Compositions for musical clocks made possible a newly objective exploration of the relationship between music and time. Works by George Frideric Handel, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reflected the absolute and uniform flow of Newtonian time. In contrast, Leopold Mozart’s clock music alternated between two different meters and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used more complex tempo ratios in a musical installation, Fantasy in F minor (K.608), built around a dramatically illuminated pendulum. Repeated thousands of times, this installation pitted clock against music, in effect providing a new kind of experiment that favored relative Leibnizian time over uniform Newtonian time. As if responding to K.608, Joseph Haydn incorporated his own clock music into his Symphony No. 101 in order first to underline, then to stop time. Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor, D940, brought these temporal experiments into a new realm of intimate musical experience.

Peter Pesic, a historian, pianist, and physicist, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author of seven books published by MIT Press, including Music and the Making of Modern Science (2014), Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (2017), and Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science (2022). His sixty papers concern the history of science, music, and ideas. A fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society, he is also the recipient of the Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize and the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize from the History of Science Society.

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