Silence

 

Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful 4’33’’. Thus, it should make more sense to talk about silences, in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.

 In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz (Treatise upon Orchestration), silence can be obtained through orchestration: With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo of all the rest of the orchestra. In fact, if Berlioz’s treatise is to be taken as relevant to traditional orchestration, we find several places in the work where the concept of silence plays a clear and conscious orchestrational function.

 There are also contrapuntal silences, related to texture as well, but performing a more basic determination of lines. These are silences which give time location and shape the musical discourse.

  A third type of silence is the harmonic absence, which, like the orchestrational silence, can only be understood as a choice for no action. For instance, a plagal cadence could be understood as the absence of a tonic chord, and in general, any play with harmonic sequences which frustrates expectations is the construction of a silence. This kind of silence is even easier to notice than the orchestrational, for in tonal music we expect particular cadences in particular locations of the piece, while the orchestrational choices of color have a wider range of possibilities. In serial music the silence-absence occurs in relation to the structure of the given series of the piece and its traditional transformations.

 Silence is also a religious concept, complementing and making meaningful the myth of the primordial sound, a favorite myth among musicians. Sound and silence together have given a rich spectra of metaphors for the expression of life’s persistent mystery, furthermore, they conform a full mythology in which the musician can express a wide variety of cognitive and social emotions. Toru Takemitsu has put it in terms of the modern musical religious experience: Confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence.

 There is a further dimension of musical silence which can be extended to any epistemological experience. Through the action of memory (Mnemosine), silence extends and transforms sound on the inner dimension of the listener-composer. The piece of music extends beyond its sound parameters into the realm of the listener particular connections. The semantics of the piece build upon basic emotions and memories, complexifying the original input. Silence is needed to make the piece intelligible, to give it a meaning. Silence becomes a receptacle for musical reverberation both of the physical sound and of the psychological process initiated by the music. There are a number of Bach pieces (see the Ricercare of The Art of the Fugue, or the Contrapuntus X of the Musical Offering, etc.), Brahms, Mahler, and many others, which include this kind of silences. For instance, he writes at the end of the piece a white note and right after a silence of white (instead of writing a whole note) in which the piece gains an extra time for its processing, both at the acoustic and the psychological level. When not in the score, this kind of silence is spontaneously produced at the end of a performance, sometimes unfortunately broken by an insensitive rush for thunderous applause.