The subject of Music Quickens Time is music’s relationship to what is called, simply, “life.” There are disclaimers to the effect that its author will “attempt the impossible,” but, in general, the “parallels” shared by music, politics, and other things are drawn without much strain.

It would be odd if Daniel Barenboim, the outspoken conductor and pianist, had nothing interesting to say about music, and in a chapter entitled “Sound and Thought” his argument repays attention. He sets up a contrast to his own Romantic approach by quoting John Locke’s assertion that, despite the social prestige it confers, music “wastes so much of a young man’s time to gain but a moderate skill in it; and engages often in such odd company, that many think it much better spared.” Against this view, Barenboim places the idea that music is a source of wisdom for life. His book is, in many ways, a philosophical defense of the importance most educated people attach to “the arts.”

He begins by discussing what might be called the phenomenology of musical sound. The relationship of music to silence is his central idea, and he uses silence to account for our response to well-known pieces. The first chord of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata suggests a quarrel with silence by sharply interrupting it, and the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isoldeseems to embrace silence by very slowly emerging from it. He ponders “the life span of a