Steve Schwartz: >But what's the appeal? [of Torke's theoretical notion that "music has >the capacity to suspend time, to make us forget time"] I'm not saying >that music should never do this. After all, we can all think of places >in musical works where the music seems to stop... the forward motion >suspends, before it goes on again. But why, according to Torke, should >music stop? Why is this inherently better than music, in Torke's terms, >a slave to time? What's the problem with forward motion? I don't think Torke's music stops, nor do I think he wants it to, and I don't know if it is a matter of "better"; I am certainly not comfortable with the idea of responding for Torke. In the examples I gave of my own musical experiences of "stopping time" there was actually "forward motion" of a thematic and harmonic sort, and the Mahler finale certainly climaxes. Time stopped for me as a listener in the sense that I had an intense focus on the moment; the freezing of the moment was psychological. Personally, I certainly would not want this to happen all the time. In the case of the music by Torke that I know, the driving rhythms do not pause and they are interesting in themselves. Thematic and harmonic development may be entirely absent, for all I know; I don't know his music well enough to say. But I think he might say, so what? Most music doesn't have nearly enough rhythmic interest. If I knew more about Asian music, I might be able to compare Torke's aesthetic to some of that. What little I've heard, though, tends to be highly percussive and rhythmically complex; hence the suggestion. I have no idea if there is any influence to trace. There is one piece by a Western composer, written in a Japanese style, Rochberg's Slow Fires of Autumn, which I might have mentioned before as making time stop for me. It stops musically too. It has short intense phrases and a lot of silence in it. No forward motion at all, to speak of. I have mentioned it on previous occasions as a piece I find both profoundly restful and exciting at the same time. Not for everyone, I assume. Too bad. Jim Tobin