The Pursuit of Silence: In-between Space of Music
Silence has been called “rest”: music’s in-between space. Parallel to the idea of “ma” in Japanese music, Debussy wrote that the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them.
Before Western notation system, the length of these silences were often dictated by spaces. When groups of monks chanted in a chapel, they inserted a pause determined by the acoustics of the chapel to prevent the next line from getting mixed by the last one’s resonance trail. But these pauses also created a meditative space and provided “the unity of the monastery breathing and singing together.”(2)
In much of early Baroque music, in a literal way, silence often depict sleep, death, and featureless landscapes. But after training the audience’s ears on sounds, Monteverdi takes them away in “Orfeo” and the attention turns onto the very process of listening. Likewise, Beethoven introduces “explosive silence” (e.g. in Eroica) playing with the expectations of the listeners after building them up. (3)
In the 19th century, liminal silence, which was often ultrathin orchestration at the outer edges of a composition, was utilized to blur the line between composed sounds and the ambient sound of the concert hall. The preconditioned listening habits challenged by the 20th century composers more and like in Webern’s atonal pieces, the proportions of sound and rests were renegotiated to the point where roles seemed reversed.
Silence has been used as space for listeners to self-reflect. The question-like musical phrases in pieces like “Psalom” by Arvo Pärt and Tom Takemitsu's “Rain Coming” are left suspended in silences. Whether the long pauses feel sheltering or terrifying depends on each listener’s state of mind.
(1) Chris P. Miller. (2007). Silence. The Chicago School of Media Theory.
(2)(3)Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim (Oct. 2, 2019). How the Silence Makes the Music. The New York Times.
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