A bold rethinking of time, music, and human experience, Flow under Constraint argues that what cannot be measured may be most real. Tracing the long history of imposed order on musical experience—from ancient proportional movement to clocks, counting, and algorithms that render time legible to machines—it uncovers rhuthmos : the perception of lived, unquantized flow as a form of resistance to metric control. In an age that counts everything, this book defends the intelligence of unmeasured experience and shows how freedom, creativity, and consciousness can persist beyond the machinery of metron.
William Jordan is a Canadian composer whose work ranges from songs and choral music to chamber, orchestral, and operatic scores. His compositions are informed by the history of Western music together with modernist influences, and has been performed across North America, Europe, and Asia.