We shall not dwell on the noteworthy fact that, beginning with the Baroque era, the temporal structure of music, linked to an increasingly strong and expanding sense of tonality, developed ever more complex forms of sonorous continuity which reveal the presence of an implicit assumption of time as irreversible, linear, progressive. Bergson, the philosopher of pure duration, saw in music the embodiment of his ideas of “lived time,” the flux of change and becoming. But in 1927 Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man lashed out at the Bergsonian doctrine of duration and reasserted the archaic values of the “classical man” of Greek culture. “We have seen,” he said, “the subjectivism of the ‘Faustian’ or modern Western man, associated fanatically with a deep sense for the reality of Time–as against Space.” Lewis cherished classical man because he had “no sense…of Time. His love of immediate ‘things’ found in its counterpoint in his love of the ‘immediate’ in ‘time.’ He was that creature of the Pure Present so admired by Goethe.” Lewis’s rejection of the time doctrine and his reassertion of the spatialized consciousness of ancient man parallels the turning away from the “terror of history” which Éliade notes, on other grounds, as the emerging state of contemporary man’s consciousness.
Music dominated by the temporal image and music dominated by the spatial image reflect completely opposite attitudes or stances toward reality. While they are both supremely human forms of musical expression, the former tends toward the subjective utterance of the individual while the latter leans toward an objectified projection in which the composer’s energies are focused beyond himself and the lyrical flow of his inner personal states. Subjective man, “Faustian” man, to use Lewis’s terms views existence as change, himself and his history at the center of a process of becoming. For him, life is an experience, whatever the nature of its content, in which nothing stands still, nothing lasts, and the future beckons. Subjective man cannot transcend time; he is trapped in it. However, when man seizes on the present moment of his existence as the only real time, he spatializes his existence; that is, he fills his present with objects of perception which takes on solidity and concreteness–a state of permanence. His world is no longer one of time and change alone; it is a world of space in which time and change are modes of motion.
In the new music, time as duration becomes a dimension of musical space. The new spatial image of music seeks to project the permanence of the world as cosmos, the cosmos as the eternal present. It is an image of music which aspires to Being, not Becoming.
The New Image of Music, George Rochberg. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn – Winter, 1963)
Bolding by me on what Rochberg points out as the broad artistic-philosophical difference between the Romantic and Modernist periods. I find it funny that he goes off topic a little bit earlier in the essay by railing on total serialism by comparing Boulez & Stockhausen negatively to Webern, “They were unable to keep the precarious balance Webern had maintained. While the stream of events in totally serialized works may be continuous in the sense that sound is always in motion, the discourse has lost its sense of direction.” He spent the entire first essay in The Aesthetics of Survival, Indeterminacy in the New Music, trashing totally serial music as essentially the same as indeterminate and seems to be a little hung up on it.