Music has been described as "an art of sound in time."⁷ It is a fundamental, even willful misprision of time, however, that lies at the heart of modernism's obsessive rejection of the past.

The law of the conservation of energy (First Law of Thermodynamics) tells us that "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it just changes form."⁸ Einstein demonstrated in 1929 that energy and mass (matter) are equivalent (E = mc²). The world we experience today is essentially a variation of the world we experienced yesterday. Ultimately, nothing has been created or destroyed, added or subtracted. What was has simply morphed into what is. This fact was intuitively grasped by the ancients long before it was formulated as the First Law of Thermodynamics: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Even while avant-garde composers and their proponents have been feverishly preoccupied with trying to extricate themselves from the past, modern physicists, working through the implications of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory, have reached conclusions about the nature of time that reduce their mnemophobic colleagues' aesthetic pretensions to absurdity. Most startling of all has surely been the realization that ours is "an egalitarian universe in which every moment is as real as any other."⁹ Perhaps Einstein himself said it best towards the end of his career when he observed, "For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."¹⁰

If Einstein was correct, and past, present, and future are fundamentally indistinguishable, then trying to break from the past is the nihilistic equivalent of trying to break from the present and future as well. This is readily understood when we realize that everything the human eye sees lies in the past, since light travels at a finite speed of 186,000 miles per second and cannot reach us instantaneously. Although in everyday experience this strange temporal effect is not noticeable, it is, nevertheless very real, and is dramatically amplified the greater the distances involved. "If you look at the moon, you are seeing it as it was a second and a half ago; for the sun, you see it as it was about eight minutes ago; for stars visible to the naked eye, you see them as they were from roughly a few years ago to 10,000 years ago."¹¹ The comparatively slow speed of sound—a mere 740 miles per hour at sea level—means that any noise or music that reaches the ear lies even further in the past than what meets the eye, a fact which explains why we see lightning before we hear thunder.

Any observer moving relative to another observer will inevitably perceive and conceive of "now" in a different way. One wo/man's past is another's present and yet another's future. Relativity per se, however, is not solely responsible for the presence of the past. A work composed and performed in eighteenth-century Vienna then subsequently forgotten may be rediscovered and revived in nineteenth-century London, recorded in twentieth-century Tokyo, and heard for the first time by a twenty-first century audience during a radio broadcast in New York City. What Emily Dickinson said of words is equally applicable to musical ideas: "A WORD is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Begins to live / That day."

This propagation of information through time and space ensures not only the presence of the past but is indispensable to the creation and survival of what we commonly call culture. Emerson corroborates, "It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past. You are formed and fed by it. The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest."¹²

It is somewhat misleading, on the other hand, to speak of "the propagation of information through time and space," because in Einstein's universe, all events, no matter when or where they occur, exist perpetually in spacetime. Physicist Brian Greene explains:

To illustrate this concept, often referred to as "block time," the DVD is a useful metaphor. A digital video disc contains all the information necessary to render a complete performance of, let us say, an opera, but we experience that performance not as a single instantaneous event but little by little, as a sequence of combined visual and aural sensations. It is not inconceivable that another entity elsewhere in the universe might assimilate the disc's contents in another way, perhaps even taking in the entire work all at once, timelessly as it were. But our human faculties and technologies, and the laws of physics obtaining in this part of the universe, impose certain perceptual norms and constraints that make such a feat impossible for even the most keenly sensitive Homo sapiens.

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