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I was reading a book today called Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times by Omar Calabrese (Princeton, 1992) and found the following quote, which is not only relevant to the past articles about Time but relates to both Music and Photography too:

‘Another example of how we have moved beyond a threshold in out perception of time can be found in photography. We have become indifferent to so-called instantaneous techniques. And yet the ‘instants’ of our instantaneous photography are not what they were, but exist distinctly beneath our level of perception. Taking a photograph at a thousandth of a second makes it quite impossible to forecast the final photograph from what is seen through the lens. Nevertheless, having accumulated competence with this kind of technology, we are able to imagine the existence of a time and movement that are beyond our physical capacity of perception.’

Naturally, I found this intriguing – not least because the book was written in 1987 before the advent of the consumer digital camera, which has made photography more popular than ever – but because that ‘Baroque’ sense of time is something I can’t escape when listening to music and even when writing my own music. The same chapter touches on various phenomena of contemporary culture including television series, break dancing and video games and highlights the overriding attitude of our age, which he refers to as ‘Neo-Baroque’. It is undeniable that the rhythm and repetition of mass media and technology has influenced all of our thinking and all of these things affect our aesthetic choices, ‘however isolated we might consider ourselves to be in the ivory towers of the university campus, immune to the charms of Coca-Cola, more attuned to Plato than Madison Avenue’, as Umberto Eco puts it in his foreword!

Camera Obscura is a composition for 4 amplified violins and film and is a kind of homage to light, relating the process of capturing and recording light to music. An abstract camera appears after a blinding flash of light and, after a series of blurs and blinks, the picture of a lifeform appears in the camera’s eye. The performers interact like the colours and curves of an image histogram as the piece comes into existence, develops and then fades away to a distant memory – just like a photograph. The piece explores the relationship between organised light (photography) and organised sound (music), attempting to combine the two with comparable methods of ‘tonal distribution’.

Continuing on the theme of Time in music, a thought on the music of Xenakis: ‘Ultimately, it seems Xenakis’ spirit was consumed by the music that is outside the scope of Time, but it is also clear that he was fascinated by the effect of pure rhythm and the prosody of language to awaken our understanding of antiquity and our emotions. The Time Traveller character in H. G. Wells’ novella The Time Machine explains, ‘There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.’ And I believe it is in this light that we can understand the convergence of Xenakis’ temporal and non-temporal musical ideas. Wells said, ‘The portion of the past that is brightest and most real to each of us is the individual past, the personal memory.’ For Xenakis, music was ‘an individual pleroma, a realisation’ (Formalized Music, New York, 1990) that presented timeless ‘cosmological’ and ‘philosophical’ arguments in the form of sound. However, it seems that his consciousness was steeped in the literature of the tragic poets and the universality of Greek philosophy so antiquity was in his blood as if it was a personal memory flowing through the rhythm and meter of his music.’ From ‘The Tragedy of Rhythm’ by Joel Baldwin.