April 7, 2005 at 9:33 AM

George and I were driving in the snow. Suddenly, in order to avoid meeting with an apparition of a moose, we took a dive off the road and into space. We were floating for some time in the flat light, with nothing but a blank page for a landscape. I wondered if somehow we had fallen into a bottomless crevasse. This couldn't be the explanation, for the whiteness went uninterrupted with not even a mention of a shadow of darkness. After I concluded that the whiteness was permanant and noticed a silent calm, I decided we must have landed and stepped out of the car. No land rose to greet my feet--only the whiteness. Without a horizon to secure my sense of gravity, I became weightless and floated into a nearby town to continue the rest of my day. Then I woke up.

My thoughts have been subconsciously returning to the concept of negative space and its importance in art and music. I become weary of hearing all the notes from lesson to lesson, and this is when it hits me that sometimes it is not the notes that need improvement, but the silence.

On the piano, I have a short Bartok study, a folk tune that creates an image of children at play. The piece continues merrily, conjuring up memories of hide-and-seek and chases up and down grassy hills. The right hand carries the melody, while the left hand is its playmate, busy filling the space with pounces, tip-toes, and playful dashes.

But an interesting thing happens when Bartok inserts a one-measure rest followed by two measures of a triple-soft chord (with fermata), followed by a second chord, even softer (another fermata), and one more empty measure, all Andante. This two-chord progression should take at least ten seconds to perform.

After the silence, the piece continues with a slightly different flavor. The silence interrupts two more times, and this is what really makes the piece what it is. It affects the mood of the audience. They hold their breath, and their ears strain to catch what will happen next.

If you plow through all the road signs, the fermatas and tempo changes, and the entire measures of rests that were intentionally placed there, you have just lost the meaning of the music. Silence and timing--the negative space in music--is equally as important as the music itself.

And how the students react when I ask them to linger there on those two chords! Being still is so uncomfortable for a musician. Over the course of the year I have witnessed a miserly trend toward whole notes and rests; we like to cheat them of their time. I count out loud to show them what has literally been written. Then we talk about the reason why they think it was written that way. What could it mean? Is it there to create that same feeling you get after you've found your hiding spot and you listen for the sound of the footsteps of the seeker? Is it the echo of Mother's call to dinner, the one that we always ignored because perhaps we didn't hear it after all? I don't know, and that's the great thing about music--it can mean what you want it to mean, but it should mean at least something, even if it's just a feeling, a color, or an impression.

In order to create the music, we must be at peace with the silence and then find the very best way to carve the sound into it.

From Inge S
Posted on April 7, 2005 at 1:12 PM

Wow, I love that concept of negative space. It's something to think of perhaps even beyond music. I think I posted a quote from a radio show about something Stern said about saying "hello" and the importance of the spaces between the two syllabes and how you get there. But you said it so much better. Thank you for the insight!

From Jim W. Miller
Posted on April 7, 2005 at 2:16 PM

I'm a Howard Stern fan too.

From Benjamin Eby
Posted on April 7, 2005 at 5:07 PM

I'm a fan of Sterno; strained, not stirred.

From putch panis
Posted on April 8, 2005 at 12:25 AM

Hello, Emily! What a wonderful insight :-) I enjoy the tranquility of silence and rarely break it, when I have the choice. I always think that if silence should be broken, it should be by something that either holds an equal or greater meaning. I think that people rarely hold still anymore, and silence is something that causes increased discomfort and awkwardness for most. Stillness is confronting; it makes you hear your real thoughts. Some philosophies, like Zen, reach toward absolute nothingness as a form of self-actualization. I think that's a bit extreme, but it does underline the importance of solitude and silence.

From Sue Donim
Posted on April 8, 2005 at 1:39 AM

This entry reminds me of the Arvo Part piece Spiegel Im Spiegel, which isn't ever silent, but retains for me a sense of absolute peace and stillness nonetheless.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on April 8, 2005 at 6:04 AM

Emily, your post is so interesting and beautifully written, too. Thank you for stimulating my thinking.

Someone I once knew told me that the most difficult things to play in music are pauses. In an old Billy Joel recording of Innocent Male, there is a great pause. No matter how many times I listen to the recording, I can't predict when the pause will end.

I, too, love silence and am reluctant to break it. One becomes aware of so many tiny sounds that would not be noticeable otherwise. I have this experience only in rural places. As a great Native American chief said, "There is no quiet place in the white man's cities." So sad, so true.

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April 7, 2005 at 9:33 AM

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