An article by Coordinator of Music Theory and Associate Professor of Music Theory Keith Salley, Ph.D., titled “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg” was published in the December issue (Vol. 21.4) of Music Theory Online, a peer-reviewed online journal of the Society for Music Theory.
The article uses archival and analytical scholarship to investigate relationships between the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of subjective time and the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s philosophy of developing musical ideas. It presents analytical readings of three of Schoenberg’s compositions that were written around the time that German translations of Bergson’s works were first made widely available. In doing so, the article establishes an intersection between French metaphysics and Austro-German expressionism—an intersection that will hopefully invite further inquiry into this topic.