It’s the Baader Meinhof Effect again. This week I heard a term for the first time, a term that you may already know because you’re smart, but I didn’t because I’d not noticed it before. And then it took me hearing it for the first time twice for it to get in my head.

Stop-Time.

Des Tong mentions this musical term in the deeply interesting interview he did for my 58keys series on YouTube last Wednesday. Then Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs podcast spent a sliver under an hour examining Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, and dwelt on it. (Do listen to the whole thing, but stop-time segment comes in from 26’40”.)

You’d think, then, I’d know what it was, at least enough to not ask you to check out Wikipedia’s definition. Well.

So it’s a beat, a particular rhythm that’s different to the rest of a piece of music and it feels as if it’s made that music stop, as if it’s made time stop. I don’t know how a regular beat can do that when it’s a beat, it’s literally a series of sounds that come one after another in time, but it does. In “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, it comes between one of that song’s many dramatic changes in tempo, even in form, and it’s like it holds you in the air for a moment, just before you drop back down into the time of the song.

There’s a moment in WG Snuffy Walden’s thirtysomething soundtrack where the music pauses for the smallest breath that feels like a chasm. It’s a pause, an ending, yet you know it hasn’t ended, you know you’re falling to the next note and when that comes, it’s like it’s caught you and is bringing you along to something else.

It’s also like I wish I knew any musical terms whatsoever.

Well, I do now, I know stop-time.

And somehow I’m going to use it in my writing. Er. I mean, other than this, writing to you about it.