Bjørn Kruse: Chronotope – Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra

The title Chronotape is a term used by the Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin,(1895-1975) to describe how an awareness of time and space (chronos and topos) is repre- sented in language and discourse. I find that the term also naturally applies as a model to the experience of temporal and spatial di- mensions in musical “discourse”, where the immediate memory of events in the past, and the expectations of events in the future, fills and enriches the moment of listening. Music creates its own chronotope, a spacious ‘now’, colored by the sensory perception of a past, present, and future.