Music has often been simply described as organized sounds framed by silence. Recorded music has always suggested this definition, with increasingly pristine (and now digitized) silences before and after musical works, and between movements. Any extraneous “noises” prior to or within the performance itself, such as instrument squeaks, valve sounds, and even breaths, are often “cleaned up” in post-production. Even the “noisiest” genres, such as heavy metal and other rock music, where fuzz and distortion are used as expressive effects, are often presented on recordings with clean silent frames between the tracks.
Any definition of a musical work relies on assumptions about noise and silence. For instance, we have certain conventions in Western music that enable us to tell when a musical work begins and ends, and what sounds are most likely musical sounds that are part of the work (the sound of the trumpets), and what sounds are probably not part of the work (the cough of the woman in front of you). At classical music concerts, audience members and performers enact a “silence” before a piece begins, and another one when it ends, to frame the work. There may be silences within the piece itself (a grand pause, for instance), and we understand that the work is still ongoing, and that that period of time is meant to be understood as a silence (even as the woman in front of you noisily unwraps her cough drops).
Yet, in addition to the background audience noise of any live performance, there is always some “musical noise” surrounding the means of tone production itself, even in the finest performances. Musical sounds are generated through rhythmic physical motions or air pressure applied to an instrument, and instruments (and humans) are noisy things. We might hear Andrés Segovia’s fingers squeak on the guitar strings, or János Starker’s bow scrape the cello strings – are these really “noises” that should be removed from a recording or minimized in performance? Glenn Gould was perhaps the most infamously noisy performer, with his grunts and moans riding atop his brilliant performances of Bach. In a New York Philharmonic performance, the noises might be more incidental, but if you were on stage with the orchestra, you might hear air escaping around a clarinetist’s embouchure, the clunking of the tuba valves, or the breathing of the trombone section. These noises, though, are closely tied to the nature of the instruments themselves and the process of playing them, much as breathing and the resonance of the human head are attached to the quality of the voice. Most of this noise is quite subtle, and often inaudible to the audience in larger venues, yet it may be quite evident at a chamber music concert. It is usually only in recordings that its presence becomes an artistic question.
It can be difficult to draw lines between musical noise (noise resulting from the process of music-making) and regular noise, or less-musical noise and more-musical noise, or even between body and instrument. For example, with the guitar, the fingertip applies force to the string on the fret, and the string vibrates not only on either side but also underneath the fingertip. Thus the “squeaking” noise of the fingers moving along the strings from note to note, or chord to chord, seems more closely connected with sound production than, say, the noise of the keys on a bassoon. The latter seems to be a more discrete relation, as opposed to the more continuous relation of the fingers to strings. Yet bassoonists, or even pianists, who are at some distance from the actual striking of hammer on string, certainly do not feel as though they are working through an intermediary device when they perform. Violinists, for example, do not believe that their right hand (holding their bow) is less connected with sound production than their left hand (on the fingerboard).
We have continued to “improve” upon Western instruments, and yet in many respects most of our orchestral instruments are still quaintly old-fashioned. Many older traditions of instrument-making have survived because the product is successful – Stradivarius did indeed have it right. However, the eccentricities inherent in manufacturing an instrument to play a tempered scale have always made for peculiar idiomatic tendencies, and for the occasional awkwardness. Unidiomatic passages go against the workings of the instrument’s acoustics or mechanics, such as fingerings that “just don’t lie well.” Much of what we hear as musical noise develops from these unidiomatic passages, since usually the player must exert more effort in order to execute them. One would expect more valve noise from a tubist struggling with fast fingerings, and one would expect more pedal noise from a harpist dealing with a very chromatic piece. (Some instruments are also just mechanically noisier than others. It can be difficult to tell the notes from the mechanical noises on a virginal, and its champions would not have it any other way.) Although we may not play the instrument in question, may not have held or even seen one before, we understand how it feels to take deep breaths and to exhale quickly, we understand what it is to pound and strike, and, above all, we understand tools and the joy of action.
In the professional musician, a window of facility outlines the limitations of the body and the instrument. As the edges of the window are approached, there is more noise: the trumpet player squeaking out higher and higher notes, a tenor reaching for a high B-flat, or the sound of János Starker’s bow hairs rapidly scraping across the strings in a Bach allemande. For the general audience, these instances in which the instrumentalists have approached the impossible may be the only times they notice musical noise. Virtuosity requires great talent and strength as well as great dexterity, and we forgive the sometimes excessive noise of virtuosic attempts much as we forgive “mistakes” in the improvising jazz player, knowing them to be the residue of risk. As Stan Godlovitch has written: “Talent without skill is like power without authority – unsteady, capricious, unreliable” (Godlovitch 1998: 20).
Certain gray areas exist in the arena of noise in music. For example, instances can be offered which blur any line between “successful performance” and “instrument malfunction.” Clarinet squeaks, unlike guitar string squeaks, are unintended accidents that take the place of the intended sound. As such, we might characterize them as malfunctions, and eliminate them from consideration as musical noise. However, gurgles from a horn getting full of water may accompany a successful performance. And what do we say about the “noises” of a Glenn Gould, muttering and singing along to his performances of Bach? When is there “too much” noise? What should be removed from a recording so as to provide the best instance of the work? Is the sound of wind players breathing a noise that should be “fixed in the mix”?
Certainly mistakes are noises – in musicians’ lingo, the “clams” or “fraks” that occur in wind instrument playing when notes do not speak, or when the clarinet squeaks in place of a tone. Yet, is a wrong note always noise? As Robert Walser points out, the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was infamous for missed notes, yet he remains one of the more important musicians in the history of jazz (Walser 1993: 343). Davis played “closer to the edge than anyone else and simply accepted the inevitable missteps” (Walser 1993: 356). There are also, of course, a myriad of extra-musical noises on the part of the performers or the audience which are unattached to performance means, such as feet shuffling, rustling, even talking.
Musical noise reminds us of the means of performance and the close relationship of musician to instrument. The intimacy of the singer with her own voice is traditionally appreciated in Western music. (Interestingly, in popular songs, it seems that audiences will accept certain tunes from some singers but not from others, particularly if there is too great an incongruity between that singer’s public persona and what is conveyed in the song (Bicknell 2005: 266).) Less well appreciated is the close relationship of instrumentalists to their instruments. The Kpelle of Africa even consider instruments as surrogate participants that cause the human performer’s fingers to move. Stephen Davies has written eloquently about musicians and instruments, and he states that in general we treat instruments “with care and respect, even reverence, more so than we accord to many of the other artifacts that are part of our lives” (Davies 2003a: 109). We are upset when they are mistreated or destroyed. Musicians have an immense degree of attachment to and identification with their instruments – a complex interaction unfortunately smoothed over when we speak of “making music.” The attachment to the instrument is built not only out of years of practice and devotion, but also from the artistic and physical resonance the instrument brings to the player. Imagine B. B. King without his guitar “Lucille,” or Yo-Yo Ma without his Stradivarius cello.
The issue of musical noise becomes prickly in the recording studio. Today, musicians and engineers must make decisions regarding which sounds are and which sounds are not aesthetically good aspects of the performance. Contemporary digital recording techniques allow us to pick up a very wide band of sounds, and we can manipulate these sounds at an almost microscopic level. Essentially, any layer of sound, no matter how thin or momentary, can be removed or enhanced. In classical recordings, sounds deemed as “noises” are almost always removed or lessened. (Exceptions are in those recordings marketed as “live” – both as an enticement to the public and as a warning of a “noisier” product.) Tom Leddy has discussed the privileging of the concepts of “neat” and “clean” in a manner that is helpful in discussing recordings: “To say that something can be neatened or cleaned implies that there is something underlying that is worthy of neatening/cleaning” (Leddy 1995: 260). He discusses the attractive tension between surface messiness and underlying neatness, as, for example, in an abstract expressionist painting (Leddy 1995: 260). The violent, thick palette strokes of color overlay a “cleaner” structure beneath. Possibly musical noise is an everyday surface quality of live musical performance, a “proto-aesthetic” quality. Like the palette strokes, perhaps we should view the sound of the guitar string squeak or of the air escaping around a clarinetist’s mouthpiece as ineliminable parts of the aesthetic content of the performance, rather than as things to be “cleaned up” in the final mix.
There has been some backlash against the digitization of recordings, especially when it first began in the mid-1980s. Some audiophiles valorized older vinyl recordings as being more “authentic” or true to the performance. Vinyl recordings (LPs) are analog recordings, that is, the record itself has a groove carved into it that mirrors the original sound’s waveform. The record player than transforms this groove to an analog sound signal which can be fed into an amplifier. A CD is digital, that is, the audio information from the recording session is digitized – like many, many snapshots taken in a row, which are then converted to digital information bits. The early public perception was that this digital process left out some of the information, resulting in a more sterile sound, and this indeed may be apparent in some early CDs. These days, however, the sound quality of a digital recording is so much improved (the detail of sound captured and encoded is staggering) that this argument has diminished greatly. Today the most distinguishing feature of an LP is the noise of the needle, a noise that is an artifact of the reproductive technology, and not tied to the musicians’ actions.
In live rock and pop music, sheer volume itself (which exposes even more noise) is an important expressive feature. One of the differences in vocal quality between Frederica von Stade and Sheryl Crow (or any opera singer versus a rock singer) is the “clean,” “pure” sound of a classically trained voice, versus the “graininess” and noise of the rock singer. Yet both aspects, the purity and the graininess, add crucial expressive elements to those performances in those genres – possibly because both purity and graininess require effort and artistic manipulation of the “normal” singing voice. This effort is recognized as expressive.
Interestingly, it is only with the advent of rock music and the electric guitar that noise itself becomes such a predominant expressive factor in music. Imagine Jimi Hendrix without distortion in his rendition of the national anthem. Imagine Janis Joplin with a clear, pure sound. It is difficult today to remember how radical it was in the 1960s to push musical noise to the forefront of a performance. Did the increased volume of the new electronic amplification suddenly suggest that what were once small musical noises might be now be showcased as a musical event?
However, as Susan McClary indicates, it is interesting to see what counts as noise, what as order, and who gets to marginalize whom (McClary 1985). Current Western classical music practice has stifled and made tame the concert hall, the recording, and the performance itself, in search of a polished package (McClary 1985: 152), absolutely in contrast to a rock concert. The quiet, controlled, disciplined classical audiences of today are actually an anomaly in music’s long history. Before the late nineteenth century, operas were often social events where one ate, chatted to one’s neighbors, and heckled those on stage. Lovers escaped to the darkness of the upper balconies. After the late nineteenth century, the invention of the electric light allowed house lights to be lowered – a powerful audience inhibitor – and chairs began to be bolted to the floor facing the conductor (Haynes 2007). Audience attention began to be regimented and restricted, and noise of any kind was proscribed, to the point that today even a candy wrapper can cause immediate silent censure.
Issues of noise surface in other arts as well. We understand the patter of the ballet slippers, and the rustling of costumes on stage to be “noise” attached to those artistic events. In painting, brushstrokes are often visible on the surface of the artwork, left as an artifact of the physical gesture of applying paint to canvas. Consider van Gogh and the expressive nature of his brushstrokes, the rhythm of them running with and against the representation. Sometimes by “muting” the surface noise a different sort of expression is put forward, as we see in the “clarity” of a Vermeer portrait. Think of the chisel marks left evident (or not) on sculpture. And, just for argument, what about “sweetened” background sounds in film: the foot-chase scene where the sounds of clicking heels and doors unlocking are added or enhanced? Or body mics in a live Shakespearean drama? Few in the audience, I would venture, object to sound/noise enhancement on the dramatic stage, and yet many might find hearing more musical noise (as they would if they were actually on stage during a performance), disconcerting. Perhaps it is because most people are more familiar with speaking, walking, and the other noisy mechanics of acting than they are with the mechanics of producing music.
Artworks require frames to help us first to understand them as artworks, and second to perceive where they begin and end. These frames may be as structured as a gilded frame around a painting, or as nebulous as the museum space surrounding what would otherwise appear to be a Brillo box. In the performing arts, such as dance, theater, and music, the artwork is not inert: it progresses through time. Without some kind of framing device, the audience might be confused as to when the play started, or when the music began.
In Western classical music, we use silence to frame the artwork, and also as a means of articulating phrasing, form, sections, and movements. Musical silence is an especially dynamic and important component of live musical performance (Judkins 1997). Silences are often the “thread” binding phrases, sections, movements, and even entire works together. They allow us to reflect on form and continuity. Silence is often used as a moment of reflection, anticipation, or summation in music. Musicians indicate musical silences not only by not producing sounds but also by remaining perfectly still.
In live performance, the acoustics and “feeling” of the space create an intimacy between the performers and the building or area in which they perform, greatly influencing the performer’s interpretation of silence – especially those silences within the piece. When musicians warm up on stage prior to a concert, they are also testing the quality of silence in that hall. The resonance that a building or a room provides has proven an irresistible attraction to performers throughout music history, and points to a crucial distinction between live and recorded music, as room ambience and other acoustic effects are often artificially enhanced later in the studio.
There are two general kinds of musical silence. Most internal silences are measured – that is, they are short, notated, pulsed moments felt as part of the ongoing musical line. Brief measured silences often become the “breath marks” or punctuation at the end of musical phrases or sentences, not allowing time for reflection or anticipation; they are a part of the fabric weave, not a seam. Measured silences are specified and remain the same from performance to performance, and from performance to recording.
More interesting philosophically are longer, unmeasured silences, which are given meaning by the tonal and rhythmic material near them (their musical context) (Clifton 1976). Longer unmeasured silences include framing silences (before and after the work, and between movements), grand pauses, and other long internal silences (fermatas, caesuras). These silences are typically improvised in live performance – never rehearsed – even in a large orchestra. For the musician, long silences present considerable technical problems because of the exposed attacks and releases – the finesse that the arts require in any kind of “edge-shaping.” Most longer unmeasured silences vary greatly in length and character in different live performances.
For example, we would think it quite bizarre to have a conductor say “We will take 25 seconds of silence between the first and second movement.” The shaping of unmeasured silences is a large part of what is the edge (literally) and excitement of a live performance, playing an important role in stylistic interpretation. Silences can distill the potential energy of the penultimate grand pause, or the inertia of the end of a phrase. Most framing silences typically go unrehearsed, in the knowledge that the sense of “the moment” will determine the appropriate timing between movements, the silence after a fermata, or the length of the final silence after the music ends. What is rehearsed is the actual mechanics of stopping and starting the group, or, in the case of the solo musician, the releases and attacks. It is as if musicians have an unspoken understanding that longer, indefinite length silences are one of several musical elements that can only be given their final shape in a specific performance in a specific place.
In jazz performance, nearly all silences are pulsed. In a jazz ensemble situation, the opening “frame” is not silent but rather counted off by the leader. The nature of timekeeping with a drum set necessitates a continuous pulse either articulated in sound or constantly felt beneath any silence. The concluding “frame” at the end of a tune is characteristically blurred with various expressive ventures – the pianist outlines the chordal structure, adding a “color” note at the ninth, the drummer explores the cymbals while slowing the pulse, the bass player adds a glissando down to a final tonic, and lets it ring. This is not to say that silence is not used aesthetically in jazz; it is just usually found in a brief, pulsed context – ironically, silence is often “freer” in classical music. A jazz saxophonist may have many moments of “silence” or gaps in his improvisation, but it is heard over the background rhythm section, and not as silenced time on stage.
On recordings, musical works are presented much as paintings are on a museum’s walls, with engineered silences and clean edges. In live performance, however, musical convention and physical gesture are required to help the audience identify and frame the musical event. We understand that the orchestra is just tuning, not playing a piece, because we know that today conventions require physical stillness on the part of the players, and an effort at producing silence before the work is commenced. One says “today,” because, as noted above, this was not always the case. Western classical music has become increasingly silence-framed and formal, some feel to its detriment. (It was not until well into the twentieth century that audiences finally stopped applauding between movements of symphonies.)
Major orchestras, opera companies, and vocal ensembles record in large concert halls, often set up out in the center of the hall (over some of the seats), in an attempt to capture its acoustics. These sessions will invariably also include a recording of the musicians just sitting silently. The resultant recorded “silence” is not, of course, absolutely silent. It captures the “silence” in that hall with all of those individuals in it, and it is used in the recording to enhance the silences framing the piece so that they will not sound too “sterile.” Exposed silences in live performance are much less pure, simply because an audience has a certain ambient noise level that comes from simply being alive, not to mention coughing, rustling, or sneezing. In live performance, some of the audience may seize the moment for applause “too soon” after the last note, inadequately framing the ending. Similarly, a final silence can also be stretched to an awkward length by incomplete gestures on the part of the conductor.
In contemporary music, silence is often used as a deliberate, obvious compositional device. Such “playing with time” and pairing of opposites (sound and silence) is an artistic trend perhaps reflective of the many disparities in our times. Today we are presented with many quite discontinuous and seemingly blurred experiences of time and space, from airplanes to particle physics. These incongruities of modern life often find expression in contemporary visual arts and in music, sometimes with materials or formats “incongruous” to that art form and its canon: in music, this is often the use of void or silence. It can make for challenging listening. Of course, just as we see in the visual arts, many musical works are not so much musical events as they are statements about the nature of musical events. For example, in John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952), the performer simply sits silently for three tacit movements. (It should be noted that Cage indicates in the score that “the work may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any length of time”.) Most writers agree that the musical content of a performance of this work is the ambient sounds that become apparent to the audience within the boundaries of that performance (Davies 1997). However, as Stephen Davies argues, if Cage’s point was to draw our attention to the potential of ordinary sounds he failed: “He failed because he intended to create an artwork and succeeded in doing so, thereby transforming the qualities of the sounds to which that work directs our attention” (Davies 1997: 17).
The lessening of internal, formal relationships, whether in the arts or ordinary experience, is extremely disconcerting. When settings and events become increasingly non-related, we have to work hard to find cause-and-effect connections. Unfortunately for the listener, music can become complex more quickly than any other art, since it relies on the perceived coherence of its internal formal relations through time, usually greatly assisted by repetition. Thus both the “spinning out” of a Baroque melody in a Bach partita, and the fluid, seamless vocal writing of Josquin produce continuous musical anchors for the listener – as does the more formal punctuation of Haydn and Mozart. These “anchors” were compromised in the late twentieth century by the shakedown of traditional harmony, and the evolution of tonal systems that offer little redundancy. An overly generous use of musical silence can lessen the perception of internal musical relationships, by actually distancing bits of information further across time. On the other hand, “minimalist” and “New Age” music that employs very little or no musical silence might be viewed as a reaction of sorts to the largesse of silence in the “classical” musics of Varèse, Schoenberg, Boulez, and Ligeti.
In conclusion, during musical silences, rather than being in the “other-world-ness” of, for example, film, we become even more intensely aware of our physical surroundings, through the interaction of sound and architecture, actually enlarging our sense of time and our own existence. Sometimes a lack of sensory information actually enhances our awareness of the passage or directed-ness of time, and even without sensory change or variation we still experience its passage (a phenomenon certainly crucial to appreciation of the repetitive, minimalist works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass). Music may be one of the only ways in which we truly engage the present, especially when musical time is crystallized in musical silence. The characterization of silence in live performance is more than just the articulation of form – it is a large part of helping the audience to know “where they are” in the piece. Consider the quality of the silences between verses of a carol or madrigal, or after the magnificent opening of the Bach D-minor organ toccata. These silences are musical silences, not ordinary silences, whose character is determined by the musical materials around them, their edges.
See also Aesthetic properties (Chapter 14), Classical aesthetic traditions of India, China, and the Middle East (Chapter 23), Definition (Chapter 1), Instrumental technology (Chapter 18), and Performances and recordings (Chapter 8).
Attali, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bicknell, J. (2005) “Just a Song? Exploring the Aesthetics of Popular Song Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63: 261–70.
Clifton, T. (1976) “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly 62: 163–81.
Davies, S. (1997) “John Cage’s 4'33": Is it Music?” reprinted in Davies (2003b), pp. 11–29. —— (2003a) “What is the Sound of One Piano Plummeting?” in Davies (2003b), pp. 108–18.
—— (2003b) Themes in the Philosophy of Music, New York: Oxford University Press.
Godlovitch, S. (1998) Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study, London: Routledge.
Haynes, B. (2007) The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Judkins, J. (1997) “The Aesthetics of Musical Silence in Live Performance,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31: 39–53.
Leddy, T. (1995) “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities: ‘Neat,’ ‘Messy,’ ‘Clean,’ ‘Dirty’,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53: 259–68.
McClary, S. (1985) “The Politics of Silence and Sound,” afterword to Attali, pp. 149–58.
Walser, R. (1993) “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” Musical Quarterly 77: 343–65.
Kania, A. (2010) “Silent Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68: 343-53. (A investigation of both the role of silence in music and the possibility of wholly silent pieces of music.)