I’ve been thinking about the many times I’ve tried to write about time. This was partly inspired by recent posts I’ve written on music, memory, nostalgia and brevity. Partly, too, because time is a topic that rarely takes time off in my brain. And partly, no doubt, because I just haven’t had much time this past week to do the thing I’m trying to find more time to do: writing.
When you spend a lot of time with music—whether as listener, composer, performer, writer, teacher or a combination of these and other roles—it’s inevitable that you reflect on the passage of time and how it gets represented. Music, after all, is a time-based art, a way of organising sound in time (or time in sound, if you prefer). And while I never want to turn those kinds of definitions into strong distinctions—I think all art forms are time-based, because everything we do is time-based, and I believe music relies on space as much as anything—there is no getting away from music’s timeliness.
A lot of the writing I’ve done as an academic and occasional music journalist has been an exploration of music in, or as, time and space. My first book, about Portuguese fado, explored the relationship between songs, memory and place. My third book, The Late Voice, took time, age and experience as ways of exploring songwriters, singers and songs. Now, with my focus on songs and objects, I find myself thinking about how we narrate our lives through our engagement with the things around us. That’s a relationship based on time, and also an opportunity to think again about time as a thing that gets represented in songs.
All songs take time, but there are also countless songs that take time as their topic. With all of this in mind, I’m considering a series of posts on Songs About Time that will thread into the other topics I write about here.
I’ll only be able to scratch the surface of this one. I’ll begin with one that’s never far from my mind.
‘I do not fear time’
I began the section on time in The Late Voice by referring to Nina Simone’s wonderful version of Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’. This is such an important song to me that I’ll probably devote a separate post or two to tracing its longer trajectory, its journey in time. (I have already done that in an academic essay available on my website, though I may still produce a media-enhanced version of that text for Substack in the future.)
For now, though, I’ll stick with Simone’s version for its interplay of acceptance and anxiety over the passing of time. I remain intrigued by the way Simone emphasizes the line ‘I do not fear time’ towards the end of the song, while also setting up time (via her introduction to the song) as something that can cause some consternation, if not outright fear.
Simone performed ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ at a 1969 concert at Philharmonic Hall that became the basis for the album Black Gold, released in 1970. While she may have performed the song on other occasions, this is the only recording I’m aware of. I’ve mostly known it in its album form, with Simone’s spoken introduction (the version I’m sharing here), though it was also released in edited form as a single, along with another track from the album (‘The Assignment Sequence’), and that shorter version has also been released on compilations.
For me, Simone’s introduction to the song is a vital part of her performance and I think it’s best heard in this version. It takes longer, but the extra time is used to build a mood of contemplation appropriate to the song and its subject matter.
By the time Simone added Denny’s song to her repertoire in the late 1960s, she had amassed considerable personal and professional experience, and it is this experience—what I call Nina Simone’s ‘late voice’—that I hear in play right from the pre-song narration:
‘Let's see what we can do with this lovely, lovely thing that goes past all racial conflict and all kinds of conflict. It is a reflective tune and some time in your life you will have occasion to say. “What is this thing called time? You know, what is that?” … You go to work by the clock. You get your Martini in the afternoon by the clock. You get your coffee by the clock … You have to get on the plane at a certain time … It goes on and on and on. Time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? And then one day you look in the mirror—how old—and you say, “Where did the time go?” We’ll leave you with that one.’
Simone was only thirty-six when she recorded ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, but she pours a lifetime’s experience into her rendition.
It’s likely that Simone heard ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ on Judy Collins’ 1968 album of the same name, given that she attempted to record Collins’s song ‘My Father’ (from the same album) not long after recording Denny’s song. Collins was the first artist to release a recording of the song, having initially placed it on the B-side of her single release of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ (another cover released prior to the composer’s own version).
Another influence I hear from Collins is Simone’s use of the ‘morning sky’ version of the first line. Denny’s most well-known version starts ‘Across the evening sky’, though there are other variations which I’ve written about elsewhere.
Where Denny’s version of the song with Fairport Convention drew much of its affect from its stately pace, Simone’s derives its power from its use of silence, beginning with the introduction. She speaks very softly, creating an intimacy that invites her audience to start to think about time. Such intimacy causes an awareness of time’s passing that, contrary to the assertion in Denny’s lyric, could lead to fear if unchecked.
In her brilliant book Time, Eva Hoffman describes the ‘chronophobia’ she experienced as a child. She recalls reading in the silence of her room and ‘listening to the clock … aware that each tick-tock was irreversible, and that the stealing of time, second by second, would never stop’.
At the same time, an imposed silence can encourage us to turn to our memory in order to negotiate sensory confusion. As Pierre Nora writes in regard to official silences, ‘the observance of a commemorative minute of silence, which might seem to be a strictly symbolic act, disrupts time, thus concentrating memory’.
As both Nora and Hoffman observe, it is time that allows us to think about time: ‘the need for reflection, for making sense of our transient condition, is time’s paradoxical gift to us, and possibly the best consolation for its ultimate power’ (Hoffman).
Although ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ engages with chronophobia, it is arguably more concerned with reflection. This is true for the versions by Denny, Collins and Simone; what Simone’s version may be said to add is a sense of ‘dislocation’ that ‘exacerbates the consciousness of time’ (Hoffman’s words again). This results from the silence and stillness at the heart of Simone’s rendition, a silence which seems to be, paradoxically, even louder on record because of the listener’s knowledge that they are listening to a live recording.
The ‘silence’ of the concert hall is not really that silent, as John Cage and others showed us long ago, and the addition of audience, equipment and other background noise adds layers of sound against which the fragility of Simone’s stark performance is forced to compete. Initially backed only by a gently strummed acoustic guitar, she slowly sings the first two verses and refrains before taking a brief yet quietly virtuosic piano solo.
The sense of reverie is enhanced when, in the first verse, she stretches the word ‘dreaming’ (from about 3:03 in the recording above) and uses melisma to make the word flutter slightly above the melody, as if relocating the song itself to a space of dreaming and contemplation. During the second verse, soft percussion enters (from around 4:15), a single, steady beat that, at 60 bpm, echoes the ticking of a clock and serves as a reminder of the passing of time. (This bpm is also at the lower end of the average adult resting heart beat).
For the third verse the piano is silent again and Weldon Irvine’s organ shimmers ghostlike in the background. The overall impression is one of peaceful, thoughtful reflection and a yearning devoid of any bitterness (it ‘goes past … all kinds of conflict’). This makes what happens next all the more surprising. Before the final ‘goes’ has disappeared the band comes crashing in, organ, electric guitar and percussion providing what is presumably a climax to the show (‘we leave you with that one’).
It’s a shocking moment, jolting listeners from whatever reveries they may have settled into. Time seemed to have stood still, we let it go by, not knowing where it went, unworried until the band returned like a superego telling us to move on from our fantasy. It’s both part of the masquerade—the abrupt climax to the show—and brutally honest, suggesting that experience can be a shattering process as much as the gradual one Simone narrates in her introduction. It’s like an alarm clock recalling dreamers to the demands of the day.
Mike Butler’s description of the performance (in the CD liner notes to Black Gold) as ‘a dream encounter between Nina and Sandy Denny’ seems entirely apt, even if it’s not clear whose dream Butler is referring to. ‘Dream’ captures something of the ethereal, uncanny otherness of this magisterial performance, and also offers a reminder that dreams get interrupted by the demands of the day. ‘Meeting’, meanwhile, recognizes that Simone’s version does not replace, better or reinvent Denny’s, but rather encounters it in a timeless and liminal space. Rarely has the fragility of time, space and existence been caught so effectively on tape.
What can be done with a melody, and hence what can be done with time, are vital aspects of musical affect. Singers can play tricks with our expectations and use vocal art to alter our sense of time. Examples include the use of tempo rubato (‘stolen time’), rhythm and vocal phrasing, all of which affect our sense of the perception of time by opening up a long present of expectation and surprise, a dialectic engagement with song.
Philip Ward writes of Sandy Denny’s vocal art that her ‘rubato elongation of a line seems to make time stand still’. That magic is put to great effect on Denny’s own versions of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’. It’s also what seems to be aimed for, and is certainly achieved, in the performance by Nina Simone, that ever-fascinating case study in the delicate balancing act of taking control of another’s song and being true to it.
Sometimes what I turn to when I don’t have much time is a song like this one which will take even more time from me. In the interests of transparency, sometimes what I turn to are words I’ve written before. A large part of this post is based on a previously published blog post about Nina Simone’s ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, itself based on the 2013 book I wrote about Simone.