Christian Accaoui's 'Le temps musical' Examines Music's Temporal Paradox

In 'Le temps musical', Christian Accaoui explores music as a temporal phenomenon, analyzing it through the lens of musical experience rather than directly confronting metaphysical time. He links his conception of musical time to Augustine's dialectic between intentio (ultimately referred to God) and distentio, proposing a 'time-fresco' that reconciles the instant and duration, aiming for total mastery of time through a succession of instants pre-conceived by the composer. Accaoui argues that this mastery, characteristic of Western music and realized through reasoned use of rhythm, variation, form, and scale, paradoxically abolishes time by bringing it closer to eternity. Despite a purely musical starting point, the analysis returns to the metaphysical enigma of musical time and its relation to eternity, acknowledging that classical time-fresco is inseparable from a metaphysics of time, and it is impossible to disentangle compositional technique from metaphysical underpinnings. The book is published by Éditions Desclée de Brouwer.