Examples of nonlinear aspects of a piece are textural consistency and durational proportions. Nonlinear time is by contrast non-processive. Works such as Schoenberg's Opus 19 piano pieces (the first of which is analyzed) exemplify so-called nondirected linearity, as opposed to the predominantly goal-directed linearity of the common practice period. This means that much twentieth-century music may be regarded as linear, though its harmonic goals are equivocal. Tonal progression is seen as a powerful way to project linear time, but not as the only way: linearity might also be projected through processes or evolutions of texture, gestural function, and hypermetric stability. Linear time in music is linked to process and the fulfillment of a listener's expectations in succession. These temporalities may be grouped more broadly into the linear and the nonlinear. Kramer suggests several categories of musical time, ranging from goal-directed linearity to moment and 'vertical' time. The temporalities of today's music tell us about time in our society and suggest to us new ways of listening to music of the past. In these varied musics-for example, music from Bali, a Mozart symphony, a process piece of Steve Reich-there is a difference not only in style but also in time-sense, which itself expresses cultural values. We 'learn' time by listening to music of all types and periods. By this he means many different things, including how music exists in time, how music portrays time, and how music creates time. To Kramer, the meaning of music resides in its temporality.

This book by its very structure, then, evokes the variety of time in sound: one reads almost as if one is listening, with a temporal awareness heightened by Kramer's questions of both old music and new, of our perceptual processes and methods of analysis. It is as if Kramer believes that in order to understand musical time we must experience it as we read. Indeed, a musical logic does seem to guide the exposition and development of ideas in this fascinating, thought-provoking work. 'This book is as much composed as it is written,' states Jonathan Kramer in his preface to The Time of Music.

The succession of articulated durations