Still Life with Sound

One of my favorite modern composers, Knut Nystedt, wrote the piece "Immortal Bach." It is a Bach chorale, sung once straight, and then the second time around in several parts all at different tempos and all radically decelerated. What I love about this piece is that it takes the quintessence -- the paradigmatic example -- of a phrase, a moving line, a living arch of sound and breaks it into a series of unmoving vistas. It's like watching a movie by taking the film out of the canister and looking at each individual frame, one by one, like witnessing the settle and seep of paint on a canvas.