One morning a couple of years ago I was listening to Morton Feldman’s magnificent solo piano piece For Bunita Marcus. It’s a very easy piece to listen to.
It is also very quiet. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’s pitched expressly at the ears of its audience; it sounds like something you might be overhearing. The sustain pedal stays down throughout, the slow but irregularly played notes linger for up to twenty seconds, and the tones overlap. In accordance with the score, the pianist—here it was Hildegard Kleeb—repeats patterns but then changes them, so that you are allowed to let go of the memory track and just listen, without proprietary feelings. But perhaps despite yourself you start to capture certain phrases; it becomes hard not to capture them, as you start grasping the form and spirit of the piece. As they enter your bank, they take you by surprise. You may wonder whether you have the right to keep them.
Anyway, something funny happened around the middle of the piece. During a repeated two-note pattern—if this were another composer you might say an obsessively repeated two-note pattern, but nothing about this piece is obsessive at all—an E flat two octaves above middle C was repeatedly sounded, or touched. (It’s a quiet piece to begin with, but Kleeb plays the notes as an eater, holding a fork, breaks the surface of a buttery cake—with the understanding of it as a luxury.) The E flat sounded very close—much less than a half step, maybe ten cents off, or a tenth of a half-step—to a warning tone made outside my window by a backhoe, moving dirt in the park. Both sounds shared a quiet presence in the room, and they were at odds. You had to accept the clash—what was the choice, elect to listen only to the backhoe?—but there was a prize in the acceptance of it. In other words, not asking what the clash is doing to you, but what it’s doing for you.
You can practice radical acceptance if you’re sick and your body is acting beyond your control, and you can practice it as a listener, when sounds act upon your consciousness. Quiet music, in the best cases, heightens the possibility of acceptance. It puts you on heightened watch.
* * *
The story of the twentieth century was not only the story of large-scale outward movements—telecommunication, postcolonial liberation, and total war. It was also, among other things, the story of self-absorption and self-guided spirituality, the time of going way inside for one’s own gain. It produced the apotheosis of the small self, the heroics of aloneness, and the rules of self-sacrificing art. Look at all the lights voluntarily put under bushels in the middle of the century, as rhythm and blues was giving way to rock and roll, as Little Richard and Johnny “Guitar” Watson were excellently, outwardly straining and gnashing:
In 1952, John Cage writes and performs “4'33",” and Nat King Cole’s trio creates an instrumental version of “I Surrender, Dear.”
In 1954, Chet Baker records “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” the Modern Jazz Quartet records “Django,” and Dorival Caymmi records Canções Praieiras, for voice and guitar alone.
In 1955, Frank Sinatra records In the Wee Small Hours.
In 1956, Chris Connor records He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, and João Gilberto discovers his sound while practicing in his sister’s bathroom.
All of this musical activity is to some degree about the performer’s privacy. It treads an ambiguous line between breaking a contract with the audience and giving them more of what they want. None of it, however, comes across as a quiet that’s meant to comfort, or to appease, or to curry favor. False intimacy is the kind that tries to elicit a fixed reaction, that is calculated to comfort in order to score a point. Real intimacy has no stated goal. It is full of its own untranslatable reasons.
In art, the confident gesture, loud or quiet, is of highest importance; perhaps it’s even all there is. By extension, the acknowledgment of the human behind it—the actual machinations of the finger, limb, or torso making the art—is secondary, if relevant at all. The dance critic Arlene Croce had an excellent way of putting this: “the arabesque is real, the leg is not.”
She was talking about ballet as a code of “signs and designs.” Let’s talk about music that way, at least for now: as a code of signs and designs. Music is artifice. It is an organization of sound that expresses feeling. The effect of the minor chord, on its own or in its context, is real; the position of the hand is not. The stab and decay of the amplified note is real; the input and output levels are not. The vibrato is real; the larynx is not.
* * *
Quietness is the idea of open space, an idea that can mean very little or very much. (Of course there is no open space, really, in earthbound life; there is always something there.) Open space, whether in a park or a poem or a song, is first an element of design. And then it is a sign, a signifier or a symbol.
You realize the power of a short silence when you hear it in a song. You realize it in the middle of Metallica’s “All Nightmare Long,” in the tiny break before James Hetfield takes a gulp of air to keep singing, or at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” after the strings finish rising and before the final chord; and all through Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody,” where the silences seem to swing because they last a fraction of a second too long, or Erik Satie’s Sarabande no. 1, where the one-beat rests break up the waltz time so often that you might never experience the song as being in three, or in any particular rhythm at all. Silence confounds, enriches, clarifies.
In some sense the listener is always playing along with the music herself, in her own way, through the nervous system or the memory, if she’s heard it before. By that formulation, quiet—which, when taken to extreme, is silence—represents the opportunity for the listener to breathe, whereas all other musical matter requires that you hold your breath, concentrate, navigate. Quiet represents letting go, not hanging on; respite, not responsibility. You can hear it, but you’re hearing metaphor as much as you’re hearing content.
Used with a little rigor or aggression, the conscious production of less sound or no sound can turn the act of listening upside down. It means that the listener can be listening to, and responding to, absences. Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus consists as much of decaying notes as sounded notes. Some works by Bernhard Günter or Ryoji Ikeda or Michael Pisaro can strike the ear as silence, even though something musical is usually happening and usually continuously: a small, sustained tone or disturbance, either digital or field-recorded. (John Cage’s “4'33"” is silence, if we define silence in music as the musician not producing sound from his instrument. That does not mean it isn’t also music, in terms of a composition, performance, and listening experience Cage intended to be musical.)
Those are extremes. There is another form of quiet, however—one that is not represented by actual silence. It is intimacy, which isn’t measured in seconds, but in minutes.
João Gilberto’s bossa nova recordings—all of them, but particularly some of those heard on his album João Gilberto, recorded in New York in 1973 and often called the “White Album”—are among the great examples of what we’re talking about.
Intimacy is a reaction against all that is normal and acceptable in performance. It is the rhetoric of speaking only to one person, as opposed to thousands. At its best it commands by withdrawing: it can sound selfish, a self-limiting of potential. Or it can sound generous, as the most or best that a shy person can muster. It draws you inside the performer’s instrument or respiratory system.
* * *
After his first few years in music as a member of the young vocal group Garotos da Lua, João Gilberto retreated from performing in 1956, staying with his sister in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, reportedly singing and playing guitar in her small tiled bathroom, where he found the acoustics perfect.
Seventeen years later he was living in New York, a Bahian speaking halting English. He was living in his own head, and might have wanted to get his listeners in there, too: there is a sense in his music from that time that he is playing for an audience in his memory or in a fantasized, ideal projection. Two songs on the “White Album” make the case especially well for the force of intimacy, and both are about home: “Falsa Baiana,” an old samba by Geraldo Pereira, and a version of Gilberto Gil’s “Eu Vim da Bahia.” He’s changed the tone of the humor in them. They were once social songs. Now they’re cloistered, but they still have the samba rhythm inside them: Gilberto could create it alone. Great musicians can contain within themselves the force of more than one person.
He made the album in New York with one other musician, Sonny Carr, a drummer who worked on Wall Street by day and would obey Gilberto’s edict of playing with only brushes on a clenched high-hat cymbal. It was engineered by Wendy Carlos, the organist of Switched-On Bach and creator of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, who positioned a microphone close to Gilberto’s mouth and changed the way he sounded on record. It is the closest to the ideal of his performances, and it set a model for how his voice would later be recorded. It is here that you can really consider what singing in a small tiled space may have done for him.
It also went far beyond the intimacy of his first recordings in the late 1950s, the recordings said to have modernized Brazilian music. That modernizing, curiously, seemed to go against the idea of music as a social force, as a shared popular culture of samba-canção and bolero. It was the acknowledgment of a Brazil without crowds. Gilberto arrived with the sound of a new masculinity, an extreme vulnerability. It came from a number of sources, mostly American: Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”; the Brazilian singer Dick Farney; the controlled, continuous tones of Frank Rosolino’s trombone in the Tommy Dorsey band; and probably Chet Baker, who made his first vocal recordings in 1954. For all that, it was barely emotional. Its undulations were minuscule. The voice had no vibrato, and it came from the head; the “ba-dum-ba-baw” he sings toward the end of “Falsa Baiana” sounds like the thinnest muted brass.
Gilberto disappears at the end of some words, sometimes making you feel like he’s removing himself to his ideal place. The word “cantar” in “Eu Vim da Bahia” ends with a small, aspirated “ah”; it is the uncommon example of an aspirated “ah” in popular music that isn’t sexual. He demands, consistently, almost sullenly, that you listen hard to him: true passive aggression, a quality not abundantly found in pop until the 1980s.
* * *
If you understand music as free enterprise, which is how most people in America have understood it since the decline of the piano in the living room—the mid-1970s, pretty much—then the spectrum of quietness, intimacy, and silence in music might seem a form of selfishness or self-sabotage. It is not wanting to be heard, or only wanting to be heard on your own terms.
But if you listen another way, the quiet impulse might be a populist idea. It might reach more people. It is an expression of civility. It is not trying to interrupt or drown out anything else. It allows for the rest of life to be heard.
And it connects to a much greater pool of history and human expression. Quiet music intimates daily living as much as performance and stage business. It doesn’t favor the biggest, proudest expression as the only true form of music-making; it is trying to transform what is casual, unspoken, or overlooked into a musical vocabulary. It is building a continuity between rest and motion, thought and articulation, sleep and alertness; it’s always doing the work of connecting audiences, musicians, and people, rather than holding one above the others.
You don’t just hear the glory of the quiet impulse in music that is downcast or meditative by definition—ballads or bossa nova or slow jams or folk song. You hear it nearly all the time in some musicians: Curtis Mayfield and Arthur Russell and the Modern Jazz Quartet, for example.
Curtis Mayfield was one of the great quiet music-makers of the twentieth century, and one of the wisest: intimate even when protesting racism over funk beats. The sound of his guitar and his voice seemed to work in alignment. He played a Telecaster without a pick, finding a trebly and clear guitar tone with subtle ministrations of the wah-wah pedal to offset the respirated breathiness of his voice. He raised his boy tenor up to a calm falsetto; he figured out ways to be prophetic while delivering a relatively low signal. He let you hear the dip and catch in his voice in the important vowels of each line, where many other singers might sing full and steadily. At best his art was like highly melodic talking heard at close range. And it was civil. He created space in his music so that others could be heard. There is always a sense that he has secured your permission and will play by the rules.
One of his most representative moments comes on the record Curtis/Live! in 1971, in “Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey).” After the second chorus the volume cuts and he sings about how everyone bleeds like everyone else: he’s making connections. “Can I get a bit deeper?” he asks, then suggests that all human life comes from the same source. He declares that he is black and proud: he’s telling you what he is and how he feels about it. He’s rallying your conscience, but politely: he is preparing you to be a little bit surprised by a sudden change in volume or attack, or by an idea that takes some self-possession to express in public. But when he sings the slogan, he doesn’t sing any louder than before. And after the next chorus and a bass solo comes an amazing sequence. The whole band cuts out, except for the conga player. “We don’t need no music,” Mayfield sings; “we got conga”—which makes sense if you are defining “music” as something made by a band. A few lines later he goes deeper, as he warned you he would. “We don’t need no music,” he repeats. “We got soul.”
Nearly any given piece of music proceeds along the supposition that it is crucial. It is fighting to be heard, or conforming to a recognizable design, or otherwise validating its claim on your time, earning its length or seriousness or volume level. Curtis Mayfield, in his lyrics and in his sound, was willing to admit that “music” is secondary to greater things, that it can make room for better versions of the truth. In doing so, he gave it away genuinely. As a friend once pointed out to me while listening to this song, how many other musicians can suggest without rancor or resentment that we don’t need music? John Cage couldn’t. He disliked the accepted idea of music. He wrote in his book M: “Music (‘good music’) excludes the stranger, establishes the government, renders the composer deaf.”
This is not primarily a book about words and music. It mostly considers words as components or representations of sound. But in this case, the words and the sound are expressing the same thing.
* * *
Arthur Russell was a soft-voiced singer, too. He created the music for his album World of Echo, according to his biographer Tim Lawrence, through midnight sessions, on “pretty much every full moon between 1983 and 1986.” Like Curtis Mayfield, he had a sentient relationship with his instrument, which was the cello; he used digital effects on it to make it echo and bulk and warp and flood your hearing—to make it replicate things that the voice can do. He was making music connect, spreading it out, rendering his music simple and complicated at the same time, perhaps confounding its purpose a little bit in the service of magic.
He hesitated before finishing anything he’d started; he recorded much of World of Echo in the control room and edited with a razor on the fly, erasing bits of tape and recording over them, fully aware of the possibility of bleed-through, which shows up on the final product. He liked the word “liquefy”: he wrote of “liquefying a ‘raw material’ where concert music and popular song can crisscross.” And in his song “I Take This Time,” he sang the lines “You made a sound that’s in an early state / That liquefies inside before it’s old, before its energy is over.”
In most of his music, but especially in World of Echo, he made supremely quiet, intimate music. The entire thing sounds made for himself alone, like sections of an endless rehearsal tape; the songs seem to make reference to a single other person, as if they’re to be heard only by that single other person, and received as a gift. (How many times he uses “you” intimately in the lyrics: “A kid like you could never understand”; “I’m putting everything around you / Over by you”; “I’m hiding your present from you”; “Although you’re coming back, it’s our last night together.”)
You can draw a connection between it and João Gilberto; I do. But there’s no evidence that Russell himself, who died in 1992, ever thought about João Gilberto. Bossa nova is a form, and he wasn’t following any particular form. More generally, World of Echo is not “quiet music” per se. He was trying to bring out music that was not preconstructed, that sat liquefied inside him, through the possibilities of amplified cello and through using the tonal possibilities of his voice, singing from the nose and back of the head, slurring words, improvising, changing his accents and melodies, extending sections at will so that there was no such thing as verse or bridge or chorus.
* * *
And the Modern Jazz Quartet: What were they up to with their strangely soft dynamic range, with all those brushed drums, their own law of seldom rising above a given volume level even as they played fairly intense music? They seemed to flout obvious logic, obvious laws of taste and expression. The drummer Connie Kay could sustain interest even playing a rhythm nearly unchanged for ten minutes, with scant off-beat accents as weak as raindrops. John Lewis seemed always to be playing less on the piano than he was expected to. “Bluesology,” on the album Fontessa, is as true and deep a blues as there is in African-American music, but it feels as if it’s made of thin china. Milt Jackson plays the vibraphone without sustain, and Lewis’s solo overlaps sneakingly with his; counterintuitively, it contains very little. Toward the end of it, where we might expect signs of a climax, he’s playing the piano in parallel figures with three fingers: two in the left, one in the right. It is willful, surprising, and almost unnecessary: the definition of a successful gift.
MORTON FELDMAN, For Bunita Marcus, Hildegard Kleeb, 1990
JOHN CAGE, “4'33",” 1952
NAT KING COLE, “I Surrender, Dear,” 1952
CHET BAKER, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” 1954
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET, “Django,” 1954
DORIVAL CAYMMI, Canções Praieiras, 1954
FRANK SINATRA, In the Wee Small Hours, 1955
CHRIS CONNOR, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, 1956
METALLICA, “All Nightmare Long,” 2008
THE BEATLES, “A Day in the Life,” 1967
AALIYAH, “Are You That Somebody,” 1998
ERIK SATIE, Sarabande no. 1, Aldo Ciccolini, Angel, 1968
JOÃO GILBERTO, João Gilberto, 1973
CURTIS MAYFIELD, “Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey),” from Curtis/Live!, 1971
ARTHUR RUSSELL, World of Echo, 1986
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET, “Bluesology,” from Fontessa, 1956