‘Time’, as the Marschallin observes in Der Rosenkavalier, ‘is a strange thing. If one simply goes along through life, it's nothing at all. But then suddenly, one becomes aware of nothing else.’ So it is in music as well: for three days in mid-January 2009, a group of scholars from diverse fields focused on the element of time in Maria Theresa's Vienna, and more specifically in the works and milieu of Joseph Haydn. Sponsored by the Institut für Analyse, Theorie und Geschichte der Musik at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien and organized by the faculty triumvirate of Marie-Agnes Dittrich, Martin Eybl and Reinhard Kapp, ‘Cycle and Process: Joseph Haydn and Time’ was among the first of many events planned for 2009 by the city of Vienna to observe the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. With the recent appearance of Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), the timing of this particular event could not have been more felicitous. Berger himself gave the closing address at the conference, but his provocative thesis about fundamental changes in the conception of musical time over the course of the eighteenth century was already much in evidence throughout earlier presentations by other speakers.

As with any successful conference, there was added value in the largely unplanned connections that emerged between so many of the presentations. Although each half-day session was devoted to a particular perspective, the focus often moved rapidly – to everyone's benefit – between the general and the particular. The tone for this was set on the very first morning under the rubric of ‘Disjunctures’, which began with a talk by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, Professor of History at the Technische Universität Chemnitz and the author of History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Dohrn-van Rossum's remarks about the measurement, experience and perceived acceleration of time at various points in history provided an ideal framework for thinking about time in both abstract and concrete terms, from the Middle Ages down to the present. Regula Rapp (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), in turn, offered a close reading of a single object: a lady's fan from the late 1770s decorated with detailed maps of the grounds at Eszterháza. Her presentation offered a striking demonstration of how an item with no obvious connection to the dimension of time can in fact be read as having been laid out with very definite temporal perspectives in mind.

In the first afternoon session (‘Orderings of Time’) Reinhard Kapp (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien) surveyed Haydn's personal experience of time, based on references in the composer's correspondence and London notebooks, the early biographical accounts of Griesinger and Dies, and various other contemporary accounts. Time, its measurement and its use were of constant concern to the composer, and Kapp's sources suggested that Haydn himself would have recognized the essential truth of the Marschallin's observations. Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) examined Haydn's ‘Diurnal Cosmology and the Poetics of Solar Time’ in Symphonies 6, 7 and 8 (Le Matin, Le Midi, Le Soir), tracing the course of the sun through all three works in this cycle and offering new insight into the ways in which these works cohere as a cycle, quite apart from their programmatic connections. Rainer Schwob (Universität Wien) looked at the contrasting metaphoric networks associated with day and night in the compositions of Haydn and Mozart, considering various strategies by which certain works or movements could be allied with one or the other time of day.

From the conference venue in the Schönberg-Saal of the Wiener Konzerthaus, it was but a short walk to the Aula of the Alte Universität, where participants joined a public gathering of a thousand or more to hear Herbert Lachmayer, founder and director of the Da Ponte Institut (Vienna), lecture on ‘HAYDN Genius und MusikMarkt: Künstlerische Produktivitätstrategien und gesellschaftliche Öffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert’ (Haydn, Genius and the Musical Market: Strategies of Artistic Production and the Social Sphere in the Eighteenth Century). ‘Lecture’ scarcely captures the theatrical nature of the presentation, which was accompanied by a stunning, rapid-fire array of images both old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. Lachmayer's performance was bookended by two rarely heard works by Haydn, performed by the Haydn Sinfonietta under the direction of Manfred Huss: the so-called Baryton Octet in D major, hX:2 (1775), and the Divertimento in C major, hII:17 (1766). What made the evening more memorable still was that it took place in the very same room in which Haydn had made one of his last public appearances, at a performance of Die Schöpfung on 27 March 1808. The restored room looks very much today as it does in the often-reproduced miniature by Balthasar Wigand that captured the event.

Presentations on the second day were organized around the rubrics of ‘Conceptions of Time’ and ‘The Clock’. The historian of philosophy Richard Heinrich (Universität Wien) addressed issues of time and temporal orientation in the works of Kant and Hölderlin. I (Mark Evan Bonds, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) examined the relatively late and surprisingly gradual emergence of spatial representations of temporal form in music between the 1730s (Johann Mattheson) and 1820s (Anton Reicha). Roger Mathew Grant (University of Pennsylvania) identified a number of passages in Haydn's Die Schöpfung that grapple with the imagined beginning of time: the composer's choices of metre, rhythm and tempo at various points, Grant argued, reflect changing popular conceptions of ‘deep’ time in the late eighteenth century.

From his perspective as a historian of industrial design, Ernst Strouhal (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) described the allure of mechanical devices as a medium of entertainment in late eighteenth-century Vienna, exemplified by a ‘mechanical Turk’ who played (and usually won at) chess. The mechanisms for this and similar inventions grew directly out of the technology of watch-making and betray a contemporary fascination – it would not be too much to say an obsession – with the mechanical imitation of life. This same impetus manifested itself in Haydn's music for the Flötenuhr, which was the topic of Helmut Kowar's talk. Kowar (associate at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna) demonstrated subtle differences among surviving instruments that can be associated with Haydn and traced the effect of the composer's growing familiarity with these instruments on the music he wrote for them. The day's presentations concluded with Sarah Day-O'Connell (Knox College), who identified an underlying preoccupation with elements of time in the English canzonetta, a genre marketed primarily at women. Her musical examples included specially recorded excerpts from canzonettas by Johann Peter Salomon, who was a composer as well as an impresario (and, to judge by these songs, a composer of no small talent).

The third and final day of the conference centred on ‘Narrative’ and ‘Developments’. Hans-Ulrich Fuß (Hamburg) examined the ‘syntax of parentheses’ and the ‘art of digression’ in Haydn's string quartets and symphonies, using as a point of departure eighteenth-century parallels drawn between the composer and the English novelist Laurence Sterne. Christine Siegert (associate at the Joseph-Haydn-Institut, Cologne) considered the means by which Haydn could bring events of the past into the present, drawing on L'isola disabitata as the principal source for her many examples. Federico Celestini (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz) examined particular passages in Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten that project moments of extreme enthusiasm or even ecstasy. Musically, these moments stand outside the conventional trajectories of linear time in music, for they refer neither to what has already been heard nor to what is yet to come. Markus Neuwirth (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) scrutinized the temporal implications of opening ideas in the expositions of Haydn's early symphonies, suggesting that this music operates according to temporal premises that differ from those conventionally applied in the analysis of works from later decades. Markus Rathey (Yale University) explored Haydn's ‘discovery of slowness’ in the temporal and cyclical structures of Die sieben letzten Worte and argued that the cyclical nature of the movements goes well beyond the elements of the verbal narrative to include more purely musical parameters as well.

Before delivering the final paper of the conference, ‘Time's Cycle and Time's Arrow in Music’, Karol Berger claimed that he would have nothing to say about Haydn. In spite of this – or, indeed, because of this – his wide-ranging observations on the nature of musical time and the changing perceptions of it, particularly in the eighteenth century, provided a fitting end for a conference that was just as much about time as it was about Haydn, and most of all about the ‘and’ connecting them.