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