The Innards of Time

Abstract

One of the most profound changes in the making of music in free jazz with respect to the Western tradition of jazz and of so-called classical, popular, and folk music (including the Western avant-garde) is a completely different approach to time. The space of time is traditionally viewed as a line, a one-dimensional space without any further ‘anatomy’. This is the heritage of physics, and of the tyranny of linear time that started in the Middle Ages. Clocks were installed on steeples and later in all places, where the social life had to work like a clockwork: schools, administrative buildings, military complexes, train stations, or industrial plants (see [109] for a cultural history of time).