Ian Crisp:

>... the "raw material" of music is not sound but time.  Sound
>is the thing that structures time and makes shapes and patterns in it;

This is in accord with Steve Schwartz' interesting and provocative
comment, "I would argue that music shapes time," and I am much more
inclined to hear more about it than to dispute it.  But when Steve says:

>Torke, it seems to me, likes toffee -- a lot of toffee, morning,
>noon, and night, all the time -- and he never seems to tire of it.
>It's like someone passing their entire life -- birth, childhood,
>adolescence, maturity, and death-- in a single room.

my reaction is, maybe, but I don't think so.  Since what I really wanted
to do, more than hear Torke' latest works, was to explore his musical
aesthetics, I stopped by Borders and picked up the Naxos disc, so I could
read Torke's note for myself and then hear the music, about which Steve
says"

>Truth to tell, I did like spots, mostly in the percussion concerto,
>possibly because Torke's rhythms fostered the illusion of movement.

My reaction to the percussion concerto is that it should be choreographed
as dance--perhaps with brightly colored streamers--and that such a ballet
would have tremendous excitement and fast (physical--though I assume
Steve meant musical) movement.  The musical work, especially the outer
movements, is filled with syncopated polyrhythms, and I am a sucker for
those, so it did not seem long to me.

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.  The notion of making time stand
still is of course metaphorical; because, obviously by objective measures,
its duration in minutes and hours goes on.  What is more, the thing that
is generally significant and interesting about time (and I am speaking
as a sometimes historian) is that it is marked by change.  Generally,
when things do not change, they get boring.  The crucial thing that
makes the metaphor of "stopping time" arresting is that some (musical
and other) experiences have the force to make us want them to go on
indefinitely, because they are so utterly satisfying.

Now whether thematically static, if rhythmically complex, music like
Torke's can do this for anyone is an open question.  As I suggested last
time, if it can, so much the better.  I can't say that it has grabbed
me to that extent, but I am going to mention a couple of musical experiences
that I have found "time-stopping," and which were my stimulus for starting
this discussion.  One is Mahler's Third Symphony, a work I know fairly
well but which I have heard in concert only twice--most recently last
evening, as it happens, when Andreas Delfs and the Milwaukee Symphony
drew a tumultuous ovation; and memorably from the lawn at Tanglewood,
nearly two decades ago.  The final movement, in particular, on that
occasion, affected me powerfully and, even though this work runs about
a hundred minutes without intermission, and even though I had to move
three times to get away from talking groups on blankets, I would have
been happy for the finale to have gone on forever.  My other example is
quite different: Telemanniana by Hans Werner Henze, a work rather in the
spirit of the Ancient Airs and Dances suites of Respighi, which is about
a quarter of an hour in duration.  For some reason I find that I can
listen to this work repeatedly, over and over.  This is not something I
ever did before; in fact I have a vivid recollection of being driven
nearly mad by a young woman in an apartment below me, who did this with
a popular song many years ago.  But there it is.

Jim Tobin