As these utopian and dystopian fictions remind us, we rely on works of fiction, in any medium, to help us understand the world and what it means to be human.
—Janet MurrayShaping events into conceptual narratives has long been the business of historians. Until well into the twentieth century, the contours of social development, market forces, and ideology were described along historical time-lines. The ups and downs of human affairs—in Lear's pithy phrase “who's in, who's out”—are the fiber of history, chronicled in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Yuval Harari's Brief History of Humankind, just as the ups and downs of nature's affairs are mapped out in Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. Along the time-lines of chronology are reference points and markers that enable us to collate fragmented, often indecipherable events in the present into recognizable patterns, and extrapolate probable courses of action into the future. In musical works, similarly, such identifiable patterns help us distinguish normative features of style and structure from digressive action.
But chronology is not the only way of looking at time and events. Like Newtonian physics and relativity theory, which offer alternate descriptions of space, cyclical time offers an alternative view of chronology, by reading history, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, “against the current.” Instead of viewing stylistic musical features as characterizing a particular slice of chronological time, cyclical time focuses on how they recur at subsequent periods of time. This repositions the perspective from time-strands to time-curves. The linear view, for example, regards dissonance in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury music as such an identifiable feature, a litmus test of the weakening and subsequent dissolution of tonality as an organizational system. The cyclical view, on the other hand, sees dissonance as conflicted action that appears in many periods of music, and in each instance, challenges premises of order and propriety. For example, Julian Johnson, describing musical modernity, regards abrasive textures and harmonic dissonance as endemic not just to twentieth-century Expressionism but also as the imprint of innovation in many periods from Monteverdi to Cage.
