It's also a kind of Definition of Traveler ?!

The music has a static character. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future, with linear continuity alone. It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress, or having come from anywhere in particular.


by Composer Christian Wolff

Le Silence

nothing happens

Composer Philip Glass describes the temporal continuum in his 4 1/2-hour work Music in Twelve Parts (1974) :


When it becomes apparent that nothing "happens" in the usual sense, but that, instead, the gradual accretion of musical material can and does serve as the basis of the listener's attention, then he can perhaps discover another mode of listening - one in which neither memory nor anticipation (the usual psychological devices of programmatic music, whether Baroque, Classic, Romantic, or Modernistic) have a place in sustaining the texture, quality, or reality of the musical experience. It is hoped that one would be able to perceive the music as a ... pure medium " of sound."


Philip Glass, quoted in Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekiet (New York : Broude, 1983), p.79.