act. (This was what Orwell was trying to do as a “political writer” in his own time.) Moreover, a providential notion of history—the idea that history will retrospectively judge our actions—endowed historians with a special moral sensitivity, a capacity to identify rightness. But a great-man view of history came with its own imaginative challenges. The effort to write the history of Romantic music, especially, was beleaguered by the difficulty of writing about geniuses defined by their individuality as a group whose emergence had to be explained by wider historical causes. ¹⁶

The twentieth century prompted new theories of history, forged in the crucible of anticolonial contest and destructive world wars, that undermined great-man ideas of history. But the idea of the historian as great man lingered on as historians now adopted the position of redeemer vis-à-vis those suffering under the “enormous condescension of posterity,” in E. P. Thompson’s famous words. ¹⁷ E. P. owed this outlook partly to his father, Edward Thompson, who had sought atonement for complicity in colonialism as a missionary by rewriting the history of British colonialism in India from the Indian point of view. And the elder Thompson, in turn, was inspired by a Romantic example: Lord Byron’s redemption in fighting for Greek liberty. E. P.’s redemptive focus was the English working class. He was a historian but also an iconic activist of his time. “History from below” emerged, ironically, from the Thompsons’ sense of their own great-man capacity to change history. My new book Time’s Monster (2020) talks about the need for historians to go forward with an awareness of this past and of the danger of assuming that history is a narrative of progress as we embrace our collective responsibility to shape public debate about the past, aware of its contemporaneity with the present and future. ¹⁸

Is it possible to reconceive the role of composers and musicians analogously, to imagine the creative process transpiring not just within an individual self? What has been the cost of conceiving the imagination as an individualised capacity? What broader, collective forces did the idea of genius efface? At a basic level, one might recall Clara Schumann’s contributions to Robert Schumann’s and Brahms’s work or Mendelssohn’s absorption of his sister Fanny’s compositions. But there are also the wider urban, musical milieux and the broader cultural currents that individual geniuses drew from: national sentiment, orientalism, nostalgia for the eclipsed pre-industrial past, the common class outlook of the middle-class composers who came to dominate the field—including, for instance, a greater interest in literary motifs. There is also the material infrastructure of imagining—the instruments individuals used and thought with.

This publication posits the entanglement of subject and object in the historically informed production of music, in that such production requires inventing something through the self. But if we configure the self as something more porous, we might better perceive the socially produced nature of musical invention. Rather than presume that composers and historically informed performers invent what isn’t there, we might instead start with the idea that the past and future—the non-present they access—is contemporaneous with the present, with what is there. Their collective role is continually to give the present form—just as the historian continually gives new form to a past that really existed, whose traces are visible in our present, but that nevertheless must be imaginatively reconstructed.

We have an obligation to destabilise Romantic notions of the artist and the artistic product—this is part of the task of eradicating a great-man understanding of agency, in art and history—and to instead recognise the social roots and function of artistic endeavours, for the sake of empowering collectives in our own time. The novelist Zadie Smith recently reflected that the injunction to write what you know can at times also have a whiff of “stay in your own lane,” vaunting personal experience as “inviolate and nontransferable,” a notion that goes against the fundamental presumption of fiction: that “there is far more to people than they choose to make manifest.” ¹⁹ To be sure, the novel was central to the emergence of a conception of highly individuated, internally consistent selfhood evolving in linear time, and the reader’s empathetic connection with this fictional self is critical to the imaginative process of engaging with fiction. But at a more fundamental level, fiction (and art more generally) actually depends on a brimming, porous concept of selfhood—our capacity to identify with characters and experiences that are entirely other. As its production becomes more diverse, it increasingly offers a vision of more porous selves that allow it to promote more of a sense of truly shared humanity, across gender, race, class, and so on.

*    *    *

The history of Romantic music is the history of the incipient disintegration of the elements of music (melody, rhythm, harmony). Historically informed performers recover that incipient trend. Today’s composers also remain in its train, continuing the process of liberating music from inherited structures. In this sense, their approach to composition remains “Romantic” even if it is not “romantic” in aesthetic style. In this sense, both historically informed performers and contemporary composers are participants in the same ongoing musical “style” that prizes liberation of the imagination. This is what bridges their endeavours. Today’s composers compose for today’s instruments, but those instruments enfold, like time capsules, all the incremental technological change accumulated over the past—whose earlier incarnations are the focus of historically informed performers. These material continuities also bridge their endeavours. The past is, truly, contemporaneous with the present and future. Lastly, when music allows us to access imaginatively events and experiences that are not immediately present, it, like any language, always proves inadequate, generating something unexpected and new in its own right. It does not merely reflect or express the reality of the past or the new art the composer or musician intends but creates something else on its own. This entropic quality binds the work of contemporary composers and historically informed performers, just as the work of writing binds the work of historians and poets.

The past and future are difficult to “know,” but so too is the present, insofar as it is contemporaneous with both past and future. Musical representations of the past or inventions of new music are part of that very present. They are what make the present difficult to know fully, empirically, as the present. Contemporary musicians and historically informed performers share imaginative methods and ends in accessing the non-present, but they also share this work of rendering our present contemporaneous with the past and future. At a banal level, this is simply an acknowledgment of their common identity as artists and of the role of art in life, however distinct their artistic products. But thinking about it consciously, deliberately, destabilises our reflexive presumptions about the “real” nature of the present and the distinction between art and non-art. Those presumptions, which have been foundational to our sense of the modern, are historically derived, products of the Enlightenment and its corollary, the Romantic movement. This publication seeks to understand music’s relationship to the mental capacity that allows one to see, dream, or fantasise about events “not directly accessible … spatially or temporally.” ²⁰ But this mental capacity also mediates events we can directly access; it mediates all our experiences, our very sense of self. All experience is fleeting, impossible to convey, and thus dependent on art for expression. To come to terms with that reality is to question Romanticism’s exaltation of music as the ultimate language of imagination and emotion and recognise instead how integral it is to the worldly reality of human experience of the political and the social (and vice versa). The consummate Romantic hero Lord Byron knew that the world remained enchanted, whatever Enlightenment philosophers said: “There’s music in all things, if men had ears,” he wrote. “Their earth is but an echo of the Spheres.” ²¹ This is, obviously, a Romantic understanding of music, but one that affirms music’s productive and essential rather than merely compensatory function vis-à-vis modernity—as the literature scholar and pianist Edward Said perceived in cofounding with Daniel Barenboim an orchestra composed of Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians—named the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in homage to the Romantic German poet Goethe. The very role of song in liberatory struggles throughout the modern period, including hip hop today, confirms this.

Song is poetry set to music: after all, Orpheus’s mother is the muse of epic poetry, Calliope. In my work on the history of history, I have tried to emphasise the connection of history-writing and poetry, not least because of the way poetry allows us to express and manifest different forms of selfhood. In the modern era, poets have been central to the making of history—like Byron himself, most iconically—and poetic thought has been crucial to inspiring historical action. For E. P. Thompson, who was also a poet, like his father and his son, poetry stood for “deeply inspired action,” writes Joan Scott. “The poet was crucial to revolutionary politics, for he could articulate the longings that, along with practical programs, inspired men to act.” ²² Thompson favoured the Romantic poet William Blake, especially for the way he “embodied the possibility of poetry and politics, romantic yearning and rational resistance in a single movement.” ²³

In their redemptive approach to history writing, Thompson and his father attempted to infuse the discipline with an ethical outlook derived from poetry rather than the judgement of time that had long been its end. In a time of disillusionment on the left, E. P. felt poetry’s role was to “leaven politics with imagination” ²⁴ to suggest a “middle ground between … disenchantment with perfectionist illusions and complete apostasy.” ²⁵ It is precisely because of the way it unleashes imaginative longing for a better way of being that utopic thinking is necessary for practical politics. The ease with which music, like poetry, allows transcendence of time endows it with a great deal of potential to inspire liberatory struggle in the present, when precisely what is needed is spiritual, cultural, and moral renewal in the face of climate crisis and the legacies of empire. That ease also reveals to us the centrality of such temporally transcendent imagining to our humanity, as we pass through the forever time that Akhtar describes. And in doing so, it restores our sense of connection with one another (our porous selfhood) and our environment—the (re)forging of which is the recurring end of history.