Who among us would deny that time is essential to the art of music? But if asked to define what time is, who would actually be prepared to give a definitive answer?

Time is the most profoundly mysterious aspect of our art, and yet we seem to take it for granted. We generally accept the conventional notion that the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and that only the present has any tangible reality.

If the past no longer exists, that is the same as saying the past does not exist now. Similarly, if the future does not yet exist, we can say with complete conviction that the future does not exist now. Since neither the past nor the future exists now, only the present has any tangible reality.

We can go further still. If neither the past nor the future exists now, there is no past or future now. There is only the present.

Have we then reduced time to its essence—the present "now"? If that is so, who can define what the present is? Does the present have a beginning? Does it have an end? It would seem absurd to say the present never began and will never end. So if the present has a beginning and an end, surely it must have a middle as well. Otherwise there would be nothing "in between" to keep it from being annihilated even as it came into being.

Let us assume, then, that the present does have a beginning, middle, and end. That is to say, it has length or duration. Is it not, then, possible to subdivide that length or duration into smaller units of time, much as a meter stick is subdivided into smaller units? Do we not as musicians do this almost routinely with our various note values and rests?

If we imagine the present to be like a meter stick, we will notice that it has a midpoint that lies an equal distance from each end at the exact center of "now." But there are numerous points to the left and to the right of that central "now" that make up the present. The points to the left come before that central "now" in time and the points to the right come after it. In other words, the present itself consists of a series of points in time, some of which occur earlier and some of which occur later than the absolute "now" at the center. If the present has any length or duration whatsoever, it must logically be so, even if our watches are too crude to measure such tiny units of time for us.

Such logic, however, is deeply troubling. We have already concluded, quite reasonably we supposed, that the past and the future have no reality in the present. But if the present has duration, it must contain a series of points in time stretching from its beginning past its middle to its end. That is to say, the present paradoxically contains a past and a future! If past and future are, indeed, contained in the present, time as we ordinarily understand it is no more than a myth. Past, present, and future are essentially one!

Our first reaction is to imagine that something must be terribly wrong with our thinking thus far. But if we retrace our steps, we are reminded that it seems equally absurd to consider the alternative notion that the present has no beginning or end, for in that case "now" never began and never will end!

Curiously enough whether we hold to the view that past, present, and future are one, or take the alternate view that the present has no beginning or ending, we are confronted with a world in which time as we normally think of it no longer exists. Once we catch our breath and really let this sink in, we might begin to consider what such a "timeless" world means for the art of musical composition.

We have reasoned that if neither the past nor the future exists now, only the present is real. However, we have run into some very serious problems:

1) If the present has any length or duration, it must have a beginning, middle, and end. But this succession results in a present that actually includes both its own past and future.

2) Conversely, if the present has no length or duration, it has no beginning, middle, or end. But this means that the present never began and will never end.

Both of these paradoxes lead in different ways to the same startling conclusion: "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one." (Davies, 70)

These are not my words, nor the words of some crackpot eccentric, but those of Albert Einstein, written after a lifetime of reflection on the physics of time. Similar statements have echoed through the centuries:

A day, whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment.(Rucker, 136)

—Meister Eckhart, Christian mystic, c. 1260–c. 1328

No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. (Borges, 233)

—Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher, 1788–1860

All fundamental physical theories advanced in the past three centuries—Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, quantum mechanics, string field theory—have insisted there is no fundamental distinction between past, present, and future. (Tipler, xii)

If the distinction between past, present, and future is merely an illusion, and "now" alone is real, the implications for the art of musical composition are enormous.

First, we would have to cease to think of music as something which "flows" in one direction through time, but rather as something which exists now in its entirety. This is not hard to visualize if we consider that all of the information for a Beethoven symphony is present at once on a single compact disc. The fact that we seem to hear the symphony as a sequence of events is simply a phenomenon of human consciousness which remains largely unexplained. All music that was, is, or shall be exists now.

Second, we must stop thinking of music history as a sequence of discrete events in linear time. The past, present, and future of music and musicians exists in its entirety now. Any sense of progression is, once more, attributable to the way human consciousness creates the illusion of successive moments in an essentially timeless reality.

In his astonishing book, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford, 1999), British physicist Julian Barbour quotes the great mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker: "The Now is what is real." He regards Dame Janet's pithy remark as "the perfect artistic expression of . . . timeless quantum cosmology." For Barbour, every moment in history actually exists as a distinct now in a timeless world he has, in the Classical manner, dubbed "Platonia." Rather than lament the illusion of movement in time, Barbour finds cause to celebrate:

I can live without motion if I can sense it as the line that runs through a story all bound up in one now. Janet Baker is right. Watching motion, listening to Beethoven, looking at a painting by Turner—all are given to us in the Now . . . . The artists always knew it was there, and worshipped at its altar. (Barbour, 333)

Without delving deep into the quantum cosmological ruminations contained in Barbour's formidable volume, we can make some additional conclusions about what the "end of time" as we ordinarily understand it means to music. Since everything that is is given at once, the descriptions "old" and "new" are fundamentally irrelevant. Bach and his music do not exist in some dark chamber of oblivion far removed from "now," but are very much alive. The music of the future is already "here" if we could but access it. The style wars in which proponents of tradition and innovation are constantly at loggerheads arise from a gross misunderstanding of the true nature of reality, for yesterday, today, and tomorrow, however different they appear to be, are essentially one.

This kind of thinking is very much in tune with the so-called "holographic" theories of the universe and consciousness articulated by British physicist David Bohm and American neurophysiologist Karl Pribram. Author Michael Talbot explains in The Holographic Universe:

The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell of our body enfolds the entire cosmos. (Talbot, 50)

If we knew how, then, it would be possible to discover the music of every composer who has lived, is living, or will live resonating now within our own unconscious minds. But perhaps "possible" is the wrong word, for we may well have been doing precisely this all along. Emerson seems to have expressed just this view in his essay, "Quotation and Originality":

If the thinker feels that the thought most strictly his own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he speaks them. (Emerson, 301)