In a recent blog post at On a Pacific Aisle, Joshua Kosman, the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, introduces us to what he calls a “magic moment” in Gustav Mahler’s 9th Symphony. The passage in question lasts only one quarter note, and in his article, Joshua shares with us his thoughts and feelings about this brief moment. What I find interesting here, is not the specific moment that Joshua chose to present, nor the words he found to describe what he heard (although I couldn’t agree more with both the beauty of the moment and the words he found to describe it). What I find startling is the fact that it is possible to talk about “magic moments” in music at all!

At first it may strike us as obvious that one can talk about specific moments in a piece of music. I can easily refer to a specific place in a score by naming the measure number, the instrument, and the metric position within the measure in question (this works also for live performances of music). Or I could refer to a recorded performance by giving the exact timing of the moment I am talking about. So far, so good. But what will we say about the moment that we have spotted and isolated thus? It seems to me that almost all musical moments that we will want to talk about are interesting to us not in itself but because of its immediate surroundings or the way the music led up to them. In his blog this is exactly what Joshua does. He starts off by describing what we hear in the piece up to the moment he wants to discuss. He then describes the “magic moment” by relating it to all the preceding moments (“It’s like biting into what you think is a hunk of bread and finding meringue”). Accordingly, the passage about the specific moment is only very brief (36 words) compared to the whole text (172 words). Does this suggest that we can understand specific moments only in a network with other moments? Augustine, in his unsurpassed analysis of how we experience time, posits that temporal experience and thus the experience of music is threefold:

“For the mind expects, it attends, and it remembers; so that what it expects passes into what it remembers by way of what it attends to. Who denies that future things do not exist as yet? But still there is already in the mind the expectation of things still future. And who denies that past things now exist no longer? Still there is in the mind the memory of things past. Who denies that time present has no length, since it passes away in a moment? Yet, our attention has a continuity and it is through this that what is present may proceed to become absent.” [Augustine, Confessions, book 11, chapter 28. Cited after the Christian Classics Ethereal Library]

If the present is always experienced in connection to what is remembered of past moments and what is expected in future moments, how can we isolate the present moment from past and future ones? If, when trying to understand the present, we consider things past as well as our projection of the future, how can we find meaning in one isolated moment only?

“For the mind expects, it attends, and it remembers.” Augustine uses the word to attend to describe the act of experiencing the present. In modern-day usage the word attend means to pay attention to something, it is synonymous with to concentrate. The Latin word attendere means literally to stretch to or to stretch from. There is a small but important difference in meaning. In our use of the word we stress the directedness of attention, the concentration on one spot of importance. For Augustine attention was not focused on one particular moment. Attention was the process of following an object closely through time, experiencing its mutations over time.

It then seems to me, that our obsession with isolated musical moments arises from our specific understanding of attention, focus, or concentration. For some reason we believe that seeking meaning in details is possible. For some reason we find stimulation in single moments desirable. For some reason we have seem to cut off our present from the past and the future.