A Stravinsky Moment: Paul Patterson's Time Piece

Have you ever listened to a piece of music that you thought was fantastic but did not satisfy your usual musical tastes?

I suppose I must seek this experience out. When it happens, I savour it. When I discovered The Rite of Spring when I was 15, it was unlike anything I'd heard before. But still I kept listening to it again and again, savouring a newness, which, paradoxically, never wore off.

We have a few phrases for things that require a recalibration of our aesthetic: a work may signal a "paradigm shift"; we can label it "genre-transcending"; or, with a touch of apathy, we label it labelless: "sui generis". These are unsatisfactory descriptions because they're reductive: taste is rarely collective.

So I find myself in a bind with Paul Patterson's 'Time Piece': I am left, 15 years later, with nothing more insightful to say than that I'm having another Stravinsky moment.


Time Piece - The King's Singers (Paul Patterson, words by Tim Rose-Price)

Read the lyrics here.