Andrew Lawrence-King offers an online practical workshop that explores how Time might have felt to 17th-century musicians, hosted by Amherst Early Music Festival on Saturday June 5th, 2021: further details here.

More than a century after Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905, in which he published four paradigm-shifting papers on Quantum Theory, Brownian Motion, Mass/Energy Equivalence and Relativity, most of us still consider the implications of Relativistic Time to be paradoxical.

We live our everyday lives and make music within a pre-1900 understanding of Time ‘like an ever-rolling stream’. This is Newton’s concept of Absolute Time, first published in his 1687 Principia, and bitterly contested amongst mathematicians for decades afterwards. Amongst 18^th-century musicians and the general public, acceptance of Newtonian ideas must have lagged even further behind, just as for most of us today, Hawking’s Brief History of Time (1988) remains counter-intuitive.

In this sense, the works of Josquin, Dowland & Monteverdi, even Lully & Purcell, are ‘music of an earlier Time’. Until Newton, Time was defined by Aristotle’s Physics (4^th cent. BC) as ‘a number of change/motion in respect of before and after’.

At this participatory workshop, everyone is sure to have a Good Time. Andrew leads some mind-games and musical practice, exploring how it might feel to make pre-Newtonian music. What can we discover, not just quantitively, but about the quality of Aristotelean Time? Dare we follow Phaeton’s example, and seize the reins of Apollo’s time-chariot? What about ‘unmeasured’ genres? What really counts in Early Music?

Open to singers and all instrumentalists, relevant to all repertoires up to at least 1800. Instruments are optional, but please bring with you an open mind and a free hand (or foot)!