Jim Tobin:

>But I would really like to say some more about Torke's theoretical
>notion that "music has the capacity to suspend time, to make us forget
>time," in effect to forget--for a time--about the physical limitations
>shared by music and by persons.  Any music that can do that has, for the
>listener who finds it so, a lot going for it.

But what's the appeal?  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 (think of Bach's massive "Aber" in the opening chorus of
Cantata 21 -- a deliberate, massive application of the brakes or even
that Brahms horn call in the introduction to the First Symphony finale),
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?

Steve Schwartz