Time and all that it implies
I have recently started a few summer projects, and one of them is a fantasy piece for orchestra that is centered on the idea of time travel. One challenge I find myself facing is the idea of expressing the idea of traveling back in time through music. The funny thing is that it’s an idea that should shows us going backward, but we wouldn’t know that if it were not for the forward progression of time.
Music is nothing without the passage of time… that’s very obvious. We only know of the passage of time because of what happens in it. There have always been expressive musical devices that allow us to bend and stop the clock. We have ritarando, fermatas, rubato… all of these interpretive techniques are ways of being expressive while bending tempo and time.
Ives began to mess with our temporal perceptions by music that contained multiple tempos. Elliot Carter went in his own direction with metric modulation, and writing rhythms that gave the illusion of multiple tempos. All of this, to me, are interesting and illuminating takes on simultaneous temporal realms.
Can we illustrate different moments of time simultaneously in music? Can we warp and bend time like the gravity of celestial bodies?
It would be an interesting challenge to further develop the ideas of Ives and Carter and others to progress and even challenge the very foundation of what makes music a unique medium. Time itself could very well become a new expressive dimension to consciously bend and shape.
There are relatively recent tools for this: In one application, Cubase, there are literal warp features, from forcing the timeline to conform to actual time by dragging the ‘bar line’ to what you’ve defined it as, to ‘time stretch’ algorithms – which go in either direction, smaller or larger, & which can be made to color the sound more or less. And that isn’t to say, shrink or grow the pitch, just the time.
In the Tempo Track window, you can ‘interpret bars’ which does a similar thing. Or define any point in the timeline, down to 4000 pulses per quarter note, with a pencil and change the point’s ‘tempo’ in increments of 1/1000 of a beat per minute.
As far as relativity, you might just select some tracks to be ‘time linear’ vs others which are ‘bars and beats linear’, which means the former isn’t warped as the latter is.