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Why "intermittent" music?

1. "Taking into account the lengths of lace curtain that overhang and cut the stage space like decorative saw blades, as well as the intermittent live and electronically produced score by Chris Peck, who is seated with two other musicians on the side of the stage, the whole affair grandly adds up to much, much more than just two dancers."
   Robert Greskovic. 2003. The Wall Street Journal. Review of John Jasperse's just two dancers at Dance Theater Workshop.
2. "And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dorbeetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising, but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls."
   Virginia Woolf. 1927. To the Lighthouse. Google Books.
3. "Pauline Oliveros provided a more conventionally notated score for her 'Pebble Music' (1992). Had she adopted Ms. Ono's concise form of scoring, her card might have read: 'Throw a bunch of pebbles in a plastic cup. Shake them around, tap instruments with them, drop them. Play vague bits of intermittent music. Eventually stop.'"
   Allan Kozinn. 1992. The New York Times. Review of a program by the Downtown Ensemble. nytimes.com