Music exists in time. All musicians know this fundamental truth—but what does it actually mean? Thirteen scholars probe the temporality of music from a great variety of perspectives, in response to challenges that Christopher F. Hasty, Walter Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University, laid out in his groundbreaking Meter as Rhythm.

The essays included here bridge the conventional divides between theory, history, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, performance practice, cognitive psychology, and dance studies. In these investigations, music emerges as an art form that has an important lesson to teach. Not only can music be understood as sounds shaped in time but—more radically—as time shaped in sounds.