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Karol Berger's book addresses one of the most interesting if not entirely novel topics in recent historiography: the fundamental change in the artistic understanding of temporality since the second half of the eighteenth century. This study examines a phase in history during which an awareness of being on the threshold of a new epoch and a forward-thinking intellectual outlook became prominent. These were based on the faster exchange of knowledge and the rapid increase of experience made possible through the mediums of printed music and music journals, leading in our case to the emergence of music historiography. The various phenomena termed 'pressure of experience' by the sociologist Wolf Lepenies, referred to as a 'horizon of expectation' by the historian Reinhart Koselleck and described as 'acceleration factors' by the philosopher Hans Blumenberg thirty years ago (in relation to the period around 1800) are no longer subjects of controversy in the field of musicology. Yet Berger's book on the transition from a cyclical to a goal-directed notion of time is nevertheless a highly fruitful reading experience, because of its thought-provoking contents, and it is necessary to explain why this is so.
Any readers who expect Berger's book to introduce them to its complex subject matter through a reflection on methods and conceptual critique will be disappointed. The question of why (and with what far-reaching consequences) music theorists set about dividing art into binary oppositions of old and new, regressive and progressive, so that they could understand the increasing wealth of data as a meaningful coexistence and sequence of events, remains in the background. Nor is the question of why one should perceive Bach's music as 'cyclical' but that of Mozart as being like an 'arrow' examined in conceptual-historical or cultural-theoretical terms. In fact, Berger barely offers any explanation for his excellent idea of associating the study Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987) by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould with the title of his own book. Gould's description of one of the most dramatic episodes in modern natural research, the discovery of the earth's age and the radical change in human historical thinking, is only mentioned...