I'd quite like to understand what goes on in moments which people describe as making time stand still. Could you just contribute some examples so we can see if there's something in common happening? Of course, there may be no consensus, which in itself would be interesting.
I think there are some in Prokofiev for example. I'll dig out specifics later.
To me time stands still during the conclusion of Shostakovich's 4th Symphony. The music is so haunting and still so intense that most of the time I almost stop breathing to take it all in.
Mompou
Quote from: Mandryka on December 02, 2022, 09:25:55 PMI'd quite like to understand what goes on in moments which people describe as making time stand still. Could you just contribute some examples so we can see if there's something in common happening?
I think I know this feeling which I only experience rarely, though. I would also express it a bit differently, namely that I - often suddenly - get aware of something around me which I perhaps best may characterize as the eternity. The last time I had this feeling was when listening to Gustav Leonhardt playing some organ music by Sweelinck.
The one composition where I've distinctly had that feeling of "time standing still" or, as I phrased it to myself at the time, of the music being "frozen in time" is the final section,
Tombeau, from
Boulez's
Pli selon pli. Time only "resume" at the coda (at 12'17" in the below video), when after a sudden pause, a phrase is played by the pitched percussion, taken over by the piano, and then repeated (with interjections of the brass and strings), until the soprano sings her final lines.
The effect is rather striking and fascinating, because throughout most of the movement the music is tremendously busy, with all sorts of things happening, but without a linear direction (which only appears in the coda). Superb music, and
Boulez (and post-WW2 music) at his best!
Thanks for these examples, which I will explore soon and comment if I have anything to say.
The most clear example for me is at about 10 minutes into this performance of Prokofiev Sonata 8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzODV6moOE4&ab_channel=incontrariomotu
@ritter -- I think Boulez had things to say about the phenomenon in the Collège de France lectues. Will look sometime soon.
@ritter -- what about Berio's piano sonata as an exploration of this phenomenon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uRjIA2lf4s&t=316s&ab_channel=AndreaLucchesini-Topic
The books by Robert Stecker and Stephen Davies are good philosophy books dealing with the relevant issues.
(https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780742514614-us.jpg)
(https://media.wiley.com/product_data/coverImage300/59/11190916/1119091659.jpg)
Quote from: Maestro267 on December 03, 2022, 03:56:52 AMTo me time stands still during the conclusion of Shostakovich's 4th Symphony. The music is so haunting and still so intense that most of the time I almost stop breathing to take it all in.
Same here.
Schubert Quintet D 956 Second Movement - beginning and the ending. Complete tranquility, as close as possible to time standing still.
I think one of the brilliant things about that Schubert movement is how the tranquility remains somewhat disturbed in the third part (after the violent middle section).
Usually, a static rhythmic pulse gives the illusion of suspension of forward motion. Ross Edwards Symphony No. 1 is a good example for me.
Quote from: relm1 on December 06, 2022, 05:52:12 AMUsually, a static rhythmic pulse gives the illusion of suspension of forward motion.
This seems to be the technique for time suspension generally.
Quote from: relm1 on December 06, 2022, 05:52:12 AMUsually, a static rhythmic pulse gives the illusion of suspension of forward motion. Ross Edwards Symphony No. 1 is a good example for me.
+1 for Ross Edwards - a moving, powerful and soulful work and a wonderful tribute to his conductor friend.
Quote from: vandermolen on December 06, 2022, 06:58:32 AM+1 for Ross Edwards - a moving, powerful and soulful work and a wonderful tribute to his conductor friend.
I hadn't heard of this composer (nor of the conductor) before now. Thank you for the youtube link. Very powerful and moving work...and very sad too.
I found an excellent and detailed musical description of it along with an interview of the composer here: https://www.abc.net.au/classic/read-and-watch/classic-australia/ross-edwards-symphony-no-1-1991/10619828
PD
Quote from: Pohjolas Daughter on December 06, 2022, 07:13:23 AMI hadn't heard of this composer (nor of the conductor) before now. Thank you for the youtube link. Very powerful and moving work...and very sad too.
I found an excellent and detailed musical description of it along with an interview of the composer here: https://www.abc.net.au/classic/read-and-watch/classic-australia/ross-edwards-symphony-no-1-1991/10619828
PD
Yes, very sad indeed PD.
Louis Andriessen's De Tijd certainly has slow moving passages, I'm not sure if it quite counts as an example of time standing still, I'd be curious to hear what others make of it. Here
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qm2PNQEvasc
Michael Korstick's nearly 30 minute Adagio in Beethoven's "Hammerklavier."
For me...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6kp0F0Lo9G0
(https://i.postimg.cc/CZDpGgpC/mqdefault.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/CZDpGgpC)
Quote from: Verena on December 05, 2022, 03:44:01 PMSchubert Quintet D 956 Second Movement - beginning and the ending. Complete tranquility, as close as possible to time standing still.
Absolutely.
Corelli: Christmas Concerto - AdagioThe pauses throughout this movement, where one violin is followed by another and then another before the entire orchestra joins in, are so unutterably gorgeous that they make me forget to breathe.
A thought that needs more developing: I suppose the "conventional" views of music that makes time stand still are (1) the sorts of things that are so perfect as to make you "forget the stars, the moon and sun" (two examples for me: Byrd's Turn our captivity and the Pavan of the Sons of the Morning from VW's Job), or (2) the sorts of things in which almost nothing happens for long periods (step forward, Mr Feldman). However, I'm thinking more of pieces that mess about with time by structural means - usually, in what I'm thinking of, by confounding our expectations of sonata (or other) forms, unexpected repetition, cross-reference etc. Probably easier to give examples than explain: so I have a fair idea of how long many pieces have lasted after hearing them - 7 or 8 minutes for a typical Haydn sonata-form movement, 20 or so for a Bruckner first movement, and even something as non-repetitive as Erwartung or Earth Dances feel roughly like their respective 30 minutes or so. But take the first movement of Shostakovich 15 (symphony) - after hearing that, I have no idea how long it has lasted (10 minutes, 15? - about 8½, apparently, after looking it up). Prokofiev's 9th sonata has the same effect on me, as does a lot of Messiaen. It may be something to do with very engaging music that nevertheless doesn't make any sort of conventional progress. Just random thoughts at the moment.
How about (sections of) Debussy's Pour Les Sonorités Opposées (Étude IX)?
There's a performances by Anatoly Vedernikov which lasts close to 7 minutes - well worth checking out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz8oxPrB60g&ab_channel=punkpoetry
Quote from: DaveF on December 23, 2022, 01:52:07 AMI have a fair idea of how long many pieces have lasted after hearing them
In most cases I'm ahead of the actual time when listening to any given piece of music, either when checking during playing or after it stops. What to me might have seemed like 10 minutes, for instance, turns out to have been just 6. I don't know why this is so --- and it's the very opposite of time standing still, actually: times flies faster for me when listening to music. :)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwLOdXdE5PI&t=1s
Le reveil de l'intraitable réalité, part of Finnissy's History of Photography, has many moments in Annie Li's (wonderful, best available) performance. Second track here, an example about 8 or 9 mins in.
Li studied the music with the composer for a year, and I find what she does more poetic than Knoop, and probably Pace too - I may be being unfair to Pace.
From Jonathan Cross's essay Musical spectra, l'espace sensible and contemporary opera
Something extraordinary occurs in the third scene of Pygmalion, Jean-Philippe
Rameau's acte de ballet of 1748. The title character, a sculptor, is creating a marble
statue of a woman. She is so beautiful that he falls in love with his own creation. The
intervention of L'Amour, the goddess of love, brings the statue to life; the statue, in
turn, declares her love for her creator. Jubilations ensue. At the crucial moment of the
statue's metamorphosis, Pygmalion sings of his joyous bewilderment, accompanied
by the most astonishing orchestral sounds. . . .
Prompted by his discovery of the work in acoustics and intervals of
Joseph Sauveur (published, as Rameau notes, in 1701 in the mémoires of the
Académie Royale des Sciences8
), Rameau attempted to demonstrate in the Nouveau système de musique théorique et pratique (1726) how any single note produced by a
sounding or vibrating body was in fact made up of a spectrum of overtones above a
fundamental frequency, in a similar way to that in which white light had been shown
by Newton to be made up of a spectrum of colours. More precisely, he observed that
'a single string makes all the consonances resonate, among which we distinguish
principally the twelfth and the major seventeenth'.
9 This is what defines the corps
sonore for Rameau. And in this moment in the opera we hear a musical realisation of
this scientific discovery: the position of each note in the initial E major triad coincides
with the spacing of the overtones in the corps sonore, to which in subsequent bars the
violins and flutes add further partials, 'as if Rameau were composing out the corps
sonore itself'. . .
This moment appears as sacred, in that it is set apart from that which surrounds it. The normal passage of time appears to be suspended as the corps sonore
reveals itself; as a result, time takes on a (vertical) spatial dimension. The listener is
invited to cross an imaginary threshold in order to enter a different time/space, to
engage a different, non-narrative mode of listening. It is as if a bell has sounded,
tolling out across the space, ritualising time. But it is not just the statue that has been
'sensitised'; it is the entire theatrical space. The corps sonore here creates an espace
sensible, a term I adopt from Michel Leiris.. .
The moment in question is just before 14 minutes into Leonhardt's recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdnHx03VNPo&t=129shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdnHx03VNPo&t=129s
Leiris's Opera: Music in Action, mentioned in the above essay on Rameau, is here
https://monoskop.org/images/c/c1/Leiris_Michel_Brisees_Broken_Branches.pdf
How about this one, Messiaen's first organ work, Le Banquet Celeste (1928)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTyvgKdlIZc&ab_channel=mrSymphonic
If time stands still, then it loses its direction. When we listen we cease to be aware of time past, present and future. Stasis. That's what I think Messiaen achieves here, at least in the first part, up to the pedal points which come in at 2.30 in that youtube performance. I'm not sure what to make of the pedal points.