Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time

Mid-October is a very pleasant time to hold a conference in Portugal, coming as it does in a period when those of us from more northerly latitudes are beginning to wonder if we will ever feel the warmth of the sun again, and the conference in question, 'Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time', provided much nourishment as well as intrigue for the intellectually curious.The second international 'Msica Analtica' conference, held at the Universidade de Coimbra, was the brainchild of Jos Oliveira Martins and Richard Cohn and served to open a dialogue between the numerous strands of intellectual enquiry into the disparate, sometimes confusing but ever fascinating relationships between music and time.This was a conference truly marked by disciplinary plurality: music theory, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, classics, psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and computer science, with everything in between and much beyond, were represented.Three keynote and seven plenary speakers were invited, and papers from nearly fifty delegates were heard in the three days.Eighteenth-century topics were explicitly represented by just a handful of presentations, but there was enough in the conference to suggest the importance of this historical period for changing conceptions of musical time in the West.With such an array of ideas and approaches, an attendee might be forgiven for entertaining a mild feeling of bewilderment in trying to put everything together and give a coherent picture of the riches on offer.In one sense such an attempt would seem to go beyond one of the most productive points of the gathering: to bring together a remarkably varied and complementary range of expertise in the hope that unexpected sparks might flicker across some of the newly created proximities, establishing profitable connections for future research.On the other hand, there are several prominent threads that can be traced across the conference as a whole.One of the focal points, returned to in many of the papers and conversations, was the primal significance accorded to rhythm and metre in trying to understand musical time.In part this might reflect the strong presence of empirical and theoretical approaches and the methodological orientation of these towards such parameters, though even here there was a conspicuously wide range of perspectives on offer.These elements were foregrounded in two of the three absorbing keynote addresses -Nori Jacoby (Max-Planck-Institut fr empirische sthetik), with 'Around the World in 30 Beats: Universal Constraints on Rhythm Revealed by Large-Scale Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Rhythm Priors ', and Tosca Lynch (eMousik, www.emousike.com),with '"Shaping the Flow": Ancient Greek Rhythm and the Movement of the Voice'.These elements were also present, beyond a number of the main conference papers, in at least four of the seven plenary talks: Anne Danielsen (Universitetet i Oslo), 'Beat Bins, Asynchronies and Muddy Sounds: Shaping Micro-Time in Grooves'; Richard Cohn (Yale University), 'Historicizing Non-Isochrony'; Jessica Grahn (Western University), 'Causal Investigations of Motor Areas in Rhythm and Timing Perception Using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation'; and Martin Clayton (Durham University), 'Theory, Empiricism and Ethnographic Research in Musical Rhythm'.