II.  It's been almost 15 years since you have launched The Time of Music. Other scholars wrote important books and studies on this topic during the following years. Yet musical time is still not given enough academic credit, (it is not studied on equal footing with musical harmony, for instance). Do you have an explanation for that? JK  Part of the explanation is habit. Throughout the history of music theory, there have been treatises that treat in whole or in part musical time and rhythm, but they have always been in the minority. It would be impossible for one book, such as The Time of Music, to turn that tide. Still, there are literally thousands of articles in print on the subject, so it has not been completely ignored. But I do agree: it is still treated peripherally in music education and scholarship. Why? One reason is that every musical process takes place in time, so even studies that purport to focus on other aspects of the musical art are necessarily involved with time. So, perhaps it has not been so ignored as we tend to think. But that is still not a good explanation, because you may still ask, "why is time not treated explicitly in more sources?" One reason is that music theorists like to deal with what is finite anc quantifiable. There are (in many musical systems) 12 pitches. The mathematics that deals with the mighty 12 can become complex, but it is manageable. Time is a continuum. It is only quantifiable in certain ways (e.g., musical meter)—and, not surprisingly, it is in these ways that it is usually studied. Unfortunately, the majority of music theorists are still looking for easy, objective answer to hard questions. But there are no easy answers to questions of musical time.     Continued 1  2  3a  3b  4  5   next