Do you notice a mistake?
Time, with its implication of chaos (in the etymological sense of a chasm), has become an obsession for me, one that I cannot escape, all the more so as I feel, sense, and see the monstrous disintegration of all spiritual life with each passing day. This process burdens me with a paralyzing weight and discombobulates my whole system with a revolting certainty and slowness.
These words were written by Bernd Alois Zimmermann on 7 June 1945, in the journal he began on that date. Time was his fixation, his obsession, his Zwangsvorstellung (literally, a “representation of constraint”).1 In a letter to Karlheinz Stockhausen dated 14 March 1958, following the publication of their respective articles “How Time Passes…” and “Interval and Time,” Zimmermann listed what he considered the great modern works on this matter: Johannes Volkelt’s Phenomenology and Metaphysics of Time, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Edmund Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Viktor von Weizsäcker’s Structure and Time, Gerhard Krüger’s essay “On the Kantian Lesson of Time” in the volume Anteile (Shares) presented to Heidegger on his sixtieth birthday, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius’s Time. He also noted more “marginal” works, including Ezra Pound’s essays collected as Motz el Son and Gisèle Brelet’s book Le Temps musical (Musical Time). This philosophical backdrop was the setting within which Zimmermann’s compositional ideas took shape.
His early works, such as Extemporale, the Sinfonia Prosodica, and the Concerto for Orchestra, show a return to the ideals of the 1920s and to the “objective, in a certain sense monistic musical manners of the Baroque,” contrasting with the “subjective, dual developments of the nineteenth century, whose dialectical structure subordinated musical elements to a spiritual tendency, to an idea.” He frequently turned to pre-Classical forms and older dances such as the capriccio, chaconne, ricercar, toccata, and tratto. Primarily focused on absolute music — emphasizing gesture, the pathos of gesture, and Baroque form, if not motoric objectivity — Zimmermann took as his models Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith, both masters of balancing expression and form.
This duality is evident in his 1949 study of Arnold Schoenberg, whom Zimmermann saw as both expressionist and constructivist, offering a middle ground for those seeking alternatives to the doctrines of Darmstadt. His affinity for Hans Werner Henze, whose Ballett-Variationen he praised for its organic combination of heterogeneous styles, also reflects this balance. For Zimmermann, Schoenberg’s use of the tone-row guaranteed a continuity between the musical material “extracted from an infinite multitude” and the spiritual design of the artwork, conceived as an “organization of a sound-order.”
Zimmermann’s early tone-rows, such as those in the Sonata for Solo Violin (G-A-F-G♭-B♭-C♭-E♭-C-E-D-D♭-A♭) and the Sinfonie in einem Satz (Symphony in One Movement) (A-B♭-F♯-G-E♭-C♭-C-A♭-F-C♯-E-D), are still thematically constructed, featuring thirds, scale fragments, and hints of tonic and dominant. As his rhythmic elements became serialized, they began to function within the sound-order, like the isorhythm of old, notably in the Cello Concerto, where pitch loses its thematic role.
Zimmermann soon began drawing inspiration from Anton Webern’s approach to differentiation, structuring his rows in three-note groups related by inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion. This technique culminates in the Perspektiven, a work informed by Webern’s Concerto op. 24 and Stockhausen’s “composition by groups.” The first part of Perspektiven is built from three rows:
Prime: D-E-C
Retrograde inversion: B♭-G♭-A♭
Inversion: F-E♭-G
Retrograde: A-C♯-B
Prime: D♯-E-C
Retrograde inversion: B-G-A♭
Inversion: F♯-F-A
Retrograde: B♭-D-C♯
Prime: B♭-C-B
Retrograde inversion: C♯-E♭-D
Inversion: E-F♯-F
Retrograde: G-A-G♯
Zimmermann’s work subsequently evolved through three broad phases, each tied to a core idea: an intimate musical consciousness of time, inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology and leading to his notion of the “sphericity of time”; the “pluralist” method of composition, first introduced in a commentary on Dialoge; and the stretching of time (Zeitdehnung), strikingly illustrated in his later electronic works Tratto I and Tratto II, as well as in Intercomunicazione and Photoptosis. These philosophical reflections on time are not merely external ideas but are integral to his music. In each piece, an organon or vehicle for metaphysical insight, Zimmermann invites the listener to engage in an aesthetic and philosophical experiment, though he emphasized a distinction between musical and philosophical concepts of time. His theoretical writings, essentially metaphorical, are aimed to circumscribe shifting fields of signification more than to establish exact definitions or firmly delimited concepts. Influenced by analogical thought and scholasticism, Zimmermann used the same terms consistently, but his literary and philosophical references greatly extend his notions and concepts.
In 1957, Zimmermann published the short article “Interval and Time,” following closely on Stockhausen’s “How Time Passes…”. His argument draws on the well-known opposition between Newtonian time, seen as external, objective, and measurable, and the notion of inner time, influenced by Husserl and Henri Bergson. Zimmermann suggests that music can align the objective passage of time with time as a lived experience. Sound, he argues, is a sonic form, or sonic body, with two primary qualities: it should be a product of thought, measurable and understandable, and it should embody a “principle of one’s musical life,” a “sonic soul,” and an “event.”
For Zimmermann, unlike in mystical tradition, timelessness arises not from abandonment but from a rigorously ordered form, as seen in isorhythmic motets (ultimate expressions of lived presence), Franco-Flemish canons (where superposed meters blur the succession of “nows”), the layered temporalities of Girolamo Frescobaldi’s music, and the pure beauty of Mozartian perfection. He writes,
The mastery of time, achieved through the most accomplished temporal organization, has exorcised music’s deepest antinomy through an order suspended like a gimbal and yet liberated in an open space. It represents music outside of itself and expression within itself, beauty and death fraternally united for a second of eternity at the calm eye of the storm.2
Zimmermann achieves this illusion of timelessness by suspending linear progression, instead guiding the music through a spiral progression and creating a meditative, almost prayerful, quality. While the duration of a work varies from one performance to the next, the proportions of metric, rhythmic, and therefore temporal relationships remain consistent. The interval, at the intersection of calculation and event, regulates the discrepancies between meters and rhythms, and also between durations and pitches, whether successive or simultaneous, inviting listeners’ inner awareness to perceive these relationships.
Zimmermann’s philosophy is deeply influenced by Saint Augustine’s reflections on the aporia in experiencing time, an experience of memory and expectation, as described in Confessions (XI, xx, 26):
But even now it is manifest and clear that there are neither times future nor times past. Thus it is not properly said that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps it might be said rightly that there are three times: a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future. For these three do coexist somehow in the soul, for otherwise I could not see them. The time present of things past is memory; the time present of things present is direct experience; the time present of things future is expectation.3
While the universe and our instruments of measurement oblige us to experience time as a continual and irreversible flow, Zimmermann argues that in our spiritual reality, time opens up, and only a “thin layer of ice” separates past from future. These two realms soon intermingle, giving rise to what he calls “the memory of the future” and “the premonition of the past,” where the work as a whole resists the approach of death.
Zimmermann introduced the idea of the “sphericity of time” in connection with his opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). “Time curves and forms a sphere,” he wrote on more than one occasion. This image, never fully defined but constantly enriched through repetition, can refer to rhythm, form, or even periods in music history. The origin of this metaphor goes back to his article “Lenz, New Perspectives for Opera,” in which Zimmermann describes “the spherical representation of space-time in opera.” The expression “spherical form of time” subsequently appeared in his introduction to Die Soldaten, derived from the dramaturgical conception of “unity of inner action” in the Anmerkungen übers Theater (Observations on the Theater) by the eighteenth-century German dramatist J. M. R. Lenz, who aimed to dismantle the “three unities” of classical tragedy. Zimmermann’s idea of spherical time thus results from spatial representations, from the reality of theater and the stage. However, he uses the image wherever he is concerned with the psychic unity of time, whether historical or musical.
In 1960, he added a companion to the sphericity of time: the idea of “pluralism,” which he elaborated extensively in his writings. Music, as an aesthetic and metaphysical experience of simultaneity, is the art form uniquely suited to represent pluralism. It is, in essence, playing with temporal layers, calculated according to duration and tempo, using relationships based on those among frequencies in the fundamental series. The series — a fundamental, all-encompassing, omnipresent musical structure — ensures coherence within the musical discourse, bringing unity to what might otherwise seem random or fragmented. Acting like a “memory of the countless layers of our musical reality,” Zimmermann’s pluralism integrates serialism, tonality, and the jazz and blues traditions of the oppressed. This last influence appears not only in whole works, such as Nobody Knows the Trouble I See (1954) and Die Befristeten (Those Whose Days Are Numbered, 1967), but also in sections, forms, and the instrumentation of other pieces.
Zimmermann’s pluralism is an accumulation of meters, events, quotations, montages, and collages, evident in Dialoge, Présence, Die Soldaten, Antiphonen, and Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu. Through the series, a kinship emerges between sound and duration proportions (theoretically examined in “Interval and Time”), stratifications of pluralism, and stylistic blending. Old or familiar music resurfaces in the memory, in the folds of consciousness, where chronology is unknown. The past may be bygone, but it remains alive and present within the “intimate temporal consciousness of the history of music” — a notion Zimmermann borrowed from Husserl. As Zimmermann argued in 1968,
We cannot avoid the fact that we live in the midst of an incredible amount of cultural material from very different eras. We live simultaneously on different temporal and event-based levels, most of which can be neither separated nor combined, and yet we manage to navigate securely within this confused web of intertwined threads. It seems that one of the most astonishing phenomena of our existence is the ability to permanently enjoy this incredible wealth of sensations, with all the movements that traverse it, such that the threads that compose them always end up intertwining, even if only for a fraction of a second.4
These temporal and event-based levels, “which have their musical equivalent,” had been captured in literature by James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Referring to these authors, “Let us not be ashamed to call them our fathers,” urges Zimmermann, embracing their diverse styles and pluralism, in which they mix quotations without concern for chronology, belonging, or language (since we do not all live at the same time). In this way, the composer establishes a lineage that is less subjective than collective and historical, relevant to an entire generation.
Three motifs from these literary sources turn up in his writings: first, the idea of putting all of space into a “notshall” (Joyce’s word, changed to “nutshell” by Zimmermann), representing a non-future; second, the “dance of the hours of simultaneity,” a phrase often attributed to Ulysses but really from Hermann Broch’s commentary “James Joyce and the Present Age.” This idea highlights the simultaneity of language streams, suggesting that once we reach a concept of totality, time effectively transforms into space. The third motive comes from a certain excerpt from Pound’s preface to The Spirit of Romance (1910), which reads,
It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grand-children’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.
In Zimmermann’s work, quotation becomes homage, debt, inner image, commentary on an unfinished past — a “dialogue across eras among those who dream, love, suffer, pray.”5 Above all, it becomes time itself, the duration of its inscription in the work. In the sixth movement of Dialoge, pluralist composition meets quotation from Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 467, Debussy’s Jeux, the Veni Creator Spiritus, and jazz. But how can one cite the art of the future?
This paradox hints at the melancholic’s relationship with time — drawn to the past or, more precisely, to everything lived until now, where the bygone naggingly displaces the present, leaving it with only the ecstasy of lament. Or, perhaps the act of quotation expresses a fascination with the fleeting, volatile present, where the immediacy of experience connects us to a more spontaneous, celebratory outlook, liberated by dance, ballet, leaping, and to fusion with the joyful whole.
We should avoid equating pluralism too narrowly with musical quotation. Zimmermann uses the adjective “pluralist” to describe the combination not only of heterogeneous musical sources but also of extra-musical expressive means: text recitation, film projection, news items — all elements that unfold in time.
In 1967, Zimmermann discussed how Webern uses brevity to atomize the flow of time, creating a feeling of infinite extension. This led Zimmermann to introduce the idea of time stretching. His approach simplifies the principle of temporal layers and reduces meter to a constant, counted in quarter notes with the metronome marking 60, thus facilitating measurement in seconds, as seen in Photoptosis and the Requiem für einen jungen Dichter (Requiem for a Young Poet).
In Zimmermann’s pluralist phase, the number of simultaneous temporal layers can be indefinite and can vary at any moment. But in the works that employ “time stretching,” there are always two layers unfolding at once. In Zimmermann’s late music, the proportions often derive from the interval of the tritone, whose frequency ratio 7:5 relates to the golden section. The stretching of time, an uninterrupted presence, a unity of the perceptual flow, heralds a music of “thrownness” and being-toward-death, inspired by Heidegger’s concept of Erstreckung — the stretching or thinning out of Dasein between birth and death. In Being and Time (§72.374), Heidegger writes,
Dasein does not fill up a track or stretch “of life” — one which is somehow present-at-hand — with the phases of its momentary actualities. It stretches itself along in such a way that its own Being is constituted in advance as a stretching-along.6
From 1967 onward, a more ominous temporality takes shape in Zimmermann’s work: that of suicide. Suicide is less the literary theme of the Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, via its borrowings from Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Konrad Bayer, than the project of the music itself. While structures accumulate, generating a dense and stagnant listening experience, the music ultimately kills itself by suspending further accumulation.
In his final letters, Zimmermann — the musician of vanity and a reader of Ecclesiastes (fragments of which he set in his cantata Omnia tempus habent [For Every Thing There Is a Season] and combined with Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor in his “Ecclesiastical Action” Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne [So I Returned, and Considered All the Oppressions that Are Done under the Sun]) — concluded that “music, as an art or anti-art, has murdered itself.” In Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, as the knot of the tragedy tightens, the culmination of his work, life, and confrontation with death comes together. In a paradoxical, final creative surge, Zimmermann’s musical “suicide” prefigured his own on 10 August 1970.
Translated from the French by Tadhg Sauvey
1. Bernd Alois ZIMMERMANN (ed. Heribert Henrich), “Du und Ich und Ich und die Welt”: Dokumente aus den Jahren 1940 bis 1950, Hofheim, Wolke, 1998, p. 44. For commentary on Zimmermann’s readings of Augustine, Kant, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger on time, see Siegfried Mauser, “Die Erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen der Zimmermann’schen Zeitphilosophie,” in Zeitphilosophie und Klanggestalt: Untersuchungen zum Werk Bernd Alois Zimmermanns, Mainz, Schott, 1986. See also Carl Dahlhaus, “Sphéricité du temps, à propos de la philosophie de la musique de Bernd Alois Zimmermann” [1978], Contrechamps, 5 (1985), p. 86-91. ↩
2. Bernd Alois ZIMMERMANN, “Mozart und das Alibi” [1955], in Christoph Bitter (ed.), Intervall und Zeit: Aufsätze und Schriften zum Werk, Mainz, Schott, 1974, p. 16. ↩
3. ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-5021, 1955. ↩
4. Bernd Alois ZIMMERMANN, “Du métier de compositeur” [1968], Contrechamps, 5 (1985), p. 57. ↩
5. Bernd Alois ZIMMERMANN, “Dialoge” [1968], in Intervall und Zeit, p. 16. ↩
6. Martin HEIDEGGER, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, 1962, p. 426. ↩
Do you notice a mistake?