In my experience, music theory texts are sometimes interesting, usually boring, sometimes admirable, rarely exciting, and never inspiring. Maybe I haven't read enough theory texts. But this one is scholarship bordering on art. It expands your mind, asks you to think differently, maybe even to use a part of your brain you have never thought would apply to Western Classical music. And it's very well written, without gumming your eyes up with a lot of unnecessary theoretical jargon.

This is one of the few theory books that I can say was a pleasure to read, in fact it was a treasure to unearth it and think about it and then attempt to apply it to works that I am familiar with. It definitely changed the way that I perceive music.

...in 1988 for a book like Jonathan D. Kramer's "The Time of Music" to appear because it was with this comprehensive piece of work that music started to cease being considered, in an almost exhaustive manner, "the art of sounds", as musicians themselves were indirectly encouraged to realise that time and not sound is the only ontological dimension of music. Kramer has a peculiar gift of revealing the "beyonds" of musical time perception and in so doing he actually teaches the reader how to look after the relevant aspects of music listening: Beethoven, Scönberg and Stravinski (to whom the author dedicates three separate "analytic interludes") thus become "new" composers to whoever reads Kramer's writings. In so doing, he is not only commenting on the temporal aspects of a few compositions, as J. D. Kramer, while depicting temporality, by no means foregoes pitch. In his analysis, sound is always a bearer of temporal significance. It illuminates the qualities of musical time and offers consistency to the Kramerian "jargon" which includes terms such as "linearity" and "nonlinearity", "vertical", "moment" or "multidirectional" time etc. Perhaps the best thing about this book is the way Kramer avoids proposing a "musical language". What he actually does is to create a general, yet solid theoretic and aesthetic framework into which musicians are supposed to fell free to explore the qualities of musical time both in listening, instrumental performance and musical composition. I have come across "The Time of Music" in 1995, a year after I had published a book of my own dedicated to music temporal phenomena. I was thus amazed to see that there was no apparent clash between my discoveries and Kramer's theoretic work: he only gave me a larger perspective and a better motivation to continue the search for meaning in this elusive dimension that we call (musical) time.

I laughed all the way through. I loved how witty and clever they all were. My husband and I keep it in our car for when we head to the green!