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'Time', as the Marschallin observes in Der Rosenkavalier, 'is a strange thing. If one simply goes along through life, it's nothing at all. But then suddenly, one becomes aware of nothing else.' So it is in music as well: for three days in mid-January 2009, a group of scholars from diverse fields focused on the element of time in Maria Theresa's Vienna, and more specifically in the works and milieu of Joseph Haydn. Sponsored by the Institut für Analyse, Theorie und Geschichte der Musik at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien and organized by the faculty triumvirate of Marie-Agnes Dittrich, Martin Eybl and Reinhard Kapp, 'Cycle and Process: Joseph Haydn and Time' was among the first of many events planned for 2009 by the city of Vienna to observe the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. With the recent appearance of Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), the timing of this particular event could not have been more felicitous. Berger himself gave the closing address at the conference, but his provocative thesis about fundamental changes in the conception of musical time over the course of the eighteenth century was already much in evidence throughout earlier presentations by other speakers.
As with any successful conference, there was added value in the largely unplanned connections that emerged between so many of the presentations. Although each half-day session was devoted to a particular perspective, the focus often moved rapidly - to everyone's benefit - between the general and the particular. The tone for this was set on the very first morning under the rubric of 'Disjunctures', which began with a talk by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Professor of History at the Technische Universität Chemnitz and the author of History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Dohrn-van Rossum's remarks about the measurement, experience and perceived acceleration of time at various points in history provided an ideal framework for thinking about time in both abstract and concrete terms, from the Middle Ages down...