As John Cage discovered when he wrote 4′ 33″, absolute quiet can never be achieved. Andrew Clements reveals why the secret of music lies in the gaps between the notes
The handiest, most compact definition of music I know is that it is sound organised for a cultural purpose. It is not perfect, but such a blamelessly ecumenical description neatly short-circuits all aesthetic assumptions about high art and low art, the Western tradition and world musics; it is just as applicable to West African drumming as it is to Beethoven’s late quartets or, for that matter, to John Cage’s 4′ 33″, the piece that set the seal on his notoriety in the 1950s.
Any attempt to get to grips with silence in music inevitably begins with Cage. Though the new edition of Grove’s Dictionary doesn’t trouble to include an entry on the subject, it is something that has preoccupied composers increasingly through the 20th century, though until Cage came along, no one had the courage to confront it so directly and defiantly.
At the first performance of 4′ 33″ in New York in 1952 (in the appropriately named Maverick concert hall) the pianist David Tudor had appeared on stage and sat down at the piano as if he was about to begin a normal piece of music. His gestures showed that the work was in three movements (lasting altogether four minutes 33 seconds, hence the title), but no notes were played; all the audience heard was what filtered into the auditorium from outside, or what they generated themselves.
For Cage the piece was a public declaration of his belief that absolute silence was not achievable that an aural void will always be filled with something, even if it is only the sound of the listener’s breath and beating heart. He had been building irregular silences into his works of the late 1940s, especially the sonatas and interludes for prepared piano, and, increasingly absorbed by the whole notion, had taken himself off to the anechoic chambers at Harvard University, in which soundproofing and acoustic baffles were used to produce as near to total silence as technologically possible. Here, he quickly realised that he was searching for the impossible: “Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,” he said later. “No silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”
Anyone who has stood in a desert on a windless day will have experienced what he means. The absence of sound there is as near as the natural world gets to total silence, but even that is an illusion, and the smallest movement a footstep, a piece of wood expanding in the heat creates a noise, and takes on enormous significance.
In 4′ 33″ it is the accidental noises cars in the street outside the concert hall, the shuffling and coughing of a probably confounded audience that fill the void, and they, by definition, are not organised and will vary (something Cage would have loved). But the fact that the work is in three movements of strictly prescribed lengths (their proportions calculated according to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese method of fortune-telling) gives organisation to the whole piece. Even Cage, the great proponent of musical freedom, and of the concept that anything can be music if you want it to be, did not let go of every constraint, and his silence, however provocative, was still a compositional tool that he manipulated in a creative way.
Across the Atlantic, though, another avant-garde composer was wrestling with the concept of silence in his music at exactly the same time. Jean Barraque’s monumental Piano Sonata, one of the great achievements of postwar European serialism, also confronts silence head on, but treats it not as a liberating force, as Cage did, but as the enemy, something profoundly corrosive. Longer and longer silences eat away at the second movement of his work, making ever greater inroads into the textures, until nothing is left, and the pitches of the 12-note row on which the 50-minute work is based are finally picked off one by one.
Barraque, a strange, reclusive man, obsessed with death throughout his life, was instinctively a grand romantic, though one whose music was informed by the most rigorous technical procedures, and for him silence was a metaphor for the extinction of creativity; it opposed the invention of music, it negated it, and the battle between the two is one that silence wins in the Piano Sonata, which delivers an extraordinary emotional punch in performance, when it is played with the kind of concentration and minute observation of every detail that it needs.
Cage and Barraque, then, represent opposite creative poles in their attitude to silence; for Cage it was positive, life-enhancing and mind-broadening, for Barraque a glimpse of the abyss. But music through the ages has included pauses, moments at which one phase in the argument is brought to a halt before taking off in an entirely new direction. Those aren’t silences in the way that either Barraque or Cage envisaged them, so much as grammatical punctuation marks, though a composer like Anton Bruckner, whose great symphonic paragraphs are articulated by such moments, did use them in an entirely different way.
Bruckner had grown up as a church organist, and the whole of his musical world was informed by the resonant acoustic of such buildings; that was the notional space for which he created even his orchestral works, and the long decay of sound in such spaces is built into their structure. The silences that break up the great statements of the Eighth Symphony, for instance, weren’t conceived as silences at all, but as moments when the vestiges of the preceding climax are ebbing away, so that as the next musical statement begins, it does so surrounded by the halo of what has gone before; “silence” there is a kind of musical memory, a link between past and future in his great architectural schemes that conductors and recording engineers ignore at their peril.
The same is true of Sibelius, and of what is probably the most famous and disconcerting use of silences in the symphonic repertory. The irregular gaps that break up the final chord of his Fifth Symphony, delaying the clinching final chord in a teasing way, are astonishingly effective and affecting dramatic enough for William Walton to borrow the idea for the ending of his own First Symphony. Yet there is nothing random about the silences in Sibelius’s work. The conductor Osmo Vanska arguably the best conductor of Sibelius’s music of our time has said that when he conducts the Fifth, he takes great care to count out those rests exactly and never treats them (like some conductors do) as fermata, generalised pauses; each is carefully notated at a different length.
Exactly why that makes such a powerful difference is, like so much in Sibelius, a mystery, but it is clear that in his own way he understood the importance of silence just as profoundly as the avant-garde of 40 years later, and organised it with minute care in those famous final bars. Where music is absent is just as important as where music exists. So could music just as well be defined as organised silence? I’m not sure about that, but it is certainly worth thinking about.