In high school, I was shown a score of
music which held an inscription on the back of the title page that
said that the music was important, but to really understand the
piece, you needed to listen to the silences. I have thought about
this particular page ever since, and had never before considered the
idea that the only reason specific sounds are special is because they
are defined by the silence around them. The above concept was further cemented
in Sophomore English when we were introduced to the Tao. Within that
volume I read a similar parable: that the spokes of a wagon wheel
only have importance because of the space that divides them.
Often, I think that many composers
(including myself) get caught up in the process of creating sound
that we forget that we must also create silence.
It is the thing between that gives the rest meaning. A thing is a
hole in a thing it is not.
How do
we listen? How do we really
listen? Sure, most of us “hear” pretty well. A lot of us zonk
out during the rests as we daydream about whatever we're doing later
in the day, only to spiral back to reality as the conductor flashes
us a cue. How many of us create silence?
How many of us really listen?
An
interesting aspect of music, special and separate from other artistic
disciplines, is that it also incorporates a temporal dimension – a
dimension that in part relies on the memory of the listener. We use
our memories to enjoy the great cathedrals of the Old Masters built
from kernels. We use memories to see how intellectual we are; how
clever we are; how many things in the music we can recall and compare
against sounds yet to be heard. Is the piece itself really the notes
being played, or is it in actuality the change that occurs between
notes? Is a piece of music the surface of what we experience, or is
it the rebellion against preconceived / established notions?
In
painting, you're presented with all of the stimulus in one instant,
and you're able to constantly refer back to it, measuring what you
perceive immediately with what you perceive gradually. You see the
painting created by the original artist, and not a filtered version.
You see it within a definable space. In most cases, you do not hear
all of the music instantaneously; you do not hear it presented by the
original artist (unless of course they are the performer as well),
and you aren't able to constantly refer to previous sounds (unless
the composer repeats them, or if you use your memory).
Imagine
for a moment that you went to a gallery and each piece you viewed
constantly changed. You have to rely on your visual memory in order
to understand and more greatly appreciate the art. I can't help but
wonder if there was a way to create music where we weren't bound to
our aural memory? Surely you can't just present all sounds at the
same time – it would just sound like a garbled mess. What
would it sound like? How would it be performed or written?
Much
in the same way that silence between notes defines the sound, I
believe that so too do the moments of quiet existence define who we
are in the larger moments – both positive and negative.
Interestingly,
several years ago a music group did a project where all of the
participants recorded the same number of seconds at the same time of
day (relative to their time zone). Each audio clip was overlayed
with the others to create a single aural image of the world for those
few seconds.
Surprisingly,
it was quite peaceful.
