Music sculpts time, time sculpts music. Instrumental music does not surrender to its own movements, these are secretly (or voluntarily) pre-determined by the particular conception that the composer has of time, but also by the very nature of temporal perception. The various conceptions of time that follow one another from the Middle Ages to the present day induce to a large extent the succession of musical events, as is shown by the strict parallel between the evolutions of music (from baroque to classical style) and time (from that of the seventeenth to that of the nineteenth). On the other hand, any temporal perception challenges the mind with a mixture of flow and synthesis. This reality, which has not changed, necessarily invites one to abandon oneself to the flow or to privilege synthesis. No doubt a choice was made a long time ago (St Augustine) and which, at the heart of Western musical tradition, favors synthesis, the hold on time (composition is the Latin equivalent of the Greek word synthesis). Thus, the musical structures tend to make the successive phenomenon something that participates in the not successive: the music expands the present, "presentifies" the time, grants the moment and the duration.
A first part analyzes in the vague concept of (perceived) time the abstract notions that intermingle there: flow, synthesis, present, succession, duration, simultaneity are at the same time surrounded by a critical reading of Husserl and made tangible by the musical matter. A second part identifies the technical means that the musician uses to compose the time, this mixed flow and synthesis: are thus studied in turn rhythm, variation, form and mode, in their temporal implications which structure the succession and the duration, the one after the other and the whole. A third part outlines a brief history of the intention, from St Augustine to Hegel.