Time's Department Store: A Polyphonic Score for Reading
Timothy E. McCracken · University of Toronto Quarterly · 1992
You have been invited to write on knowing; specifically the discovery / invention problem of musical knowing. Even though you are working with time, you must begin with this visual problem: how can you introduce the time of music only within a space? Your desk is a working metaphor for the promises and problems at hand. Straight ahead is your computer screen. The impatient cursor blinks on the empty blue field. You must etch in here what others will see. More questions emerge from the visual: are you discovering a hidden truth waiting in the circuits? Or will you be making a new truth? Or is all knowing a polyphonic theft, a fresh composition yet one tapped into the grammar of experience?