This book is a comprehensive examination of the conception, perception, performance, and composition of time in music across time and culture. It surveys the literature of time in mathematics, philosophy, psychology, music theory, and somatic studies (medicine and disability studies) and looks ahead through original research in performance, composition, psychology, and education. It is the first monograph solely devoted to the theory of construction of musical time since Kramer in 1988, with new insights, mathematical precision, and an expansive global and historical context.

This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories to the area of musico-literary studies, drawing from the fields of semiotics, disability studies, musicology, psychoanalysis, music psychology, emotion and affect theory, new media, cosmopolitanism, globalization, ethnicity and biraciality. Chapters range from critical analyses of the representation of music and the musical profession in contemporary novels to examination of the forms and cultural meanings of contemporary intermedia and multimedia works.