Stop-time

In tap dancing, jazz, and blues, stop-time is an accompaniment pattern interrupting, or stopping, the normal time and featuring regular accented attacks on the first beat of each or every other measure alternating with silence or solos. Stop-time appears, "occasionally," in ragtime music. The characteristics of stop-time are heavy accents, frequent rests, and a stereotyped cadential pattern.Stop-timing may create the impression that the tempo has changed, though it has not, as the soloist continues without accompaniment. Stop-time is common in African-American popular music including R&B, soul music, and led to the break of hip hop.

Stop-time is, according to Samuel A. Floyd Jr., "a musical device in which the forward flow of the music stops, or seems to stop, suspended in a rhythmic unison, while in some cases an improvising instrumentalist or singer continues solo with the forward flow of the meter and tempo. Such stop-time moments are sometimes repeated, creating an illusion of starting and stopping, as, for example, in Scott Joplin's 'The Ragtime Dance' and Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp'."

Stop-Time

Stop-Time, published in 1967, is a memoir by American author Frank Conroy, and tells the story of his poor childhood and early adulthood, growing up in New York City and Florida. Focusing on a series of moments from his life, the book combines traditional fictional devices such as scenes while also delving deeply into the author's psyche. The book established Conroy's reputation as a writer. In his review, Norman Mailer wrote, "Stop-Time is unique, an autobiography with the intimate unprotected candor of a novel. What makes it special, however, is the style, dry as an etching, sparse, elegant, modest, cheerful. Conroy has that subtle sense of the proportion of things which one usually finds only in established writers just after the mellowing of their career." Many younger writers have cited Stop-Time as an important influence on their writing careers including David Foster Wallace. He published his second book, Midair, 18 years later.

References