Verticality

This chapter looks at the enactment of time over the course of an entire piece. The author presents an analysis of Toshio Hosokawa’s Vertical Time Study I (1993) as a vehicle for examining how the body participates in creating structure in Western contemporary music. The author draws on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “vertical Being” and Nietzsche’s “eternal return” to argue that the piece’s form might be construed in terms of the listener’s affective engagement with the music. This engagement, in turn, has the potential to reorient the direction of time by bringing into experience its depth. The author concludes by considering how the temporal reorientation signals the possibility of using affect as an analytical tool in contemporary music.