Abstract
At the center of Jürg Frey’s music is a paradox. On the one hand, the sonorities changeextremely slowly and the palette of sounds tends to be monochromatic. Yet while the textures and
pacing can give an auditory impression of frozen stillness, the music is carefully designed with
motion and harmonic arrival built into its form and phrase structure. This essay explores the
paradox between stasis and motion in Frey’s music in two ways: first, by examining the musical
techniques that create tension between stillness and movement, and second, by examining how
Frey’s work reflects back onto recent writings on music and time.
My analysis centers around a close reading of techniques employed in the Frey’s String
Quartet No. 3, as well as through several pieces in his Extended Circular Music series. The essay reads
these works through the lens of writing by scholars Christoph Cox and Jonathan D.K. Noble. Cox
and Noble's conceptions of time and music provide a foundation for my own analysis of Frey’s
work, which examines how an affect of infinite time is both evoked and disrupted. Ultimately, I
argue that Frey’s music is expressive of a boundary between “duration,” an unmeasurable,
unquantifiable, abstract concept of temporality, and “clock time,” the temporality of everyday
musical progression.