It is common knowledge that music unfolds in time, as opposed to the visual arts that unfold in space. Yet when scholars describe essential processes of twentieth-century musical form, they emphasize the category of space, sometimes even more than that of time. Nasreddin-Longo writes, for example, that “Boulez's Structures, Book I (1952) has frequently been spoken of as a vertical and horizontal space within which sound events are contained.” Here, “space” embraces “sound events,” properly speaking, the markers of a time continuum. Taruskin also wrote recently on integrated musical time and space in Babbitt, who, by serializing rhythm, practically merged the dimensions of musical time and space.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Debussy expressed a view of music as a spatial art, offering this mysterious remark: “music and poetry are the only two arts that move in space.” Even earlier, Wagner wrote these poetic lines in his libretto of Parsifal:

In these words, Wagner expressed his longing for a miracle that he might have anticipated: the transformation that took place in late Romantic and post-Romantic music. The art of creating harmonic tension reached such a peak that some composers learned how to generate a state of harmonic spaciousness and timelessness. Timelessness also characterizes the very essence of mythic time as the origin of all things. Markedly, Lévi-Strauss singled out the above poetic lines from the libretto of the Parsifal, remarking that these words suggest “probably the most profound definition that anyone has ever offered for myth.”

During the historic period that followed, Webern substituted spatial symmetry for the time dimension so compressed in his short works. Cage commented on a new system of notation that derives from so-called “graphic notation,” where “the space on the paper is equivalent to time.” When Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) describes one of her circle-scores as organized so that “each sectioning of the circle was a structural cue representing two minutes of time,” she demonstrates that the myth about turning time into space can be directly conveyed through a score.