Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound

Imagination is part of the practice of nearly every musician. But does this faculty only aid in the preparation of music—practising, rehearsing, devising, composing—or is it more fundamental to the art form? By recasting temporality from a chronology of past, present, and future to a phenomenology of present and non-present, this publication seeks to elucidate the relationship between one’s situation within and curiosity beyond the present across a variety of musical practices. Through studies of sampling and archiving, variation and silence, history and utopia, forgery and counterfactuals, the contributors articulate in polyphony a chronologically conjoined identity for the not here, not now.