Questions concerning music and its inextricably intertwined and complex interface with time continue to fascinate musicians and scholars. For performers, the primary perception of music is arguably the way in which it unfolds in "real time." For composers a work appears "whole and entire," with the presence of the score having the potential to compress, and even eliminate, the perception of time as "passing."

The paradoxical relationship between these two perspectives, and the subtle mediations at the interface between them with which both performers and composers engage, form the subject matter of this collection of essays. The contributors address the temporal significance of specific topics such as notation, tempo, meter, and rhythm within broader contexts of performance, composition, aesthetics, and philosophy. The aim is to present novel ideas about music and time that provide particular insight into musical practice and the world of artistic research.

Contributors: Bruce Brubaker, New England Conservatory; Pascal Decroupet, University of Liege; Mark Delaere, Catholic University of Leuven; Justin London, Carleton College; Ian Pace, University College Falmouth

The three Mozart/Da Ponte operas offer a inexhaustible wellspring for critical reflection, possessing a complexity and equivocation common to all great humane works. They have the potential to reflect and refract whatever locus of contemporaneity may be the starting point for enquiry. Thus, even postmodern and postmillennial concerns, far from seeming irrelevant to these operas, are instead given new perspectives by them, while the music and the dramatic situations have the multivalency to accept each refreshed palette of interpretation without loss of their essential character. These operas seem perennially new. In exploring the evergreen qualities of Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, the authors of this book do not shun approaches that have foundations in established theory, but refract them through such problems as the tension between operatic tradition and psychological realism, the coexistence of multiple yet equal plots, and the antagonism between the tenets of tradition and the need for self-actualization. In exploring such themes, the authors not only illuminate new aspects of Mozart's operatic compositions but also probe the nature of musical analysis itself.

In New Paths, five renowned scholars discuss a variety of topics related to Romanticism, focusing especially on the years 1800 1840. In a much-needed historical and critical overview of the concept of organicism, John Neubauer ranges from its origins in Enlightenment biology to its aftermath in postmodernism. Janet Schmalfeldt shows that not only Beethoven's op.47 should be called the Bridgetower rather than the Kreutzer Sonata but also that this makes a difference as to its meaning. Scott Burnham explains extreme contrasts between emotional and mechanical types of music in late Beethoven as stagings of the limits of human subjectivity. Jim Samson discusses Chopin's little-known musical upbringing in Warsaw, arguing that his grounding in eighteenth-century aesthetics (as opposed to theory) has thus far been neglected. Finally, Susan Youens's case study of Franz Lachner's Heine songs sheds light on radical experimentation by a so-called epigone in the period between Schubert and Schumann's miracle song year.

Contributors: Scott Burnham, Princeton University; John Neubauer, University of Amsterdam; Jim Samson, Royal Holloway, University of London; Janet Schmalfeldt, Tufts University; Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame"