The primary definition of cycle is "a round of years or a recurring period of time, especially one in which certain events or phenomena repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals."¹⁷ The popular expression, "History repeats itself," is well understood in the visual arts, because forms and styles prevalent in one era often reemerge in others. The Classical orders in architecture, for example, show no signs of being exhausted, and recur throughout history, from Periclean Athens to twentieth-century London. Perhaps because the music of the Classical world virtually disappeared from the record, and a substantial body of works from all periods did not become widely available in printed and recorded formats until comparatively recent times, music history has not evidenced a series of style revivals comparable to those in the visual arts and architecture. However, the reemergence of tonality towards the end of the past century is a significant indicator that music, too, is sensitive to the phenomenon of cyclical recurrence.

Cyclic or "sacred" time, as described by Mircea Eliade, "is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable." It does not "pass," nor is it irreversible.¹⁸ Jeremy Rifkin elaborates:

The ancient Hindus envisioned a universe that was perpetually created, destroyed, and recreated according to a 4,320,000,000-year kalpa. Chanting of the mantric word Aum was believed to express the infinite cycle of creation (Brahma), preservation (Vishnu), and destruction (Siva). Jain artists pictured cyclic time as a serpent devouring its own tail, while Buddhists developed meditation practices in which observation of the rhythmic process of breathing "sets the pace of a new perception of the continuous destruction and creation of the natural world."²⁰

The concept of cyclical return equally influenced early Western thinkers, including Pythagoras (c. 550–500 BC), Heraclitus (fl. c. 500 BC), Plato (c. 428–347 BC), and Aristotle (384–322 BC). In De Generatione et Corruptione, the latter reasoned as follows:

Not all ancient cultures, however, understood the world in cyclical terms. Although the Hebrew-speaking author of Ecclesiastes 1:9 (quoted above), probably writing in the third century BC, was clearly sensible to cyclical recurrence, that statement is by no means indicative of the prevailing Judeo-Christian concept of time.²² For the ancient Hebrews time was a linear process with a definite beginning—the Creation—that progressed historically toward a definite end—the kingdom of God. For Christians, the end of history would be fulfilled with the second coming of Christ and entry into the kingdom of heaven. These views have had an immense impact on Western civilization. Jeremy Rifkin observes:

The Medieval intelligentsia were thus confronted with the difficult challenge of trying to reconcile two deeply conflicting concepts: Classical cyclic time and Judeo-Christian linear time. St. Augustine (354–430) must have spoken for many of his contemporaries when he wrote, in book 11 of the Confessions, "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not."²⁴ However, he ultimately found cyclic time incompatible with his faith, concluding that only the present was objectively real and only God's today comprehended eternity.

By the time of Machaut and Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth century, when Europeans were devising their first timepieces, linear time had become the dominant paradigm. The Western world was rapidly moving from a basically agrarian society shaped by natural environmental rhythms towards an increasingly commercial urban society driven by material ambitions and technological change.²⁵ Debate concerning the true nature of time, however, was far from finished.

In The Will to Power, written some six centuries later, Nietszsche (1844–1900) rekindled interest in the concept of cyclical time, basing his argument for "Eternal Return" on the law of the conservation of energy (First Law of Thermodynamics):

With this atheistic nineteenth-century revival of a concept whose roots were deeply intertwined with both Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions, Nitezsche's "Eternal Return" was itself a compelling example of a kind of cultural cyclical recurrence analogous to that in architecture. As one of the leading thinkers of the late German Romantic period, Nitezsche was an intimate colleague (and later a bitter opponent) of Richard Wagner, whose Ring Cycle—the most ambitious revival of ancient Teutonic and Norse mythology ever to reach the operatic stage—enjoyed the paradoxical distinction of being denounced by critics as "music of the future."

Revival of interest in cyclic time was by no means limited to Nietzsche and his philosophical circle. In 1890, Henri Poincaré published a prize-winning essay demonstrating that a system of finite energy confined within a finite volume of space will return, given a sufficiently long interval of time, to a state arbitrarily close to its initial state. In 1896, Ernst Zermelo would reason on the basis of Poincaré's theorem that all molecular configurations are virtually cyclic, and that the ancient concept of eternal recurrence might be scientifically proven. That same year, Ludwig Boltzmann acknowledged that both Poincaré and Zermelo were mathematically correct, but rejected the physical significance of their findings because the time necessary for recurrence would be almost unimaginably long.

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