Time

Year: 2021

Heading: for 22 musicians

Movement Titles:
Span 1
Span 2
Span 3
Span 4
Span 5

Instrumentation: 2 clarinets, 2 bass clarinets, 2 soprano saxes, 2 baritone saxes, 2 marimbas, vibes, piano, harpsichord, 2 wordless sopranos, 2 wordless altos, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass

Duration: 44:54

Listen: click here to listen

Order CD: click here to order

Study score: click here to order

Release Dates: August 26, 2022 (digital), September 30 (physical)

Press:

Immersive and entrancing, Time fascinates for how smartly Torke operates within a prescribed set of parameters yet never fails to hold the listener's attention. It certainly doesn't hurt that this masterfully realized work teems with lustrous textures and boasts an unfailingly joyous tone. —Textura

Filled with jubilant and satisfying grooves which echo contemporary pop music, Time unfolds as a series of musical moments. It is music which lives in a continuous and ecstatic present. —The Listeners’ Club

…hard-headed originality —All About the Arts

Torke’s inimitable vision of orchestral song craft that’s quite modern, stylish, and exciting. Take Effect, —Tom Haugen

Program Note:

A span of time: as short as a nine-minute movement; or as long as a life.

The span of a day, a week, a month, or a year has imprinted in it recurrence and repetition. Recurrence in large scale mirrors recurrence in detail. Repetition can reset an unsettled heart, can calm the nerves, can even adjust brain chemistry. Rhythm itself divides up time and breathes life into time. Time slips away as we age, but music pins us down—it offers a kind of security against the ravages of time.

Time is the one thing money can’t buy. The rich and the poor have equal access to time—time is free but it’s priceless. You can’t own it but you can use it. You can't save it but you can spend it.

TIME is the 3rd recording project (after BEING, and PSALMS AND CANTICLES) unhindered by Covid, insofar as the individual tracks were recorded independently in isolation, and later mixed together. This gave us the opportunity to hire the same musician to do all four clarinet parts, all four sax parts, all three mallet parts, and all four vocal parts whose result is a desired homogeneity and cohesiveness of performance style. Exactness is required in this kind of interlocking, rhythmic music, and we could achieve it with this recording strategy.

Buddha says, “Life is swept along, next-to-nothing its span. For one swept to old age no shelters exist. Perceiving this danger in death, one should drop the world's bait and look for peace.”