Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (review)

Time in music is often a slippery and difficult subject to master, particularly since it seems not to be perceived as a smoothly flowing, continuous stream. Modern music, of course, diffuses the conventions of time; for instance, aleatory, while sometimes taking place within a strict framework bounded by precise measurements, allows for a more random effect within it, so that sound is continually evolving within the performances and their parameters. This, as Karol Berger describes it, "post-Christian world view" requires time to be flexible, to create a linear flow that is synchronized with the music in a forward motion that is an evolutionary experience for the composer and audience. The opposite of this is a chronological stasis that he ascribes to a "premodern Christian outlook" wherein time is cyclical, based upon a successions of events or episodes that are circular, based upon a present understanding of time as a constant where future and past are indelibly linked in a continuous circle.

This is largely a philosophical argument that Berger develops over the course of the book, using as his examples the sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach as the epitome of circular time, and the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the pivotal point of change towards a more progressive view. In addition, several other topics are treated in less detail: a prelude that looks at Monteverdi's L'Orfeo as "an early modern paradigm shift" (p. 37), an interlude that focuses upon the theological shift between the Augustinian Christian viewpoint and the more enlightened humanistic thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a postlude that argues that the solidification of the temporal shift occurs irrevocably in the "revolutionary" works of Beethoven.

Each of the main sections has chapters devoted to specific works meant to demonstrate each of these points. Bach's music is divided into three chapters, incorporating discussions on both the St. Matthew Passion and the Well-Tempered Clavier. This Trini tarian approach is chosen because "Bach's music displays a double temporality, developing unquestionably up-to-date goal-directed momentum but relativizing and subordinating its forward propulsion to a sense of cyclical or entirely timeless stasis worthy of his Medieval predecessors" (p. 12). On the other hand, the focus in Mozart is on the operas, specifically Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, providing a bilevel approach that incorporates formal flexibility with a broad aesthetic purpose. For example, he states regarding Mozart's use of sonata form: "I see Mozart's form not as a rigid mold but as a flexible recipe with a few indispensable ingredients and procedures that a creative cook can supplement in a variety of ways." (p. 191). But later, in comparing the overarching philosophical connections between Don Gio vanni and that quintessential German eighteenth-century play, Goethe's Faust, the concepts become metaphorical and monumental: "Aspiration to absolute freedom, pursuit of desire without limits, the paradoxical commitment to a lack of commitment, the privileging of becoming over being—all of these belong to a modern outlook . . . and it is this aspect of modernity that is embodied in the stories of Don Juan and Faust, perhaps the only true modern myths we have" (p. 271). The final chapter on Beethoven shows a synthesis that, while "suspending, or at least drastically slow[ing]" time in the late eighteenth-century sense, incorporates a state wherein the cyclical world of Bach is present in a contemplative sense: "This other, alternative, world is not the world of action but of contemplation. The object of contemplation during the suspension of normal time is either the interiority of the individual or God—either the world within or the world beyond" (p. 333).

Given the broad scope of Berger's philosophy, it is often difficult to know where to begin the discussion. His arguments assume that the reader...