Music, Time, and Its Other ─ Aesthetic Reflections on Finitude, Temporality, and Alterity

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music’s affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music’s power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.

Roger W. H. Savage is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include Hermeneutics and Music Criticism and the edited volume Paul Ricoeur in the Age of Hermeneutical Reason: Poetics, Praxis and Critique. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Moore Institute Visiting Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway.