By this he means many different things, including how music exists in time, how music portrays time, and how music creates time. The temporalities of today's music tell us about time in our society and suggest to us new ways of listening to music of the past. These temporalities may be grouped more broadly into the linear and the nonlinear. Linear time in music is linked to process and the fulfillment of a listener's expectations in succession. This means that much twentieth-century music may be regarded as linear, though its harmonic goals are equivocal.
Nonlinear time is by contrast non-processive.
Examples of nonlinear aspects of a piece are textural consistency and durational proportions. A nonlinear sense of time is thus conveyed which is not bound to succession but rather to the meanings of those gestures. What is novel in Kramer's treatment of this subject is the emphasis on time rather than on convention. The interaction between the processive and the gestural meanings of time is discussed at length in an analysis of the first movement of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Opus 135 . Kramer demonstrates, in part by recomposing sections, that it is possible to hear not just one but several continuities in the piece.