As we rush through the minutes of this holiday season, checking off lists and racing for deadlines, it seems ever harder to find the time to experience time consciously. While technology and AI have catapulted our world into a ludicrous expectation for speed, our biological selves still need to envision our vision, express our emotions, and evolve with time.
The rich concepts of Western classical music offers a way to reverse this unsustainable conflict. While I finish writing a piano intensive syllabus on the topic of timing, so many applications spill over into conscious living. What if we use mindful listening to integrate multiple kinds of time perception and reclaim our relationship to time consciousness?
Music Reconnects Us to Our Biological Pulse
Musical rhythm is a strong, repeated pattern of sound. It is a living entity, just like our heartbeat. It fluctuates with our mood changes. It can be smooth or dissonant. Long before we had language, we felt our heartbeat, saw seasonal changes, and slept according to circadian rhythms. These patterns of time circle, like repeating chorus sections between verses, and continue to function today as they did with our ancestors.
As each new era came to pass, our relationship to time perception both reflected and influenced new cultural norms and expressions. When Aristotle (4th century BCE) linked motion and change to how we conceptualize time, and St. Augustine (4th century) framed “human time” as psychological anticipation, attention, and memory, our connection to time became more conscious. It was specifically in music composition and performance that we intentionally shaped time.
Timeposts Empower Direction and Collaboration
The development of the mechanical clock from the 13th to the 19th century in Europe revolutionized our perception of time, making it uniform and external. Western classical composers created a unique notation system with varying note values, and later standardized tempo and used a metronome to practice timing. This enabled collaborative precision and more consistent progress.
When we prioritize certain time targets to hit during the course of a piece, a day, a year, or a lifetime, they give us a time grid in which to push and pull. Nowadays we try to micromanage every quarter hour, but humans function best on a rhythm of tension and release on many levels.
Rubato: Flexible Timing as Emotional Expression
In early 19th century Romantic piano music, rubato often meant that the right hand took time—lingering, rushing, sighing—the left hand kept a steady pulse. The listener heard freedom, but the underlying framework remained intact.
The concept of tempo rubato, meaning “to steal,” means to shape the timing of the rhythmic flow. At first glance, that sounds like time can be taken without restriction. But rubato was not invented for self-indulgence. It was about communication.
How much freedom can we take without losing clarity, coherence, and context?
Georges Mathias, a 19th-century Paris Conservatoire professor, described rubato as a musical equivalent of speech. When we speak with emotion, we naturally emphasize the most interesting words. As our energy shifts, we also accelerate to express excitement, slow down for gravitas, linger on a revelation.
At its deepest level, rubato is not a method but a heightened state of consciousness, of being more alive. Ultimately, rubato asks us: Does what I intend align with what is heard?
Envisioning an Arrival Point in the Future Clarifies Direction and Desire
Henri Bergson (late 19th century) reclaims the idea of felt time, which is the foundation for conscious music perception. By placing obstacles in the flow of our experience—delayed resolutions, suspended harmonies, withheld arrivals—composers intensify the listener’s need to hear what comes next. Delaying a dissonant chord heightens suspense and anticipation, which releases dopamine and gives pleasure. Lingering on a melodic peak magnifies its significance. A pause can strengthen mindfulness and understanding. These techniques mirror spoken language and even storytelling. We lean in when something is held back.
On the other side of the same idea, staying focused on the future arrival can get us through the uncertainty of the present. Performers decide which tensions should register emotionally and in what hierarchy of emphasis.
Desire also exists in the spiritual realm. Certain composers—Messiaen, for example—created music that invites listeners to step outside ordinary time and reach beyond what we can know at this point in time. These suspended moments give us a taste of eternal, sacred time.
When Elements Evolve Together With Cohesion
Neuroscience research from the 20th to 21st centuries shows that our brains track and integrate multiple clocks influenced by our internal emotions and external factors. Social musical experiences sync up human communities around the shared real-time experience, breathing the pulse together and sensing the same emotional arcs at the same time.
This kind of structural timing demands an expanded sense of listening—tracking long arcs of direction rather than single moments of impulse, integrating multiple layers of pulses in both larger groupings and subdivisions instead of just a single uniform pulse. We become aware that our present moment exists in a complex continuum of past to future.
Reset the Senses to Gain Agency
Psychology and music harmonize in the human capacity to feel time beyond the precision of a clock. We can use the mindfulness of musical time to contemplate the new year ahead. In composing a life or a piece of music, we gain agency when we envision ourselves in the future, express our inner emotional life, and sense how we are evolving.