Chapter 4

The many forms of silence in music

Helga de la Motte-Haber

Is this heading intended as a joke? The apparent paradox of silence and music was given form in 1897 by Alphonse Allais with his Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd (Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Great Deaf Man). It is a piece made for laughter with 24 empty bars on sheet music paper and the performance direction Lento rigolante (laughing lento). Silent Music (1941) by the jazz musician Raymond Scott is in some ways comparable. Scott wanted to amuse his audience by having the musicians make movements without producing any sounds. And yet the Marche Funèbre comes across differently. Allais was a member of the short-lived group L’art incohérent that parodied the art of its time. Today this group is considered a historical precursor to the Dadaists.

The German-Bohemian musician Schulhoff was probably not familiar with Allais’s march. He did, however, have contact with the Dadaists in Berlin. The Pittoresken, op. 30 for piano were composed in 1919 with the remark: “sincerely dedicated to the painter and Dadaist George Groß [sic]!” This suite, inspired by the popular dances of his time, contains a silent piece as the third movement: In Futurum. It is notated in an absurd manner with rests and the tempo indication “tempo – timeless”. The upper staff is marked with a bass clef, the lower with a treble clef; the rhythms indicated – 3/5 and 7/10 – would scarcely be playable. The pause for breath after bar three is odd in a piano piece, as are the concave and convex double fermatas, interpolated exclamation marks and sketches of faces, including one in the “Marshal Rest”. Schulhoff also called Grosz Marshal Grosz. While the notation of the rests cannot give the precise pitch, it does indicate differences in pitch, almost melodic phrases, which, however, appear to be contradicted by the direction con espressione e sentimento, because the rests indicate a very fast tempo. But a pianist could conceivably render it without pressing the keys. It is the revolt against tradition that makes this piece seem preposterous. With a title like Ironien (Ironies), Six pieces for piano four hands, op. 55 (1920), Schulhoff identified his aesthetic approach. But he was a proponent of Dadaism only briefly.

The “visual scores” by musicians of a Dadaist bent that indicate music by way of association only, prefigure later musical artworks such as those paintings that have abounded since the twentieth century whose contemplation is meant to evoke sound. The collages of blank sheets of music, op. 106 (2008) by Michael Denhoff, are indeed conceived as silent music.

The title of my chapter, Silent Music, is not meant as a joke. There have been several publications devoted to this subject in recent years. Most of them are collections of essays that look at individual aspects of this problem (Losseff & Doctor, 2007; Schmusch & Ullmann, 2018). Salomé Voegelin (2010, p. XV) specifically explores the possibility of an immersive listening in silence. “In the quiet sound the listener becomes audible himself as a discrete member of an audience.”

As well as the publications, there are also conferences, because the sounds of the past are currently capturing the interest of historians and social scientists. And yet silence and music still seem to be mutually exclusive – perhaps one reason why David Toop (2010) looks only at the visual representation of music in his chapter Art of Silence. It seems it is not so easy to answer the question of what silence is.

Definitions of silence

The Oxford Dictionary defines silence as “complete absence of sound”. In the Cambridge Dictionary, silence is likewise described as “a period without any sound, complete quiet”, but with the additional explanation “a state of not communicating”, thus touching on a state that the meditation exercises prevalent in many cultures seek to attain. Silence would seem to be a prerequisite for religious contemplation, which can lead to a deeper understanding of the self and its conditions. In this context silence is defined as an experience of the presence of the supremely spiritually sublime, as something transcendental, that can only be experienced as the absence of all things and events.

In mediaeval times, at least, the opposition of silence and music was considered a given. Meister Eckart had demanded absolute silence: when the Lord speaks “all voices and all sounds must cease” (Kern, 2018, p. 87). Moreover, in the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church had the custom of “low Mass” in which the priests only moved their lips. Its most important characteristic was sine cantu. It was practised until 1963. But there are also other linguistic contextualisations of silence that prove useful for aesthetic matters.

When it comes to the definition of silence, German-language dictionaries differ from English-language ones in evincing a rich semantic field, as evidenced by the four-volume Grammatisch-kritische Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (1793–1801) by Johann Christoph Adelung. In Old High German and ever since, silence has been associated with a state of movement (standing, motionless, inactive), without much noise, with peace and quiet (soundless, being undisturbed by any noise), with being silent, wordlessness, solitude and that which goes unnoticed, sotto voce, that which is subsiding, hidden, which happens quietly and without a fuss. This list encourages us to describe silence musically not only in terms of a lack of acoustic events, but also through a contemplation of dynamic and rhythmic, harmonic processes, through structural characteristics in general, and to ask what is thus kept secret or withheld, or perhaps not expressed at all. Jean-François Lyotard (1955) had grappled in the context of contemporary visual arts with the question that it is on the one hand impossible to truly represent an absolute, and yet, through that which is shown, an imagining of the ineffable can be evoked.

In connection with the inexpressible, it should also be remembered that there were fundamental changes in aesthetic thinking over the course of the centuries. These include the altered status of art since the eighteenth century, which no longer had to serve a purpose and now claimed autonomy. Music in particular was increasingly understood as a language above language that was capable of lending expression to the unspeakable and unsaid. Where it comes from – no longer bound to functional ends through words or as dance music – seems to have remained a mystery to twentieth-century composers as well. Many works by György Ligeti are born of the emptiness of a rest, into which they again disappear. It may have been religious sentiments prompting Karlheinz Stockhausen’s openness to the ascending worshipper or worshippers at the conclusion of his meditative work Inori (1973/4). Echo effects and rests accompanied by a soloist within the piece contribute to its transcendental character.

Absolute silence was able to be integrated into the music as a conveyor of meaning, a signifier. Ferruccio Busoni (1911, p. 23) wrote in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music:

Busoni defined music as “signs”: “an ingenious device to grasp somewhat of that eternal harmony.

Music’s ability to capture the eternal harmony became a widespread topos in the nineteenth century and is still influential today, even if it is no longer explicitly voiced. With musical silence in particular, the same question was often raised that Charles Ives addressed in exemplary fashion in the preface to his instrumental piece The Unanswered Question (1906). “The perennial question of existence” that the solo trumpet poses in this piece, without the pursuit of an answer reaching the flutes, remains unanswered. The whole thing takes place over the quiet, triple-piano, heavily sustained, muted soundscape of the distant (offstage) strings. As a result of the increasingly forceful search for questions and answers, these muted tones are sometimes almost inaudible. They represent, as Ives writes in the preface: “the Silence of the Druids who know, see and hear nothing”. They still resound after the last question, withdrawing to a quadruple piano. Ives was a confirmed transcendentalist. This went hand in hand with his belief that man and nature partook of a common spiritual principle that is untouchable by the human question-and-answer game. The Unanswered Question inspired many of the pieces that will be mentioned in the following, although they did not stem from the same religious beliefs as those underlying Ives’s works.

The following begins by returning to Busoni’s remark in examining the expressive qualities of non-sounding elements in music, or those which fade away. A strictly systematic classification, however, did not seem feasible. The elements common to all silent pieces sometimes emerged more clearly when individual works were discussed. This procedure also made it possible to better differentiate between different aesthetic convictions. Many more works than could not be accommodated in a chapter would also have merited attention.

One that shall not go unmentioned, however, is the Symphonie Monotone-Silence (1944/1961) by Yves Klein, orchestrated by Pierre Henry. It consists of a single sustained D-major triad. Henry’s score bears the handwritten note “Durée: 5 ou 7 minutes/ Plus 44 secondes du Silence absolu” (Duration: 5 or 7 minutes/ Plus 44 seconds of absolute silence). It is unclear why it is sometimes played today in a version with 20 minutes of sound and 20 minutes of silence. The silence of the 44 seconds is much more intense than that of 20 seconds, because after the 10 to 12 seconds of the memory image fading away, attention can be maintained with effort, and an intense experience of something inaudible becomes possible, without being distracted by other thoughts. The symphony was performed for the first time at a performance, the Anthropometrien (1960), in a reduced version for strings. This was part of the context of the tireless search for immateriality that lead Yves Klein to blend Western and Eastern mysticism as a judo master and a member for a time of the Rosicrucian Order. Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void, 1960) is symbolic: The photo document is a montage, and casts doubts on whether the empty ground of the world can be attained by means of reality.

From effect to signifying symbol: the rest

Musical silences are represented in a very direct way through rests, which, however, are part of the sound and do not merely signify an opposition. In the nineteenth century the rest was sometimes described as the “silent sign”, as a form of eloquent silence. Because in music, the rest rarely denotes an empty period of time.

Various different meanings may be associated with the absence of sound. Nevertheless, it seems paradoxical that Joseph Haydn used a rest almost like a beat of the drum in his String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 71 no. 3 (1793). A brief opening passage is followed by a rest lasting one and a half measures, followed by a Vivace which, however, integrates the play with the rest, legitimising it, as it were, purely in terms of the compositional structure. But its first occurrence confronts listeners with the surprise of a silence, thus awakening a sudden attention to the music at a time when audiences were not yet used to the later concentrated listening. Mozart also made use of such dramatization with rests within a work (e.g. Piano Concerto in G major, KV. 453, measure 224).

Rests provide an underlying structure and are therefore often used to herald the conclusion. Georg Friedrich Händel dramatically separated the final Hallelujah with a general pause. For Haydn it presented one possibility among others for the moments of surprise in his music. In the finale of his String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 33 no. 2 (1781), general pauses are used to repeatedly postpone the ending. And then it seems the conclusion has arrived after all. But take care not to applaud too soon – it is only after another prolonged general pause lasting two and a half measures that the conclusion is actually reached. In England this quartet was nicknamed “The Joke”, an epithet it has retained to this day. But might Haydn have also intended not only that music be understood as a bravura performance, but also that other meanings could be experienced, heard lingering on in rests?

The repetition of a general pause in Johann Sebastian Bach’s motet Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227) has a powerful exclamatory effect. The passage at the beginning of the second movement “Es ist nun nichts Verdammliches an denen, die in Christo Jesu sind” (“Now there is nothing damnable in those who are in Christ Jesus”) contains a verbal repetition, and “nothing – nothing –” is emphatically underscored with two general pauses. Here, too, the absence of sound during rests is associated with tension and intensification. But here the general pause becomes an admonition, a call to devotion in the face of death. In the St John Passion of 1724 (BWV 245), the music suddenly breaks off at Jesus’s death with the words of the evangelist: “And he bowed his head and passed away”.

Music that falls silent

The structuring function of the rest became important for twelve-tone music with the relinquishing of tonality. Anton Webern strikingly realised his idea of the comprehensible form through the development of clearly demarcated musical forms. The rest at the beginning of many of his works and his frequent off-beat accents/lack of metric accents also liberate his music from the bonds of meter, and lend it a floating quality. And yet there is generally more than this implied. The beginning of the second movement of the Bagatellen für Streichquartett, op. 9 (1913) offers an easily described example of this. It begins with a rest, followed by an ascending eighth-note figure, decrescendoing from mezzo forte to piano and vanishing into a rest. The combination of a decrescendo with an ascending motion can be found for what is probably the first time in the late work of Beethoven. It reverses the usual combination of a sequence of notes at once rising and growing louder that had been used since the eighteenth century and known as the Mannheimer Walze (Mannheim roller) to open, or provide intensification within, a movement. It is probably such moments of turning inward that make Webern’s music appear to be on the verge of falling silent. They stem from a Neoplatonic attitude that was already widespread in the nineteenth century, according to which all that was material appeared to be grounded in the spiritual. Webern was influenced by Goethe’s pantheistic thought, but, as was not uncommon in his day, also by the continuing legacy of the symbolist movement that saw a spiritual truth behind the objective reality.

Changes in the conception of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century in both philosophy and science (including, not least, the theory of relativity) had raised doubts about the direct cognoscibility of the world. These changes affected the artists in very different ways. They inspired a new use of form that tended towards abstraction. Painters and musicians alike sought to put these thoughts into practice in various ways. One smallest common denominator can be found in the rejection of any form of positivism and in the belief in the ability to adumbrate the invisible. Pure creations of the mind independent of material circumstances were the aim. After the turn of the century the notion of evoking the invisible was also inspired by the reception of theosophical and anthroposophical ideas, particularly among Schoenberg’s circle through the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The role of the publication of Wassily Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) is also not to be underestimated. The book was quickly translated into other languages, including, in 1914, English (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). In this work, Kandinsky, himself inspired by theosophical and anthroposophical thought as well as by the occultism of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, highlighted many facets of the spiritual dimension behind the material phenomena whose inner sound he, too, sought to reveal. Webern’s music, reduced as it is to the essential, also opens up a spiritual space. Moreover, the whole of Europe was gripped at this time by the French symbolist movement. Webern himself was profoundly impressed by a performance of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which he had heard in 1909.

Fermatas and reverberation: French “métamusique”

The sentence “music is the silence between the notes” is ascribed sometimes to Mozart but mostly to Debussy, and we should recall that the word silence in French, as in English, means both the absence of sound and abstaining from speech. The unsaid in or behind what is said was discussed as a characteristic of art in numerous French publications from the 1890s onwards (see Ergal & Fink, 2010), including by Camille Mauclair (1928) in his book La Musique de Silence.

On the face of it, the numerous piano and pianissimo directions in Debussy’s music point to silence. The harmony, long durations, lack of metric accents may also create this impression. They are typical of Debussy’s musical style. The third movement of Suite Bergamasque (1890), Clair de lune, anticipates his later compositional techniques. Like many other pieces by Debussy, it comes con sordino, out of the silence of a rest; its key is blurred because it is not based on the root note; the key remains in many cases obscured as the work progresses (“mediant” relationships), even though the piece has few chromatics. Tied notes obscure the metre and contribute to shifts in metre. As an aside, successive shifts in pitch, as a hazy chiaroscuro effect, may reflect the title of the piece. The lingering echo effect created in the middle and at the end of the piece with a flowing arpeggio followed by a rest was replaced by Debussy in other works with a fermata followed by a rest or a sustained chord. A heavily accented, dry eighth-note sforzatissimo (sff/ sec) of a sound followed by a rest also creates a sense of fading away to an unknown distance (Préludes I, 1910, Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest). These and other phrases give the impression that Debussy would like to overcome the common bookending finale effect of, in particular, dominants and tonics. His works emerge from an unknown space, into which they again fade away. Irrespective of innovations in compositional technique in the form of the use of whole tones and chromatic progressions, there are, as it were, openings to the inaudible in his works, in the form of unresolved seventh and ninth chords and free-floating arabesque melodies. In Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), the opening flute arabesque is followed by a seventh chord that is not resolved, but instead gives way to a rest. This chord may be mistaken for dissonance; the seventh creates a soft susurration that invites attentive listening. Two performance directions, namely laissez vibrer and en dehors, are typical of Debussy’s differentiation of the sound. The laissez vibrer fulfils similar functions of reverberation to the rest and fermata. But it implies a stronger suggestion that something is audible. The sound dies out twice shortly after the beginning in Les collines d’Anacapri (Préludes II, 1913). The laissez vibrer refers to the intangibility of the origin and emergence of the sound.

Creating distance effects by placing the instruments separately was nothing new in Debussy’s day. But Debussy composed distance in so many different ways and even without placing the instruments at a distance, making it clear just how much dynamics were no longer merely a means of representation but, much like rhythm and pitch, had become a central composition factor – occasioning Debussy to frequently notate the Préludes II on three systems. In addition to descriptions such as en dehors, lointain, s’éloignant (prominently: outside; distant; becoming more distant), a detailed analysis would include the various indications of volume in the different parts. The en dehors, mostly soft, muted, belongs to a mysterious background (e.g. Ibéria, 1908, 3rd movement, Marche lointain, with mutes). But there is also a dehors played forte, as in the previously mentioned prelude Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest. It is the epitome of a generative process whereby a musical form appears forte/fortissimo behind a chromatically ascending demisemiquaver murmur in the left hand.

Theodor W. Adorno (1949/2006, p. 188) wrote critically and with acuity of the no-longer linear-time structure of Debussy’s works and their purely suggestive gestures:

(Ibid., p. 141)

Debussy was not an impressionist; rather, he was influenced by symbolism, an artistic movement that sought to evoke the deeper meaning of the world through symbols. Among the key librettists of Debussy’s vocal works were the symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck and Stéphane Mallarmé. Debussy also attended the symbolists’ gatherings on Tuesday evenings at the apartment of Stéphane Mallarmé.

What Adorno viewed with criticism yet also perceptively discerned in Debussy’s music is at the heart of symbolist thought, namely the attempt to evoke allusions to a “sensual infinity” through sensate signs. The phenomena were intended to be merely referential in nature in order to hint at the impenetrable. In musical terms, this meant breaking up the fixed syntax in order to let a silence show through that cannot be attained by any sound expression. In the anthology of his older writings La Religion de la Musique, Camille Mauclair (1928, p. 68) spoke of “métamusique”, whose silence can be expressed in music at best as an allusion: “There is above music a supreme language to which this allusion refers. This is the generating rhythm of the universe, in respect of which our sounds are merely echoes. And only this rhythm is metamusic.”

What Mauclair is referring to here is, in the terminology of philosophy, the distinction between natura naturata, which is secondary, produced by a natura naturans, which is understood in turn as a creative power at the original source of all things. Whether one wants to read this as an allusion to pantheism, Neoplatonism or monism need not be considered further here. Elements of these movements were present at the time, even if there is no evidence of them having a direct following.

Olivier Messiaen viewed his music as metaphysical in a religious sense, as indicated by the title of his cycle for piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944). Fermatas, pregnant pauses are used here, as well as the direction laissez vibrer, long with a fermata, as for example at the end of no. XXVII: Regard du Silence. Overall, however, this quiet contemplation of the infant Jesus reveals itself with its motley abundance of chords and its alternation between very slow and virtuoso, fast passages, to be a picture of constantly shifting colours. In some of his earlier works, Messiaen had explicitly named the colours associated with his sounds. That would be scarcely possible in this piece given the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the colours of the rainbow. Messiaen signalled this appearance of the arc-en-ciel (the rainbow) in the score, and he describes it in the preface to Vingt Regards as multicoloured gemstones blending into one another, and also as “impalpable”. The laissez vibrer with fermata of the ending is preceded by a longer, almost mono-rhythmic passage with constantly changing chords which is, however, in turn blurred by pedalling and only intended to convey an impression of the play of colour that decelerates before the fermata and evokes sparkling effects in the treble with short appoggiaturas. Messiaen had sometimes spoken concerning his “musique de couleur” of an éblouissement (dazzlement) effect, comparable to being dazzled by the rose windows of French Gothic cathedrals. He associated the quiet contemplation of the manger with a similar effect. Quiet or silence here implies the intense experience that entails a form of being overwhelmed.

Maurice Ravel, like Debussy, had a close connection to symbolism. Theo Hirsbrunner (1989, pp. 170–183) has demonstrated this with regard to his settings of symbolist poetry, particularly with an extensive analysis of Gaspard de la nuit (1908), a piano piece based on the poems of Aloysius Bertrand, who the symbolists saw as their predecessor. This note shall suffice. For we shall turn now to the fading away that Ravel handled in a very nuanced manner in his works that deal with death. An unusual passage in the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899) involves the detailed composition of a rising crescendo from pianissimo to fortissimo to an ultimate fading away in a fermata followed by a rest. The individual movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914/17) have surprisingly subtle endings, the suggestion of an elusive Somewhere. They are briefly listed here in the order of the movements: A single, very low tone; a quivering tremolo with fermata followed by garlands of notes resonating in the treble. / Tempi alternately hesitating – accelerating – hesitating, unsteady extended conclusion on the light part of the measure, with an empty fifth. / Brief gestures of farewell in pianissimo, then a solitary, dry staccato tone, as if it had fallen out of the “static” sound, it is not possible to continue. / Instability of a fortissimo sound on the light part of the measure. / A “frozen” trill: sans laisser vibrer. / A toccata, not in its usual function as an introductory movement, plunges with a short appoggiatura into the depths: a definitive conclusion.

All in all, an echo of the past blows over Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite of baroque dances. It is reminiscent of a memorial. Ravel is said to have dedicated the individual movements to friends who fell in the war. And yet the suite is not sombre, but rather highly nuanced in tone, often atmospheric with the many pianissimos. The very carefully developed finales also exude merely a sepulchral aura. The silence cannot be directly conveyed through the senses. Both the music and the sounds of nature are merely a translation of the silence into perceivable sounds, Monclair wrote. But the soul perceives the silence nevertheless; it is metamusical (métamusicale).

The All-One of space and time in the work of Iannis Xenakis

A great leap in time brings us now to a piece from 1961. In connection especially with the rest’s function of providing an underlying structure, which has further philosophical implications, it is of almost exemplary significance. It is not necessary to consider whether an entirely different source other than that of Neoplatonic thought is relevant for the relationship of that which can be perceived to the non-sensory, as Platonism, is Iannis Xenakis’s point of reference.

His piano piece Herma is based, like other works, on a mathematical method, namely the logic of the sieve theory. This was used to “sift out” categories of notes and their relationships and arrange them in a temporal order, creating the impression for the listener of clouds or linear sequences. Xenakis (1992, pp. 175–177) described the method in detail, also summarising it more briefly in the preface to the score. The abstract structural connection was clearly important to Xenakis. The pitch categories changing in accordance with the sifting procedure are indicated in the score with letters.

Despite the mathematical method he used, however, Xenakis always viewed himself as a composer in the true sense of the word. Herma is a virtuoso, blistering piece of great compass; at the beginning it strives with increasing density/fullness towards what constitutes the climax of the first section, a single sustained semibreve. This formal structure can be easily followed by the listener. The following section becomes less dense towards the end. The structure of the rests sets it apart. Rests lasting one or two measures allow silence to shimmer through despite the rapid tempo. But there are rests lasting as many as four measures that test the listener’s memory span. The piece thins out towards the end, a four-bar rest serves as the conclusion; into this silence, however, breaks a recollection of a traditional stretto with a wild triple forte. It lingers on in a rest, which is not, however, as unusual as the translucent places of the whole-measure rests.

Construction and auditory comprehension, whereby the work is reconstructed through listening, coalesce in Xenakis’s work. The mathematical structure may sometimes be too complicated to be understood in detail. But it is important to know that his music has an abstract foundation. Xenakis viewed his pieces as symbolic music, i.e. understood them as a symbol for something not directly present. Like his architectural constructions, they too are rooted in the idea of the identity of space and time in an All-One, as described by Parmenides, whom Xenakis frequently cited. Parmenides postulated an indivisible, homogenous, omnipresent original source; having not yet “become”, it contains space and time. It is no coincidence that Xenakis bases his piano work on this idea. He ruled out a purely temporal differentiation with a performance direction: The individual tones are not to be accented. In the preface to the score, we read: “The name Herma means bond, but also foundation, embryo etc.” What do these weighty reflections mean for the unusual rest structure? Suffice it to draw a parallel to the musically cadenced window façade that Xenakis designed for the monastery at La Tourette. The view through the glass dissolves the solid concrete into a whole that is organised in terms of space and time.

The fermata: dreaming spaces and sudden ecstasies in the work of Luigi Nono

There is probably no other work specifying as many fading fermatas as Luigi Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima (1980). Moments of pausing and fading away permeate this string quartet, often in combination with the tempo indication crotchet = 30, which is rarely used by composers because pieces then appear to be on the verge of falling apart. The constant changes of tempo prevent the flow of a pronounced metre from developing. In 52 places, specified as inaudibly silent, like directions to the performers, are 47 fragments of Hölderlin citations: “das weisst aber du nicht…” (“but you don’t know that… ”) is repeated five times.1 Concerning the quotations, Nono noted in the preface: “never to be spoken aloud during the performance – under no circumstances to be taken as programmatic performance indications […]. The players should ‘sing’ them inwardly in their autonomy…” As the concertgoers normally read the references to Hölderlin in the programme, but can only guess which passages they pertain to, this level of eloquent silence demands an increase in attention and hence also in immersion in the music. The fermatas, for which Nono used special signs up to four times as long as a standard fermata, and often indicated a duration in seconds, often follow a sustained note. The two fermatas just after the beginning, with a duration of 15 seconds and 17 seconds, are commensurate with that of echoic memory, which can last up to 18 seconds. They demand that the sound, mostly performed softly and therefore already vanished, continues to be heard after it has gone. But are indications of endless 25- or 27-second rests meant to call memories back?2 The subsiding al niente also explicitly substitutes silence for auditory events. The dilation of time through the fermatas al niente is also, as it says in the preface, meant to sound different each time, namely “with free fancy – of dreaming spaces – of sudden ecstasies – of unutterable thoughts – of tranquil breaths – of silences ‘intemporally’ sung.” The expressive qualities of the string quartet, of distance, silence, tranquility, depth, etc., continue to be felt by the listener in the experience of silence. Does the quotation of the chanson “Malor me bat”,3 used in many masses during the Renaissance, mark a nadir of grief? Nono cites it with a reference to Ockeghem: “sotto voce, dolcissimo, … wenn ich trauernd versank…” (“sotto voce, dolcissimo, … as I sank down in grief”). But it is not the experience of absolute nothingness. “Mit innigster Empfindung” (“with the utmost feeling”), the performance direction borrowed from Beethoven’s “Heiliger Dankgesang”, or “holy song of thanksgiving” from op. 132, soughs in Nono’s piece in quarter tones sotto voce, sometimes with great shifts in pitch, fades al niente four times, but also erupts into a triple forte:4 An ecstatic outburst that testifies to the fact that these moments of “silences, ‘songs’ of other spaces, other skies / to otherwise rediscover the possible, do not ‘say farewell to hope’“ (preface to the score). This remark by Nono was initially ignored when his string quartet was interpreted as revealing his hopes for social and political change. With the string quartet, he simply took a different approach to that of the calls to revolution of some of his earlier works, which sought to effect a direct overpowering. Helmut Lachenmann (1999, p. 27), a student of Nono’s and extremely well acquainted with his work, has expressed this very compellingly:

This restless silence of a jolting awareness is evoked, among other things, by the constant tritones of the string quartet. These derive from the scala enigmatica from Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem that Nono takes as a basis for the piece, a scale comprising elements of both major and minor scales, as well as the whole-tone scale. Many sound constellations can be derived from this. If we listen with a concentrated, heightened awareness, we can even hear in the background in Nono’s work an allusion to a harmony that is quite unusual in new music. Almost inaudible, in quadruple piano, a fifth relation somewhat roughened with quarter tones puts in an appearance:5 “wenn aus der Tiefe …” (“when out of the depth…”). It seems to be linked to places that mark a section in transition. This fifth, a timeless interval and one that is often also felt to be intercultural, fades away al niente at the quartet’s conclusion: “eine stille Freude mir … wieder…” (“quiet joy comes back to me”). The interval emerges repeatedly from the scala enigmatica. It is not the aim of Nono’s string quartet in the narrower sense, but perhaps an indication of hope: “to otherwise rediscover the possible, do not ‘say farewell to hope’”.

The meaning of silence in Nono’s work is different to the way in which it is put to use in the work of Ives, Debussy and Webern to listen intently to the primaeval source of a non-sensory, spiritual metamusic of being. We might speak here of “deep listening”. Nono’s string quartet, on the other hand, demands the intentional act of a “detecting hearing”, a listening as a concentrated, effortful quest to discern a hidden message in reality. It is surprising that non-sound, the absence of sound, in music can express very different forms of an eloquent silence.

Silent music – the introduction of new forms of silence

Nono’s string quartet encouraged composers to give greater attention to silence in Europe in the last third of the twentieth century. But a mixture of different influences was at play.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the recorded piano and ondulina improvisations by Giacinto Scelsi, rendered in traditional notation by ghostwriters, became known. Scelsi believed in the theory of reincarnation and was very heavily influenced by Indian philosophy. He was also inspired by American music, including La Monte Young’s conceptual pieces. Some of the verbal scores of his Compositions (1960) aim for a spiritual meditation practice: No. 2, listening to a crackling fire; No. 5, watching butterflies flying; No. 6, the musicians watching the audience in the way that the audience usually watches the musicians. The Compositions have no fixed duration. The best known is No. 7, consisting of the notes B and F#, with the instruction “to be held for a long time”. Young had turned to Indian music at this time. In 1964 he founded The Theater of Eternal Music, a group of artists and musicians that became known for their long-duration music. They had sometimes already begun playing before the audience was admitted; there was no fixed end; the soundscape was characterised by sustained drone tones.

Other tendencies in minimal music also suggested new directions. The 1972 European tour by Steve Reich’s ensemble, which was influenced in turn by African music, was significant, as were the Metamusik Festivals in 1974 and 1976, which gave a very broad scope to minimal music, including works by Terry Riley and Philip Glass. Interest at the time focused on the connections between Far Eastern cultures and those of the West. Silence meant committing oneself to a form of almost trance-like meditation.

John Cage indisputably made the most widely discussed contribution to the subject of silence with his so-called silent piece, 4’33” (1952). It influenced European composers when the subject of silence re-emerged in the 1990s. The works of Morton Feldman were now also known in Europe. But they were often placed in the context of John Cage, although Feldman’s music should be seen rather as mediating European and American thought. He (1985, p. 137) rarely spoke of silence – at most of stasis, a state of abeyance. For him, however, the concept of “abstract experience” is central. In connection with silence, it provides fertile ground for reflection. By the way, it should be mentioned that also the fade out of pop music leads to an attitude of immersion into the indeterminate (Kopiez et al., 2013).

Abstract experience: Morton Feldman

As always in Feldman’s music, the beginning is quiet, yet clearly set out, although admitting of exceptions such as the piece Intermission 6 (1953), which places 15 sounds, freely distributed on a page, at the disposal of the pianist or the two pianists. The endings, on the other hand, disappear into the open with the different parts thinning out and with ritardandi. Feldman (1985, p. 89) was heavily preoccupied with the way in which all sounds decay as they fade away. This is also relevant within a piece if there are no tempo indications and the sound has to fade away before the next one follows. The fading away should, at the same time, make the sound appear to start without a beginning. The fact that the sound departs from us, instead of moving towards us, creates the impression of a landscape vanishing from sight. The fading away suggests an unknown place of origin (Feldman, 1985, p. 87), whose atmosphere is merely alluded to in the sensory present. There are indications that Feldman believed there was a different reality behind the one accessible to us through the senses.

The most striking characteristic of Feldman’s system of notation is the grid technique of his pattern compositions. For a whole piece, before he began composing in the strict sense, Feldman drew vertical lines, mostly nine arrangement lines, on sheet music paper. This grid maps a spatiotemporal structure; as an image in noted form it offers something external to hold onto. Feldman (ibid., p. 125) described the grid as a “ruler”. This supporting structure extends into the piece, albeit mostly inaudibly, for instance through the metre indication 3/8. Tom Hall (2007) has examined the relationships between the grid and the musical construction, and identified a neutralisation of the grids through asymmetrical overlays of groupings of patterns, creating a shifting auditory impression. In some pieces, however, such as the four-hour trio For Philip Guston (1984), the grid emerges at the beginning, over the course of 35 bars, in the form of interrupting rests, albeit not entirely regular and intact. These rests are one of the few instances in which Feldman (ibid., p. 129) used the word “silence”. He spoke of “silent frames”. Does this mean that the audible sound elements stand out, as it were, from a background of silence? The patterns are in turn to be understood as relatively self-contained units. A linear passage of time in the sense of a consistent development is not intended.

Feldman often mentions in his writing Henri Bergson and his concept of time, which replaced the forward movement of a linear, chronological progression with the durée as a temporal fabric – a changing interpenetration of many different, shifting qualities. The totality of the patterns in Feldman’s work embedded in the structure of the grid, their repetitions, superimpositions and permutations, have the effect for the listener of the experience of an undirected sound, ultimately of an experience in which time is suspended. The composer, who described himself as “very Kierkegaardian”, was heavily influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, whose story Repetition (1843) established a new philosophical category. Kierkegaard considered true repetition to be impossible, because it implies a confluence of past and present, whereby that which is present is always also that which is absent at the moment in which, according to Kierkegaard, eternity manifests itself. Feldman (ibid., p. 107) used Kierkegaard’s image of the leap for this experiencing in an undefinable state: “The leap into the Abstract is more like going to another place where the time changes. Once you make that leap there are no longer any definitions. […] It has to happen.”

Another important intellectual ally for Feldman was Piet Mondrian, whose paintings with their purely horizontal and vertical grids hide nothing and show nothing. They abstract from any traditional pictorial representation. Feldman (ibid., p. 115) said of Piet Mondrian’s “plus/minus” series that it even neutralised our ability to visually complete the paintings: “It is all there, so to speak, but where or how to look at them, is not.”

Feldman pointed out that Mondrian’s abstract constructions have blurred elements that are easily overlooked, because, for instance, the grids with their black borders may be slightly blurred with the white and are also frayed the edges. For Mondrian, a confirmed Calvinist and anthroposophist, the frayed edges of the grid (also outwards) signified an opening up to the spiritual. Feldman (ibid., p. 81), who for his part considered art to be merely a metaphor, raised questions that were at least similar to Mondrian’s: “How can you bridge what is real with what is only a metaphor? Art is only a metaphor.” Of interest in this context is a remark by the art historian Rosalind E. Krauss (1979/1986, p. 10) about grid paintings, which were increasingly used by artists in the 1960s in an attempt to encourage viewers to see something non-visible. She described them as spiritually, “religiously” motivated, because a grid could ultimately extend in all directions and potentially to infinity, thus using the real sensory representation merely as a means to evoke something abstract. This can by all means be extended to Feldman’s idea of his music being rooted in an abstract experience, allowing us to understand his grids in terms of Krauss’s (1979/1986, p. 52) interpretation: “The grid is a staircase to the universal.”

The image of a staircase is an apposite symbol for the fact that much of American art production – including in the second half of the twentieth century – refers theoretically to the notion of the sublime, accompanied by scholarly publications dedicated to the same subject. The concept was already being redefined in the nineteenth century, and sublimitas was now no longer equated with the kind of delightful horror produced by lightning or the Alps, but rather with an inner experience of the ineffable, the inexpressible. A grid laid out by the artist has the effect of the limiting frame of a window, evoking a tension between something which can be perceived and a sensory non-present present. In his seminal essay The Sublime Is Now, however, Barnett Newman (1948, p. 53) presented this inner experience of seemingly immaterial sublimitas as an exclusively American achievement, “free from the weight of European culture […] we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings”. It is no coincidence that this description did not seem satisfactory among Feldman’s closer circle of friends. Mark Rothko frequently used a similar choice of words with regard to his paintings, as in 1947 (p. 84), when he spoke of “transcendental experience”, which surpasses empirical experience while at the same time remaining bound to it. This definition of the sublime, which has been the standard definition since the nineteenth century, also applies to Feldman’s work. It is therefore no surprise that it also includes musical techniques that recall traditions despite the fact that they fundamentally change the musical material.

In his investigation of sound and silence in Beethoven’s oeuvre, William Kinderman (1995) described open closing cadences that want to go beyond the frame, similar to those found in Feldman’s work. And he demonstrated how deeply they penetrate into the compositional structure, as for example in the last variation of op. 109, Mit innigster Empfindung, where there is a veritable decay of the cantabile theme. The sonata ends with a subsiding pedalled ritardando in an elusive Somewhere. The inaudible that cannot be represented, but only felt, is a metaphor in the sense of a catachresis, namely not directly given, but subject to the condition of the audible. Feldman (1985, p. 89) not only associated this idea with the fading away of the sound; rather, an audible, “sounding” piece of music can point to this indefinite, inaudible dimension:

The common conception of silence as the lack of sensory information is not what is meant by the inaudible ineffable. It presupposes the leap to another place that cannot be forced: “It has to happen.” Nevertheless, the composer demands of the listener maximum concentration. That Feldman’s later works often lasted many hours, to symbolise an infinite scope, presents a challenge for their reception, because it demands complete absorption, absolute immersion. Only then is the leap to the other place possible.

4’33” – The buzzing of ambient sounds

At the end of the 1940s, Cage intended to sell a “silent prayer” in the form of uninterrupted silence, lasting the length of a vinyl record of the time, to the company MUZAK. The idea is considered the initial catalyst for the three silent movements of 4’33”, demarcated by pianist David Tudor at the world premiere in 1952 by lowering and lifting the keyboard lid (ending with an open piano). The fact that there was nothing to hear in the concert hall except for the sounds of the audience was felt to be scandalous, especially as it was meant to be a benefit concert.

4’33” seems to have been a key work for Cage for sounds that did not pursue any compositional intention, stirring up nothing but sounds that already existed in reality, albeit in a set time frame. Other pieces whose titles referred to 4’33” followed, though they could be of different lengths and use different settings to produce sound with the intention of reconciling sensory perception and meditative stillness.

It was evidently difficult, however, to find the framework for the purged, silent piece of music, 4’33”, in which a pianist was to play nothing. Thomas M. Maier (2001, p. 137 ff.) has reappraised the three versions of the score and discussed them in detail. The first version of 1952 has been lost and is known only from accounts. David Tudor’s recollection is important here. This version was written in conventional notation on manuscript paper and contained empty bars without rests. The second version, printed in landscape format and also dating from 1952, uses graphic notation with vertical lines, whereby Cage specified that 1 page = 7 inches = 56”. For Cage, as for other artists, the relationship between space and time had become self-evident. The duration of the individual movements is indicated at the end of each one. But is the number 60 on the top horizontal line a metronome marking for the tempo with which a page should be read? The third version from 1960 indicates the order of the movements one below the other with the direction “Tacet”. The total length is now indicated only by the title, which in one edition, however, is abandoned as well. The tremendous effort Cage put into creating the scores challenges us to understand the genesis of 4’33” in part as a process of purification from any and all musical rules and regulations. Performed tacet, the music becomes a meditative yet buzzing/humming silence that just needs a frame by means of specified durations to bring out the play of ambient sounds.

4’33” – The pure experience

As well as Meister Eckart, the theorist of Zen Buddhism Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki also had a crucial influence on Cage. It is not known precisely when exactly Cage came into contact with Zen Buddhism (possibly as early as the late 1940s), but we do know that he attended Suzuki’s lectures in 1952. Much has been written about this, and often repeated. But the fact has mostly been overlooked that Suzuki, who had already spent 11 years in the US from 1897 onwards, blended Eastern and Western views in his thought, lending Japanese Buddhism a special focus. Suzuki, who had known William James personally, had studied James’s writings and passed his ideas on to his students. As only some of Cage’s books have been preserved, it is difficult to establish outright whether he was directly influenced by James’s writings. Only recently has the importance of pragmatism for the development of American music been pointed out (Brooks, 2016; Clarkson, 2001). It would appear that this requires a rethinking of Cage research. Remarkably, however, these more recent studies neglect the writings of Van Meter Ames (1954), a philosopher informed by both pragmatism and Buddhism, who was a close friend of Cage’s. The correspondence between the two has not even been published yet, despite its importance for Cage’s understanding of Buddhism. Ames had in fact given a lecture on Cage and pragmatism at the Sixth Congress of Aesthetics in Uppsala in 1968. Of central importance to Ames (1956, p. 306) was James’s concept of “pure experience” (James, 1904). This undoubtedly describes the experience Cage was aiming for with 4’33”.

For Cage, however, Suzuki (1994, p. 20) was presumably the most important source of information on the spiritual aspects of pragmatism; for his part, Suzuki repeatedly pointed out the impact of William James’s work on Zen Buddhist theory. He concurred with James’s idea of mystical experience: “That there is a noetic quality in mystic experience has been pointed out by James in his Varieties of Religious Experience and this also applies to the Zen experience.” In the book mentioned earlier, Suzuki characterized James’s “illumination” and “revelation” as “noetic qualities”: “They are states of insight into depths of truth, unplumed by the discursive intellect” (1902, p. 371). In Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular, James’s idea of “pure experience” was adopted by Nishida Kitarō, a philosopher and friend of Suzuki and proponent of the so-called Kyoto school. This “pure experience” could not be clearly attributed to a material basis but was rather a state of consciousness. In it, external things are presented, but in such a way that these impressions are broken up and reassembled, i.e. processes take place that are difficult to appreciate and understand individually. In the version proposed by the Kyoto school, world and consciousness are integrated in these processes, i.e. satori is anchored in them.

William James (1890, vol. I, p. 488) first described the “pure experience” of the untarnished perception of a stream of consciousness free of all concepts in relation to new born babies: “The baby […] feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion… […] the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.” And he did not bar the possibility of this unspoilt, pristine unity of experience (ibid.) for adults. He spoke of the fact “that any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately, will fuse into a single and undivided object for that mind” (ibid.). The assumption that before every act of perception and consciousness a “pure experience” precedes without a subject–object polarity is one of the premises of his thinking. In 1904 he explicitly stated this thought once again.

4’33” creates a prototypical situation for very different impressions to blend in unison, free of any form of conceptual distinction or classification. They make possible what James described as “pure experience”, a “blooming, buzzing”, that leads to an unmediated unity of consciousness and sensation. As a prime reality (1890, I, p. 263), this experience is without self-brand. Thus, it does not entail a dualism between world and individual, either: It is “a sense of existence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and the not-me.” This aspect of intention lessness, without self-brand, was one of Cage’s most fundamental aesthetic beliefs.

4’33” is not silent in the sense of soundlessness. The idea is, rather, that in the buzzing of the ambient sounds, freed from human conceptualisation, a sense of the wholeness of the existence of the world and humanity can be experienced. Cage also sought with chance procedures to dismantle the accustomed categorial relationships of compositional technique and to expand consciousness to include possibilities of genuine knowledge, which differs from that with which we are already familiar. The parallel to James, whose “psychology” is a wrestling with existential questions, is astonishing. In his published lectures A Pluralistic Universe (1909, p. 212), James disputed that conceptualising, rational, logical thought could afford any fundamental knowledge of the world:

(Ibid., p. 261)

This led to his call to “install yourself in a phenomenal moment” (ibid.) – a call that could serve as an epigraph to Cage’s work.

The perennial question of existence

Silence in the form of a rest can have the effect of dramatising the music, because it creates tension. In the twentieth century in particular, however, it often assumed a spiritual significance. It was believed to evoke religious, transcendental notions of an immaterial, otherworldly beyond, or, in the tradition of Eastern religions, occasion a meditation on the existence inherent in things. Silence can also be associated with the attempt at a symbolist reference to an inherently spiritual component in things, and with a monistic/pantheistic intention to penetrate reality with a spiritual dimension. Silence as mediator of an experience of immanence that encompasses Dasein and being can also serve as an indication of the all-encompassing unity of space and time, or indeed simply suggest the search for a better reality that could be hidden in the given reality. Even if a composer has explicitly rejected metaphysics, the musically composed silence still carries the implicit idea of something that cannot be expressed in words. It suggests the attempt to imbue something that is musically inaudible nevertheless with a trace of the sensate. What is always intrinsically inherent is the perennial question of existence.

Notes

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