Plastic Time: An In-Progress Provocation to Dialectic Immaterialism

JAMES WOOD

Leiden University

Figure 1. A rough example of rotary perception. Clear 4/4 pulses are dotted lines within the circular beat. But four-beat placement can exist elsewhere—shown by the red boundaries.

How does one visualise an unquantised rhythmic system? In figure 1 above, the concept of rotary perception provides one option. The full circle represents one complete measure, with time progressing clockwise through four even subdivisions represented by the circle’s intersections with the dashed perpendicular lines. But four-beat placement can occur elsewhere too, as shown through the corners of the red polygon. This shape becomes a new geometrical—and by extension rhythmic—standard, not defined or indeed explicable by perfect arithmetic divisions of the one-step-larger, measure-length pulse. While we acknowledge the limitations of solidifying sonic experience visually throughout this piece, what we are approaching is in essence a rhythmic palimpsest in which these unquantised beats fall on, before, or behind the standard, quantised beat while yet maintaining a central pulse.

I

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, calls music an “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots.” ¹ Pinker was not, as some musicians and academics thought, damning music to a status of pointless “confection”—after all, he has repeatedly stated that he loves cheesecake—but arguing for a human creationism behind all music. In short: music is a human invention. To justify his argument, Pinker separates music from sound. The former is “stable” in marked sonic and rhythmic patterns and teleologies, be that in a symphony moving to a climax or a beat coming to an end; the latter is “continuous,” unmarked by humanly perceptible teleology or pattern. ² Pinker is wrong. Here, we will hear that “stable” patterns are idealised hypotheses of musical performance and subsequently, in actuality, the least human thing possible. What if we take music—as a means of identifying and occupying time—as a non-human continual object: a spatiotemporal antifoundationalism against the typical notions of Western thought. The future is a concern of the past for the present: one need not imagine a non-present, for one can hear it. Deviating from Pinker’s assertion, we can then see the profitable social and philosophical implications of a broader and more open reading of time.

I say “non-existence” as a means of separating the anthropocentric perception of music and time from our analyses, to release it as an autonomous, or at least independent, entity, apart from where humanity has previously entitled it to “exist.” Unlike Pinker, I do not presuppose a dehistoricised caricature of sound or music; when I speak of “non-existence,” I am writing deliberately against anthropocentric assumptions of matter or existence.

II

“What organic connection is there between structure and experiential time?” Stockhausen asked in 1955. ³

In the song “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole,” Pennsylvanian band Code Orange interrupt their face-gurn-inducing hardcore guitar riffs to do something totally unexpected: absolutely nothing. Twice in approximately two seconds of the song, a micro-cut occurs in the sound, jolting the listener’s auditory perception. For about half a second, total digital silence irrupts, before the song powers back at full force, as though nothing had occurred. No beats are skipped, the rhythm continues and the structure endures, but the listening experience is wholly disrupted. This effect is why I call it “total digital silence.” In contrast to what can analogously be called acoustic silence, found across genres and time, Code Orange’s silence is an act of all-encompassing absence. No thing has occurred. Listeners are forced to confront the sonic void.

Video example 1. Code Orange, video for “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole” (2020).

Answering his own question, Stockhausen wrote that “if we realise at the end of a piece of music … that we have ‘lost all sense of time,’ then we have in fact been experiencing time most strongly.” ⁴ Were Stockhausen to find himself, through the vagaries of fate and time-travelling intervention, in a murky bar in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s, he may well have been delighted. The shock alteration of sheer nothingness that Code Orange introduce into “Swallowing the Rabbit Whole” affirms Stockhausen’s argument: by cutting the music so gruffly, the listener is forced to acknowledge that they had, prior to that moment, “lost sense of time.”

Rather than confronting the listener with their loss of time, Code Orange instead create a sonic means through which the listener is confronted with the non-existence of time entirely. Their auditory experience, as elucidated by Stockhausen, is shown to be at best immensely fragile and self-justified, and at worst fraudulent. In either case, that is, time is beyond the listener entirely. With barely half a second of nothing, Code Orange de-anthropomorphise time in a blunt force trauma of spatiotemporal antifoundationalism. It is plastic time. It is a dialectic immaterialism.

III

My work explores these ideas directly.

Here is a track, “Waves,” created with Electroni-Kongo.

Audio example 1. James Wood, “Waves.”

When you listen, I hope—in the politest way—that you feel lost, without a fixed rhythmic “home.” The track seems unsteady: rhythmic waves ebbing and flowing against each other, unified and separate. A “central” rhythm is proposed, before being usurped by an alternative. Contrasting propositions wrestle with each other before the drum set and percussion assert rhythmic solidarity. One’s expectations of rhythmic placement—time—are overturned by the introduction of a new rhythmic element. Habituated Western musicology and philosophy of the One means listeners search continually for an assertive declaration of a central “correct” rhythmic parsing. While the patterns remain polyrhythmic, they do so only because there is the central rhythmic pillar against which they are contrasted. To be poly-, they must be poly- toward or against something.

But how can one evaluate and reassess these ubiquitous notions of propulsive forward-facing time? How could you reassert the natural state of “free” rhythms without the need for contextualisation within a framework that is at best superimposed or irrelevant in its assumptions? Plastic time; dialectic immaterialism.

IV

Plastic time is a non-Euclidean rhythmic system. Euclidean rhythm is a system that utilises the greatest common divisor of two numbers to generate beats and silences. Consequently, the beats generated are as equidistant as possible. Distributing an arbitrary number of beats evenly over a larger measure of pulses produces what Godfried Toussaint calls “useful” rhythm. ⁵ Calculating polyrhythms becomes a matter of fractions. Such understanding was common enough in the eighteenth century, when Conrad Henfling and Gottfried Leibniz discussed music theory and instrumental tuning through Euclidean geometry.

When I was a student, the Euclidean system was ingrained into my education to the extent that it became a universal horizon. It was unquestioned because it was invisible to me. During years of listening, practising, and performing, however, I became aware that performance is the resistance of the object: we must interrogate most strongly not only that which we assume to be categorical but also lived music—that is, perceptive and experiential exposure to music in a recording or live—that does not follow Euclidean rules. ⁶ If typical quantised “musicological” rhythm and time are Euclidean, one can consider them to be well-tempered. As we know, however, a well-tempered clavier is out of tune. Plastic time is fretless time: just rhythmic temperament.

V

Figure 2. A visual representation of rotary perception, discussed in section V.

Charles Mingus’s work highlighted a need for different notational and rhythmic systems, toward a kind of actualised spatiotemporal antifoundationalism: that is, namely, a system through which to better comprehend and represent performed music—not a non-existent ideal. He wrote:

Rotary notation is a simple and incomplete means of addressing Mingus’s concern, which itself echoes long through the history of music writing and musicology, by establishing a pictorial practice of beat placement within a set phrase. In the above case, that phrase is a 4/4 pulse pattern. Figure 2 (left) shows the same 4/4 concept but with each beat equally tempered; figure 2 (right) demonstrates the idea in 3/4. For both, the circle depicts the overall pulse quantity—which is infinite—and the intersecting red lines denote the beat placement, and thus the pulse number, within. Dotted lines again indicate Euclidean 4/4 beat placement.

VI

Time is simultaneous. While it may appear to us to be a linear progression, within music and lived experience it is an always-already simultaneity, batting against its own irreducible materiality. That is, what time is for us is only ever a snapshot of its totality and is consumed diachronically only insomuch as human perception limits our consumption of all art and existence diachronically. To claim, as Theodor Adorno does, that music is “the objectification of time,” “that music is a temporal art, that it unfolds in time, means, in the dual sense, that time is not self-evident for it, that it has time as its problem. It must create temporal relationships among its constituent parts, justify their temporal relationship, synthesize them through time.” ⁸

We cannot exist somehow beyond the time, subject, or object that we examine, stepping outside or above ourselves in order to examine ourselves—nor does music-as-temporal art possess or exist within a teleological matrix. Adorno’s philosophy of music here conflates judgement with a predication that presupposes perception. In other words, he presumes musical experience as a totality, when we can experience it only as an unfolding ephemerality. Plastic time operates upon an alternative ontology. The act of perception is to live completely within the act, because any form of reflection of that perception requires a separation of self from that which is being perceived. In the latter case, one is not in the act of perception, but in the act of perceiving—and analysing—that earlier perception. A judgement is a retroactive appraisal of one’s prior perception, distanced to enable interpretation. Plastic rhythm connotes and relies upon the immateriality of aesthetic materiality: a vibrating ontology of lived immediacy within one’s situation, sonically accessed—dialectical immaterialism.

Plastic time-flow assumes one’s inability to perceive that which is beyond one’s immediate perception, understanding our human limitations of perception through experience, rather than interpretation after the fact. Plastic rhythm rests upon time as an ever-flowing phenomenon, our perception of which is enabled through sonic performance. Time is omnidirectional.

Is this ever-flowing stream not what we see and comprehend when viewing beats and pulses in a rotary system? Rather than a fixity of “correct” beat placements to quantify being “in time,” there exists an infinity of beat placements within larger pulse streams. Interactions between larger pulse streams, spheres within spheres, are similarly infinite potentialities. That is, “bars,” as much as “beats,” are fluid in duration.

It is not only our beat placements within pulse streams (notationally) that are arbitrary, cemented into the immediate in performance; rather, any start or end of such time-flow is likewise arbitrary. Beyond our limited perception, as occluded as it is to us as we are to ourselves, time is always streaming, flowing whether or not we provide ourselves the means with which to perceive it (through music). Music (rhythm) is always inevitably flowing around us, duetting with time, in mutual conditions of (im)possibility. We merely tap into and out of its multivalent streams arbitrarily when we pluck a string, hit play, or sit at a concert.

VII

The possibility that one temporal determination, the future, can be thought differently, beyond its initial simple status as a moment of time, from “that which is now to come,” makes it clear that time cannot be reduced to an ordered relation between moments. By “plasticity,” I mean first of all the excess of the future over the future; while “temporality” will be the excess of time over time.

Plastic time provides a non-unified system of self-multiplicity, of self-otherness: an anticipatory subject, endlessly mobile, necessarily creative, complex, and non-linear. Plastic time-flow enacts a metaphysics of subjectivity through distinct senses of time (rhythm). It is an immaterial means to dialectically establish oneself against oneself, in what Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller call the staged encounters of plasticity, social “gaps within which contemporary forms of thought and subjectivity continue to strive.” ⁹

The non-present gifts us a dialectic immaterialism, a coming-to-self through the immaterial, the ephemeral sonic, which is therefore temporary—and all the more valuable for being so. It is not becoming but momentarily doing one’s being.

VIII

Let us loop back and present some assumptions, that is: our musical spatio-temporal foundation.

The music theory of “Western” music, by which I mean the false universalisms of institutionalised Eurocentric classical traditions and UK and US popular musics of the twentieth century, is founded on the following rules. What follows is simplified to the nth degree, but broadly captures that which Ted Gioia suggests underpins “music as it is taught in every university and conservatory in the world today”: ¹⁰

1. Elements composing a musical piece are rhythmically defined by their time position and duration.
2. Time is linear. A gradation system is used to measure and describe rhythm. Gradation divides time into units that are in turn subdivided, articulated evenly in a kind of musical meiosis.
3. Units are called beats. Beat frequency delineates the tempo (and/or pulse) of the music, expressed in beats-per-minute.
4. Metric systems define harmonic systems. Beats are grouped into longer periods called bars, usually the rhythmic metric level that permits uneven ratio exponents. Ultimately tempo defines whether we perceive the interaction as metric or harmonic. Those longer periods can be identified as sub-harmonics, and the overarching metric system delineates harmony through its mathematical interaction. A 3:2 polyrhythm, for example, is a perfect fifth harmony performed extremely slowly. ¹¹

What of spatio-temporal antifoundationalism?

I am proposing a constant and inevitable time-flow, pre-performer and -performance. Plastic time-flow becomes a spatiotemporal antifoundation when one comprehends its actualisation. Beyond the performer, beyond the performance, time is continually and immutably progressing. It is accessed through the performance. The performer accesses time through non-ideal, ever-shifting plastic time. It is a two-step movement into time and through plastic time.

Spatiotemporal antifoundationalism is a proposal against an anthropocentric imposition of teleological movement onto music. The idea does not arise suddenly but can be traced through artistic examples. Take György Ligeti’s Thirteenth Étude, “L’escalier du diable.” The piece includes a dynamic marking of eight fortes at one point, and closes with a two-bar rest and a particular instruction, “ad lib. silenzio assoluto” (listen to this passage now by playing the YouTube video immediately below; and then please listen to the piece in full when you reach the player at the end of this chapter).

Video example 2. The ending of György Ligeti’s Étude No. 13 “L’escalier du diable,” performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Video playback starts at 5:03.

To me, the piece seems to me the most “successful,” the most moving, the most impressive, when that “ad lib.” is held for longer than one assumes attention will permit. One is forced to confront the drastic juxtaposition between the forcefully present volume of the piece and that total silence. It is the closing moment that allows the audience to slip into the gap between accessed music and inevitable time, blurring the boundaries between the humanly imposed limitations of music and its endless reality. It is a motion of mutual social engagement, enabled by spatiotemporal antifoundationalism.

The Ligeti example shows that what can be perceived as an existential threat to the illusory structure of rhythm as a shackle to time—a quantifiable, material ruse—is actualised as the executant shadow of its internal differentiation. Temporal coordinates mark the human mobile location of “silence,” through rhythm. Silence is made by performers and perceivers as it is parsed through rhythm. It both is and is not until performers fill it with something. Silence is not musically empty, but filled with a capacity for content that is not made; to perform certain rhythmic interplay is to exchange one filling for another.

Carolyn Abbate argues that musicology is not a study of music so much as an abstraction of music. “The abstraction … [is] the true object of interest and acclaim” ¹² because music is an object for reflection at a “metaphysical distance.” ¹³ “To reflect, must one in some sense depart” from the material immediate aural presence of performed music. ¹⁴ Time is therefore at best an abstraction of an abstraction, wielded by dominant forces to presuppose the deviant from the appropriate. In the sonic, in plastic time, in the ephemeral wonder of performance, one can enter the immaterial as a dialectic of oneself—a mobile ontology of multiplicity and acceptance. One need not imagine a non-present, for it always is and is not. There is so much more to be said, to be explained, but of course there is not enough …

Video example 3. Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s complete performance of György Ligeti’s Étude No. 13 “L'escalier du diable.” Video playback starts at 0:00.