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

Karol Berger's first ambition in his formidably learned and wittily expressed book Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow is to argue that there was a fundamental shift in the human understanding of time in the second half of the eighteenth century and thus to locate the beginning of modernity at that time. The background of this argument is not original to Berger, and, absent the historiographical implications about the beginning of modernity, the notion that the conception of time changed from a cyclical, seasonal sense, based on the rhythms of agriculture, to a linear, teleological sense, based on the notion of industrial and economic progress, is well-accepted and unsurprising. (The book is obviously about the West: much of the world did not experience an industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, and Berger does not worry about when (or if) a Western sense of "progress" and the intellectual trappings of modernity infected continents other than Europe and North America.)

Berger does not deny the change from a primarily agricultural world to an industrial one, but he is much more interested in the metaphysical than the material aspects of this change. His formulation is that the pre-modern understanding reflects an essentially Christian world view, in which "God's time"—an eternal, timeless, undifferentiated Now—both forms the "envelope" for finite, teleological, and event-filled human time, and is ontologically and experientially superior to it. The modern sense of time, in contrast, reflects a world view in which humans are "autonomous," time is inevitably teleological, and God's time is fundamentally incomprehensible.

Berger's second stated ambition in this book is to prove that music "itself"—that is, the arrangements of notes on the page and sounds in the air—registered this tectonic shift in consciousness. The most direct result of this shift was that at some moment after Bach and before Mozart, it began to matter—that is, to be essential to the meaning of the music—in what temporal order musical events happened. One way Berger illustrates the difference is by contrasting Bach fugues with Mozart sonatas. He argues that the point of a fugue is to show how many ways a fugue subject (main theme) can be "worked": that is, whether (for example) it can be combined with itself, and if so, in how many ways; whether it works upside down or backwards, how it works on different degrees of the scale, and so on. In principle, the argument goes, it does not matter in what order the various permutations are presented, or, indeed, how many of them there are, or in what keys they appear. Thus, as with other additive forms (variations are another example), the moment of ending is in some sense arbitrary, particularly since no fugue uses every possible permutation of its subject, and even if it did, the exhaustion of permutation is not a readily perceptible phenomenon. Thus the fugue composer needs to use means external to the basic principles of the work to indicate to the listener that the end is near. In contrast, sonata form, the paradigmatic late-eighteenth century form, is self-limiting: once it has gone through its essential process (a first half leading to an unstable cadence and a second half stabilizing that cadence) it must end. A sonata form ending is thus prepared and predicted by everything that has gone before, whereas a fugue-ending merely puts a necessary stop to a potentially infinite (or at least very long) trajectory. Those who study music have long noted the difference between Baroque additive and "Classical" self-limiting forms and between Bach's "Fortspinnung" (spinning-out) and Mozart's (and Haydn's and Beethoven's) periodicity, but Berger's metaphysical and intellectual-historical framework adds a new layer to that commonplace.

However, despite Berger's titular and professed concern with time as it plays out in individual...