Musical time and space - scientific theory and artistic practice in postwar avant-garde

Abstract

The early 20th century has witnessed major transformations in both scientific and musical domains. In particular, relativity has shown space and time to have physical reality (in contrast to a priori conditions of objects), and the hierarchical structure of tonality was abandoned in favor of progressively more systematic methods of composition evolving from twelve-tone music. By singling out the migration of the scientific understanding of space and time to musical terrain, as legitimization and metaphor for some theoretical proposals of integral serialism, a parallel is drawn between the two fields which shows the entwinement of scientific output and artistic theory and practice in post-war avant-garde.