Time is a muse that never fades.
Across genres and generations, musicians have grappled with its passage—its beauty, its brutality, and its mystery. From ticking clocks and stretched-out rhythms to lyrics that mourn lost moments or anticipate futures unknown, these pieces don’t just measure time—they feel it. Here are ten standout works that explore time as theme, technique, or emotional anchor—each one a reminder that music, like time, never truly stands still.
Music about time: 15 timeless works
1. Pink Floyd: 'Time' (1973)
Pink Floyd used real clocks for the legendary intro
A sonic meditation on the fleeting nature of life, 'Time' is one of the most iconic tracks from Pink Floyd's definitive album, 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon. It begins with a cacophony of chiming clocks, which were individually recorded in an antique store by engineer Alan Parsons.
The song explores the anxiety of wasted youth, with David Gilmour’s searing guitar solo embodying existential urgency. Lyrics like “you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking” hit hard as a warning. It’s both musically daring and lyrically poignant—rock music’s ultimate reminder that time waits for no one.
2. Steve Reich: Different Trains (1988)
Reich used real Holocaust survivors' voices as rhythmic material
A minimalist masterpiece, Steve Reich's Different Trains uses recorded speech samples from Holocaust survivors and train conductors, which Reich then mimicked with string instruments. Divided into three movements, it contrasts the American trains of Reich’s youth with the trains that took European Jews to concentration camps.
The sampled voices don’t just narrate—they provide pitch and rhythm, turning trauma into music. This innovative use of time as both historical subject and compositional technique makes it one of Reich’s most powerful works. The emotional impact grows with each listen, as the horror of the past collides with the structure of classical minimalism.
3. Hans Zimmer: 'Time' (from Inception, 2010)
Zimmer builds his iconic 'Time' theme on just two chords
Hans Zimmer’s Time is a haunting, slow-build composition that closes Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Built around a simple, repeated chord progression, it expands gradually with layered strings and a ticking clock motif. The minimalism reflects the film’s dream-layered themes, where time stretches and collapses.
Zimmer distorted a slowed-down version of Édith Piaf’s famous song 'Non, je ne regrette rien', which inspired the film’s time mechanics. Despite—or because of—its simplicity, 'Time' has become one of Zimmer’s most enduring works, often used outside of the film in everything from trailers to graduation videos. Its emotional crescendo suggests reflection, release, and the inexorable passage of time.
4. Miles Davis: 'Time After Time' (1985)
Miles Davis covered Cyndi Lauper—and made it deeply his own
Originally a pop ballad by Cyndi Lauper, Time After Time was transformed by Miles Davis into a moody, reflective jazz piece. His version strips the original of its vocal hooks and replaces them with plaintive trumpet phrases, dripping with melancholy.
Recorded during his electric period, this cover was controversial among purists but demonstrated Davis’s constant reinvention. He played it live for years, treating it like a jazz standard. The cover’s emotional pull lies in how Davis uses silence and space—he doesn't fill every beat, letting time itself hang in the air. It’s a masterclass in temporal nuance and mood.
5. Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach (1976)
This 5-hour opera has no traditional plot—and hardly ever stops
Philip Glass’s avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach is a monumental exploration of time, repetition, and perception. With no intermission and no traditional narrative, it challenges audience expectations. Glass employs his signature arpeggios and rhythmic cycles to stretch time, encouraging the listener to surrender to the flow.
The piece features solfège syllables, numbers, and abstract texts, reflecting the nonlinear nature of Einsteinian physics. Director Robert Wilson encouraged audience members to come and go freely—breaking from opera tradition. The piece changed what music-theatre could be, turning time itself into a character. A hypnotic, exhausting, and exhilarating journey through temporal abstraction.
6. Debussy: 'Clair de Lune' (1890–1905)
Debussy manipulates musical time like a dream
Though not explicitly about time, Debussy's much loved 'Clair de lune' plays with temporal perception like few other piano works. Its impressionistic style—fluid, with rubato and suspended harmonies—makes time feel like it’s pausing or melting. Debussy composed it over 15 years, and it mirrors his maturing aesthetic: from the clear Romanticism of early drafts to the foggy Impressionism of its final form.
The piece feels like moonlight drifting across water, a moment stretched into eternity. It’s this mastery of implied time, rather than time kept, that places Debussy’s work among the most temporally transcendent. Listening to 'Clair de lune' feels like dreaming while awake.
7. John Cage: 4’33” (1952)
Cage’s 'silent' piece turned ambient noise into music
At first glance, 4’33” appears to be four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. But that’s the point. John Cage’s radical piece, in which the performer doesn’t play a single note, reframes ambient sound as the music itself. It forces listeners to confront the passage of time and the environment they’re in.
The creak of seats, distant coughs, birdsong—all become the composition. It’s a provocative invitation to be present. The piece was inspired by Cage’s experience in an anechoic chamber where he heard his own body. 4’33” is about time, attention, and redefining what music can be.
8. The Rolling Stones:'Time Waits for No One' (1974)
Mick Taylor’s final Stones solo was a time-stopping moment
A lesser-known gem from the Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’n Roll album, 'Time Waits for No One' stands apart for its introspective mood and Latin-tinged groove. The lyrics reflect on aging, mortality, and the ephemeral nature of youth—a rare philosophical turn for the band.
But it’s Mick Taylor’s extended, lyrical guitar solo that steals the show, gliding effortlessly as if trying to suspend time itself. It was also one of his last recordings with the band, making it feel like a farewell. The song has grown in stature over the years, a mellow reminder that even rock gods can’t stop the clock.
9. Judy Collins: 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' (1968)
The folk anthem written by a teenager—that feels eternal
Written by folk music legend Sandy Denny when she was just 19, 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' became iconic through Judy Collins’s version. The song contemplates the swift passing of seasons and moments, its gentle melody capturing the wistful sadness of time slipping by. Collins’s crystalline voice brings grace and warmth to the track, accompanied by soft acoustic guitar.
The lyrics, reflective and simple, speak to something universally felt but hard to articulate. The song has been covered countless times, but none have eclipsed the haunting purity of Collins’s interpretation. It remains a timeless meditation on impermanence and acceptance.
10. Dowland: 'Time stands still' (1603)
A hypnotic paean to the timelessness of beauty
In his mesmerising lute song, the perfection of a beloved holds her admirer in thrall, suspending time with an enduring truth. Just as did Shakespeare and Keats, Dowland meditates on the timelessness of beauty and sets the word 'time' suspended across the bar-line, contrasting it with the movement of earthly things changing.
11. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 (1721)
Bach plays at the further shores of rhythm and metre
Bach, like Haydn and Brahms after him, loved to play tricks with time. His ingenuity can be seen in devices like his 'crab canons', which can be played backwards and forwards. Shifted barlines are a feature of the Brandenburg Concertos, and particularly remarkable in the opening of No. 3 which is notated in two but written across the barlines in triple time, and heard by its listeners as if in a three that is not quite anchored. Not quite following? Have a listen:
The slow movements of No. 4 & 5 concertos also deliberately obscure the beginning of the bars, constantly shifting them and wrong-footing the audience giving a complex listening experience.
The Brandenburgs are themselves a kind of time journey, with some concertos using 17th century instruments, like recorders and gambas, and others reinventing orchestration altogether for a new age.
12. Ligeti: Poème Symphonique (1962)
Wind up 100 metronomes. Leave them to do their thing
György Ligeti's famous 1962 piece was designed as a riposte to all musical ideologues, and was influenced by the Fluxus movement (Reich's Pendulum Music is a similar experiment with microphones). His instructions were that 100 metronomes should all be wound up at the same time, and at the beat of a conductor be left to tick.
The resultant cacophony of manic clicking gradually thins out as they unwind at different times, and their different speeds also become detectable until at the last there is just one metronome ticking alone. In our digital age, the event could last for days, and Ligeti's Poème will be more and more difficult to put on as mechanical metronomes become collectors' pieces.
Strangely hypnotic:
13. James Tenney: Having never written a note for percussion (1971)
A massive crescendo and diminuendo - and never the same piece twice
Tenney, Minimalist composer and theorist, friend of Reich and Glass in the 1960s, conceived this piece to be played on any kind of large gong or cymbal. Essentially, it's the very opposite of Cage's 4'33, a prescribed period of time in which to listen to atmospherics.
Having never written a note can last for as long or short a time as the performer chooses, being essentially a gargantuan crescendo and diminuendo which will be affected by the acoustic of the space and the range of overtones and reflections possible - and, of course, by the performer's decision in the moment.
14. Gérard Grisey: Vortex temporum (Vortex of Times, 1994-96)
Vortex of Times is a late work by the spectralist pioneer Gérard Grisey, which fulfils his vision that music can transfigure time.
With feverish, dance-like, almost minimalist rhythms, Grisey adventures through three time frames: the 'normal' time of humans (the time of speech and breathing), an 'expanded' time, the time of the whales (the rhythms of sleep), and the 'compressed' time of birds and insects (time contracted to an extremity beyond our perception). The dizzying arpeggios of the opening reappear later as slowly unfurling spirals, transformed before our very ears.
15. Harrison Birtwistle: Harrison’s Clocks (1997-98)
This intricate piano piece was inspired by the 18th century clock-maker John Harrison, who succeeded in measuring longitude.
Birtwistle plays with time, repetition and memory, with each 'clock' embodying a different idea. The first is a torrent of quavers against semi-quavers which ends in a crisis; the second is a mechanism limping into existence. The third has two ostinati grinding against each other, the fourth clock is all about winding down, while the final clock is a toccata, with a clear pulse all the way through.
'There are repetitions, but they are never exact repetitions,' commented Birtwistle of the piece. By multiplying his mechanisms and setting them off-kilter he challenged the idea of what a clock might be.
