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November 2, 2011
Intrinsic Silence: Musical Attentiveness in Practice, Theory, and Historical Context
by Timothy Westerhaus, R & S Chair for College and University Choirs
F
our weeks after the new academic year had commenced and after a demanding month of recruitment, rehearsals, and performances, Gonzaga’s choral ensembles had finally settled into a steady rhythm: the fruits of enthusiastic recruiting by students and faculty yielded a robust and bountiful group of freshmen eager to join the collegiate choral community; new ensembles were added to accommodate the increasing number of students; and cohesive communities of music and friendship had formed. The choirs had completed retreats, traveled on a mini-concert tour, and presented eight different performances on and off campus. The year had successfully launched with positive musical and communal energy.
And I, like so many of us in collegiate environments, was exhausted.
The failure to properly let a common cold heal—combined with my cont
inued vocal use in lectures and rehearsals—resulted in every singer’s dread: laryngitis. Never before had I found myself in such a state, refraining from talking and singing for one week.
Though it certainly posed challenges, it also offered a unique opportunity to reflect on and be attentive to the silence of music. Silence is that fundamental space from which our art originates and the place where music is imagined, audiated, and created.
The silence to which I refer is not simply a figurative silence or the absence of sound, but it is a real, pervasive, and underlying presence thread throughout our very existence.
The temporary loss of my voice heightened my perception of the importance of silence in music.
First, without my voice to give verbal rehearsal instructions, both students and I exhibited heightened attention to musical detail, to conducting gesture, and to listening to one another. Intermittent rehearsal chatter disappeared, and mental focus increased in both intensity and duration.
Second, attentiveness to silence in the musical score immediately increased. As we rehearsed a Palestrina motet, for example, musical consideration of texture shifted due to being more attentive to the absence of a vocal line(s), which then influenced execution of phrasing and dynamics. In addition, the points of finishing and beginning phrases unified as a result of attention to the intervening silences.
Third, the importance of silence was heightened with regard to our music-making environments. In the absence of verbal instructions, the ensembles became aware of the steady stream of white noise present in rehearsals—air circulation, traffic, and so forth.
In a performance context, this awareness of silence holds the potential to heighten an audience’s musical experience: when conductors wait to allow that rare brief moment of silence before a beginning a piece of music, audiences can still themselves, they can become comfortable with the silence (a rather uncomfortable state in modern society), and they lean in closer for the aural experience that follows.
Kathleen Harmon explores the nature of silence in “The Silence of Music” 1 through the context of Max Picard’s The World of Silence 2 and Bernard Dauenhauer’s Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance.3 Several of her insights merit repetition due to their significance in our profession. She summarizes Picard and Dauenhauer:
Silence is real, and silence is powerful. Silence is not merely the absence of speech but is co-partner with speech in humankind’s ongoing process of self-discovery and development. Without silence there is no word (Picard); without utterance there is no silence (Dauenhauer).4
Due to the proliferation of industrial noise, cell phone communication, and mp3 players (to mention but a few causes), silence occurs with ever-decreasing frequency. Because of its modern rarity, our encounters with silence possess even more potency. One can readily substitute “music” in the quote above: “Without silence there is no music.” At the most basic level, organized sound (i.e. music) depends on both the presence and absence of perceived sound to set boundaries of the beginnings and endings of music. However, as Harmon asserts, “we must choose silence itself rather than the noise of empty wordiness which constantly tempts us with false promises of satisfaction. For words [and music] can arise from silence or simply from the noise of other words.” 5
In describing the relationship between utterance and silence, Dauenhauer identifies three types of silences: intervening silence, fore- and after-silence, and deep silence.6 Each finds application to music: intervening silences punctuate not only speech but also music to impart structural and conceptual semantics. Harmon no
tes that people are generally aware of after-silence, such as in the moments that follow a speech or, in our case, a musical performance. We are attuned to an audience’s response and the difference between an immediate and raucous applause after a triumphant finale versus a lingering, awe-struck silent reception of a work. Harmon cautions, however, that “we do not generally attend to fore-silence.” 7
Musically, this is true often in both rehearsal and performance. Fore-silence allows listener and performer to enter a state of “anticipatory alertness,” recognizing “that a newsaying or hearing is being readied in anticipatory silence.”8 Taking an additional musical step with this idea, fore-silence makes the bold claim that the music we perform and the way in which we perform it is worth listening to.
Summarizing Gisèle Brelet, Harmon claims that “a performer who listens to the silence before she/he begins to play performs the piece with a different level of understanding, and the listeners hear that difference and enter the piece in a new way.”9 Brelet continues:
The accomplished performer “takes his time,” for he understands that music lives not only by sounds, but also by silences which cause the very soul of the performer or the listener to be steeped in music. The mediocre performer, however, hustles the notes instead of linking them together flexibly and freely: for he fears the breathing spaces and silences which break the continuity of the form when one does not know how to give them their spiritual content.10
The implications of attentiveness to silence are not limited to general application in rehearsal and performance, nor is this attentiveness a new phenomenon, for treatise authors writing in the Baroque and Classical eras address the issue quite specifically.
Kircher, Sheibe, Mattheson, Janovka, Vogt, and Speer employed no less than eight musical-rhetorical terms to describe distinct figures of silence.
A pausa was a general “pause or rest in a musical composition”11 that served to articulate musical structure or clarify the structure of the text.
The interrogatio posed “a musical question rendered variously through pauses,”12 and the suspiratio used rests to “express sighs, gasps, or affections of sighing or longing.” 13
All of the voices paused in homoioptoton,14 while a rest in one or all voices was called aposiopesis.15An abruptio referred to “a sudden and unexpected break in a musical composition,”16 whereas the tmesis referred specifically to “a sudden interruption or fragmentation of the melody through rests.”17
Classical era treatise authors wrote about the intrinsic sound and silence in each individual note, referred to as Quantitas intrinseca.
In his organ treatise, Bédos de Celles states, “these silences at the end of each note fix its articulation and are as necessary as the holds themselves.” 18
Hiller’s singing treatise (1774) states even more clearly, “Between two notes, side by side, of the same kind and value, and in a duple or equal division of the beat, one will always be long and the other short, according to their inner quantity.” Tromlitz enumerates examples in many meters, such as: “In 2/4 time the first quarter note is inherently long and the second inherently short.”19
These brief excerpts demonstrate not simply that scholars thought about the role of silence in music, but they thought about it in distinct ways in different eras. The above quotes make clear that silence in the Baroque was utilized as a rhetorical device, whereas in the Classical era it operated in a metric aspect (stress/unstress) and as specific articulation for each note (duration).
If authors of musical treatises were thinking about silence and music in such an intentional way, it is likely that composers were at the very least heeding a subconscious awareness of the importance of silence. And, if composers of the music that we perform today recognized silence’s potency, surely conductors would benefit from the same attentiveness.
What role does silence serve in our own rehearsal, study, and performance?
Copyright Timothy Westerhaus, 2011.
2 Picard, Max. The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman, 2nd printing. Chicago: Hen Regnery Company, 1952.
3 Dauenhauer, Bernard. Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980.
10 Brelet, Gisèle. “Music and Silence.” Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers. Susanne K. Langer, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. 103.
11Bartel, Dietrich. Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. (362)