Temporal Experience in George Benjamin’s Sudden Time

This chapter examines the orchestral composition Sudden Time, by British composer George Benjamin (b. 1960) in relation to ideas of temporal perception. In his program note, the composer makes a connection to malleable time in how the work was conceived, and in so doing opens it up for analysis based on these ideas. Starting with context from various approaches to musical time, distinctions are made between how we may experience time, broadly speaking as Newtonian and chronometric, or Einsteinian and psychological. The chapter then applies these ideas to a reading of Sudden Time in which perceptual time is understood to be manipulated through a range of compositional devices that manifest in different “timezones” – sometimes heard successively, sometimes concurrently. The work may be seen as grounded in temporal ideas that help us understand its structures and material, whilst these very structures also illuminate temporal ideas in themselves.