The playing now : A philosophical investigation of present time in music

Introduction: Music, such as the duration of a musical piec e or length of a concert, can b e measured by metronomes and clocks in objective time ( chronos ). However, playing an instrument, singing, attending a concert, listening to a record or reading a musical score are musical activities also experienced as subjective time ( kairos) . Music has an intrinsic temporal dimension of experienced time , often including an intensification of the present moment, coexisting intertwined with its measurable dimensions. This makes music a fasc inating object for philosophical exploration. Musical practice em bodie s temporal phenomena like pulse, tempo, timing, ad lib, accelerando and fermata. The musical present can be viewed as a moment of sem antic fullness , a meaningful moment . Music can carry narrative, which is a related phenomenon, also containing intrinsic temporality. Furthermore, music can be improvised in the present moment. The tonal texture of music is experienced as a context, a coherency with an intrinsic temporality. This symposium is set to investigate how music can be experienced, philosophically speaking, in the present moment. In order to do this, we introduce a number of prominent Western philosophers who have taken an interest in the phenomenon of time by using the phenomenon o f music as a lens: Saint Augustine, Husserl, Bakhtin and Ricoeur.Symposiu