Upon receiving a commission for a new Passion from the International Bach Academy commemorating the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, composer Sofia Gubaidulina was exploring a maturing interest in different kinds of time. Her compositions of the 1990s experiment with the rhythm of time in its vertical and horizontal vectors. Among these, the St. John Passion especially asks for temporal analysis: it stitches together narrative texts from different timeframes, though all traditionally written by St. John the Evangelist, playing with their relations musically. This analysis supports a reading of Gubaidulina's Passion as a sonic icon, with the nondiegetic orchestration functioning as lines of inverse perspective, pulling the listener experientially into the mystery of the Passion in its plural timeframes. Drawing on concepts and methodology from musicology (Tamara Levaya, 2017), music theory (Jonathan Kramer, 1988), literary criticism (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1981), film theory (Michel Chion, 2021) and biblical studies (Scott Hahn, 1999), my paper brings these traditions into conversation to explore the chronotopes intersecting in the narrative and musical setting of Gubaidulina’s Passion, connecting compositional techniques to the interweaving of various excerpts from scripture. Through the crossing of timeless/time-bound, life/death, divine/human, spiritual/physical, Gubaidulina makes an orthodox profession of faith, gesturing ultimately towards the intersection of the Cross, on which is located Christ Himself. To that end, this analysis focuses on the eighth movement of Gubaidulina's St. John Passion, "Way of Golgotha," her depiction of the Crucifixion–and, traditionally, a moment tightly linked both to the Apocalypse and to the Divine Liturgy.

This paper analyzes the musical genre known as “nigunim”—a music system closely associated with Hasidism and believed to facilitate mystical transcendence—and the ways that these songs collapse temporal distance between Hasidic leaders of the past, singers of the present, and the imagined Hasidic community of the future. Based on an examination of Hasidic texts, videos of Hasidic gatherings in New York and Israel, and events that I have attended in Brooklyn, New York, I propose that this music system disciplines the Hasid’s religious life as one comes to live with a more immediate connection to holy people of the past. Building on Braxton Shelley’s analysis of the gospel vamp and T.M. Luhrmann’s use of the “faith frame,” I argue that nigunim creates a “flexible timescape” in which singers have the benefit of drawing on holy people of the past to place themselves in an eschatological arc and experience the imminence of the Divine. This experience of God’s imminence translates to a more acute recognition of God’s presence in the daily life of the Hasid. To make these points, I analyze musical practices of two different Hasidic communities, namely the yahrtzeit seudah in the Modzitz Hasidic dynasty and the Seder Nigunim of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Through this examination, I offer a close look at the social, psychological, and spiritual ways that music offers an alternative formulation of time for the singers of nigunim.

I presented on Further Approaches to Musical Periodicity at SEM in 2001 and Musical Time Categories in 2010. Initially, using analysis of music structure, I critiqued parochial academic tropes on musical temporality, which to that time had been Eurocentrically portrayed in terms of a Western/non-Western, dynamic/static binary. The critique pointed toward a view within which all human musical temporalities are individuated. In 2010 I tried to represent this diversity with graphic arborescences and other schema. Here, with a mixture of hindsight and speculation, I reconsider what is parochially humanist in light of accumulated posthumanist and evolutionary perspectives. The aim is to situate music subsumed in periodicity understood as a hyperobject (Morton 2013). Periodicity is equally seen as natural law mediating information flow, which enables the description of continuities encompassing human perception and production as well as both (humanly observed) animate and inanimate phenomena. Following Tomlinson (2023) this involves a consideration of meaning or its absence, and manifestations ranging among the merely informatic and fully semiotic. Consistent with the hyperobjective premise, there is a vastness to the purview that for now is best shown at a meta-perceptive level, ie. the perception that there are perceptions to be had. In search of initial dots that can be connected eventually, I consider periodic behaviors among several eukaryote kingdoms: the photosynthesizing protozoan euglena obtusa, the fruitfly drosophila mergonaster, a 10x-slowed recording of the Carolina wren thryothorus ludovicianus, a homo sapien song from Malawi, plus a few other ancient and future possibilities.