“Sometimes the sound of silence is the most deafening sound of all.” – K. L. Toth
Music can be perceived as organized sounds. And when we mention sound, we think of what we can perceive through the ability of hearing. However, often the importance of silience is overlooked, as audience usually focus too much on the beauty of of the audible sound, while not paying attention to the use of silence by the player. Though the last statement directs the issue toward listeners, it is equall crucial to address that musicians sometimes take silence for granted as well, and although it mey not make the music uglier, it may impede the process of elevating the music to another level.
As much as I wanted to write a comprehensive view on this, I thought this small piece would do for now. Here I justify why silence is an integral part in music, explain how silence affect one's performance of the piece, and lastly discuss each type of silence, from the shortest to the longest units.
Take mathematics as an example. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks invented the numerical system, and later the Romans creat a writing system (I, II, III, IV, etc) that we still use up to now. They were all invented and used for one sole purpose: to count and manipulate the count. They were very much traders back then, therefore having a way to calculate how many/how much would be beneficial (no one wants to have a negative net income at the end of the day, however the concepts of positivity/negativity had not yet to exist). However, there was no mathematical concept of nothing-ness at the time, or at least was not very developed. To be more specific, using the Egyptians, Greek and the Romans: The Egyptians had a symbol to denote zero balance; the Greeks used alphebetical symbol as an alternative to numerical system (1 = α, 2 = β, 3 = γ, etc), and they were skeptical about the concept of 0, whether it was real or not (how can 0 be real if it denotes nothing?, and because of this undefined concept of 0, there were so many paradoxes related to limits, e.g., Achilles and the turtle). We are talking about the concept of true nothing-ness (as nothing, void, null, none), and not just numerical placeholder. There was a quite long gap between 2000 BC and 600 AD when the number 0 was formally documented. As a result, we now consider the number is by far the most important, at a level when infinity was introduced. The number 0 is essential for complex mathematical manipulations such as differentiation/integration, limits, propabilities, etc.
Similarly, replacing sounds with natural numbers other than 0 (yes, precisely because sound is something, and these numbers show something and not nothing). Because silence can be perceived as the lack of sound, i.e., the lack of music, i.e., nothing in music, it is suitable for silence to be assigned a value of 0. Now it may start to make sense. You cannot have music without just a bit of silence. It is the silence that makes the sounds speak, and it is also the silence that can stop the sounds. In other words, if you stop playing, that means you introduce silence, and the silence has its own musical value in it (If you are skeptical, refer to the reference about the Greek I made before). If one can control how to introduce silence in his or her playing, they can truly control the whole aspect of playing.
The stage is filled with silence. The silence is just as intimidating as the audience before you. Although this type of silence is not the absolute silence that I was talking earlier, it is still slience as there is no music. Occasionally interupted with people moving their chairs, or by the coughs they make, or just the murmurs, this silence can make you feel overwhelmed as if you could hear that they are talking about you. You start playing, and the sound breaks the silence; but you can still feel its ubiquity and omnipresence. While playing, the silence amplifies every move you make, augments every mistake you bump into, and all those factors are taken into account by the very sensitive audience. After you end the piece, if the listeners unfortunately don't know the piece very well, you will have to endure a rather awkward and deafening pause, where you expect people to clap or do something to reduce the intensity of that silence. From my own experience, it is even more agonizing if the piece ends dramatically and nobody claps. For a moment, I second guess myself whether I played well enough, or whether the audience appreciated the music I was delivering or not. Either way, it was unpleasant. As you can see, silence is just more than the lack of sound. It is contained by the performance, and contains the performance itself.
So that was a light touch on the subject. After this, I shall discuss more in-depth each type of silence according to its time length, from the shortest silence to the longest.
Rests. This would probably the most well-recognized and used silence in music, and anyone playing music should know. A rest symbol, with its corresponding note value, indicates how long an absence of sound should occur. One of the functions of rests is to divide the music into "digestible chunks", i.e., phrase the music. This is similar to pausing in dialogues. A sentence might be incomprehensible or misleading if the punctuation (or pause) were absent or put in the wrong place. A misplaced rest would make a music unorganized and unpleasant. Another exaple to give, in Bach's music, he wrote a set of two-part contrapuntal 15 Inventions. One can imagine the use of dialogue in this music, where part 1 is speaker 1 and part 2 is speaker 2. Rarely in a conversation do we see two speakers speak at the same time. That would be chaotic. Speaker/part 1 be silent while speaker/part 2 speaks, thus creating dialogue. Of course then was different than now, as now composers are freer in their domain of music with experimentation and innovation, but the use of rests should remain a necessity.
Legato, Non-legato & Staccato. The use here is probably a bit more nuanced than the mentioned rests. We can view each articulation as a pair of sound and silence, only with different proportion: legato = 100% sound, non-legato = 35% to 65% sound + silence, staccato = 10% sound + silence (these numbers are arbitrary). The use of staccato is often important in emphasizing the rhythms of the music, as seen in syncopations in many dances. This might have to do with the assumption that legato emphasizes melodies, and staccato emphasizes beats. A drum set is used to maintaining the steady rhythm in a band, since the drums produce sudden and aquickly-decaying sounds, which indicates very clearly which beat it is (just like the second hand on a clock). Articulating between these playing styles can be a tremendous feat, and the resulting effects can greatly influence how the music sounds and should be felt.
Fermata. I have been wondering for quite a long time: How long shoulld I (or one ) should hold the note for? A series of related questions came up: Would the duration of the fermata be dependent on my credos, or would this be determined by some arbitrary indicators marked by the composer? If a section is marked rubato, does a fermata make a difference at all? How to play notes surrounding the fermata, faster, slower, or consistent?... All these questions are valid, and I tried not to dive too deep into them. For the guitar, and I may take the liberty of generalizing the following statement to other non-sustainable instruments (e.g., piano, harp), one cannot hold for too long. The sound created from these instruments is unfortunately quickly diminished and ultimately ended in silence. The fermata here can be thought as a diminuendo, where notes slowly reduce in volume, this time a note or a chord instead of a passage. If one can only hold for so long, then the rest of the hold is technically silence. How long should we hold this silence for? This question I cannot answer. I have been experimenting with both the extremes (very short hold as if staccato, and very long as if they are two separate paragraphs in an essay) and almost everything within the spectrum. It is not surprising to say that each interpretation gave a different feel, therefore justifying the variety of this articulation. I may even say that one doesn't have to play these fermatas consistently, in other words, you can play a long fermata on Monday and a short one on Friday. There are no guidelines, as long as they are in "acceptable" and comfort zone. An over-extended fermata only brings awkwardness to the performance, and as I mentioned, the silence may devour you on stage.
The guitar (and other non-sustainable instruments). It is not the most recognizable feature of these instruments that every note created is susceptible to diminuendo. In fact, every note is a diminuendo, precisely because the sound mechanism forbades the ability to sustain. To be more poetic, we can say that the sound from these instruments is attracted to, or gravitates toward, silence. This makes the opposite of diminuendo, the crescendo, significantly harder to play. In faster pieces, marked Allegro or faster, these note-level diminuendos are negligible, as the sound doesn't have much time to decay. On the other hand, we face a challenge of sustaining a note in slower pieces, particularly when sustaining is desirable to maintain the legato nature of the piece. In guitar playing, and of course other instruments as well, we can possibly overcome this issue by "sustaining" the note via the tremolo technique, i.e. playing a note repeatedly. While this technique creates an illusion of the note being sustains, it doesn't resolve the core issue: sustaining the note with one pluck/attack. I would say that it is because of this charateristic of the guitar that makes the instrument so beautiful, a different kind of beauty as compared to the violin or the flute. The sound decays, so that it create a silence, allowing other sounds to sing; or at the end of a piece, the diminuendo is so natural that we don't even have to force the instrument to make diminuendo. Having said so, we can work on how we can partially manipulate that diminuendo by playing the aforementioned staccato, non-legato and legato. Also, a well-made instrument should permit a player's ability to sustain.
P.S. While I was writing this, I constantly related this problem to the topic of pharmacokinetics of drugs. In short, we can make some analogies: volume/dynamics are plasma levels; how long the sound is sustained is determined by the half-life (which is inherent to the nature of the drug-body/instrument); tremolo is repeated dosing, which we can use to maintain desirable plasma levels/dynamics; diminuendo is elimination of drug; etc.
Between passages/sections. It was a common practice in the Baroque period to write pieces in binary form (A-B or 𝄆A𝄇 - 𝄆B𝄇). In layman's term, it's a short two-paragraph essay, and it's natural to insert a small break between the two paragraph. Similarly, one may find the urge to insert a small pause between the two sections. While it is good to have it (the pause) there, to let the audience know that was the end of a section, I found pauses in some recordings uneasy (not that I'm saying it's wrong). After contemplating for some time, I think I may have my answer. We are quite sensitive to rhythm, even when there is only silence. By playing the first section, we automatically and subconsiously implant the beats into our minds, and the brain in turn apply the rhythm to the silence. In a way, the silence here between the passage has to obey to the subconscious invisible beats that we assign, and therefore after the silence ends, the music should also start on the beat to avoid mismatch. Here are some examples using the Allegro Assai from BWV 1005 by J. S. Bach.
However, it seems that the problem is only apparent in faster pieces, or in pieces with steady tempi. I theorized that faster tempi (to certain extends) are easier for the listeners to keep track. In slower or highly-rubato pieces, particularly those in the Romantic period, the player can take the advantage of varying the gap between passages, without causing much annoyance. On a side note, modern composers may even indicate how much time (literally in munites and second) a section should be played (see Brouwer's 20 Estudio Sencillos).
Between movements. A piece can comprise of several movements. A Baroque partita contains around four to six movements; Classical sonatas often have also four movements; Romantic sonatas usually consist of three movements. Despite the varying numbers of movement in each work, collectively they all share a common characteristic: each movement in a musical work should be constrasting to each other, ar at least significanty different. The whole point of dividing a piece of music into several smaller units is to showcase different aspects of an idea, regardless how tangible or abstract the idea can be. For example, although Bach was a prolific composer with outstanding works, a considerable amount of his work, other than being used in churches under God, has no apparent purposes (emotionally, physically, cognitively,etc); oppositely, take Mussorgsky's Pictures in an Exhibition for instance, each movement depicts a picture and dynamically resembles its story. However, each movement, whether in Bach's lute suite or in Mussorgsky's pictures, is an independent entity, but also interrelated to other movements. The end of a movement should be harmonically appropriate in the context of the following movement, so that the "storyline" is not disrupted (an easy example would be: movement 1 ends in A major, second movement may start in A major, E major, D major, F♯ minor, etc). How about constrasting? Two movement can differ from each other in time signatures (4/4 versus 3/4), keys (as briefly mentioned), tempi (fast and slow) or overall musical characteristic (happy, sad)...
I apologize if I digressed too much. Not so different from silence between passages, the silence between movements is also worth discussing. However, it is often neglected, or even overlooked, by many players that the silence there does not do much apart from letting the audience know that was the end of a movement. During my practice, I often treat this kind of silence as a fundamental and essential part of the music, being the bridge between the two movements. To be absolutely honest, I don't think I even consciously care about the to make the silence beauty; instead I, and everyone should, focus on how to utilize the silence to do... something else. The audience definitely knows what to do during these quite time: they start coughing, adjusting their chair, jiggle their clothes, stretch their bodies; some may just woke up from a small nap as if the there was some meditating background music. For musicians, silence makes room for contemplation, for reflection. What to reflect on, you may ask. Often time art is sort of a "in the moment" act, being carefree about almost everything and only focus on the present. Although this might be true while the music is being played as it could potentially take some pressore of your back if you played a wrong note, I suggest using the time between those movements to look back if there is anything we can improve. I may think about articulation, use of dynamics, reasons why mistakes happened; or we can think forward: what technique I should use next, I may try improvising some passages; or to be even more practical: re-tune your strings! I have had regrets for not tuning my strings properly prior to performance. Finally, after you have done what needed to be done, wait for the right ambience. Sometimes, the audience might not be able to resist the urge to clap between movements. You just have to wait for them to settle down, until complete silence is achieve, only then should you proceed to play. I feel mildly irritated when a musician, to capture audience attention quickly, plays even when some continue to clap. I sincerely do not think that the claps are a part of the music, at least not for this moment. As though the silence here might not be the most crucial to the overall music, it's just worthwhile if we can appreciate it.
Prior to a performance. Not everyone may have experienced this: for me, there is a brief moment just before walking on stage when I feel completely overwhelmed by the surroundings, so quite that I could even hear my blood pumping in my ears. Then I start walking. My shoes clap against the wooden floor, and the acoustic of the room amplifies the sound of my steps. It would be just silence until the audience starts clapping. Rarely, I had to make an indicative gesture, such as bowing, nodding or light waving, to let the audience know "it's time for you guys to clap". It's always hard starting a performance. All the time I thought "this recital would go just fine, I have done this for dozens of times". The truth is often disappointing. I was scared, for no particular reasons, it was just stagefright. And it was the silence that caused the stagefright. After sitting down, settle the crowd, I would tune my guitar. I deliberately tune my instrument at this particular moment to disrupt the silence, because silence can be awkward and intolerable. Sometimes playing a few notes from the piece would be a great help, as it puts you in the comfort zone of playing that piece. Then I wait for a few seconds, now let the silence sink in, so that the tuning section is not accidentally mixed with the performance. I think it helps with the clarity if there is a gap between the preparation (tuning) and the actual piece.
Between pieces. Again, I am being neccesarily repetitive here: it's time to tune the guitar. After an intense piece, those strings are probaly out of tune. Also, take a moment to savour the ovation before moving on.
After everything. This time, walk out to end the claps. Audience probably will just continue to applaude if you keep standing on stage. Also, now you have total control of the silence: You can leave it like that, or wait until the clap to die out, then surprise everyone by playing an encore! Everyone loves an encore; it shows some degree of improvisation in terms of the program, that the performance was truly and art an not just a set of pieces being played over and over again. Here the silence creates a feeling of ending, as if there were nothing else to give from the performer. By breaking that tradition, we as musicians can produce a fresh breathe of music. Something that is unannounced, unexpected, impromptu, defying and impactful.
Appreciate silence as an integral and essential part of music. Silence can really be emotionally deafening, and have the potential to escalate, or even exacerbate the dynamics of the music.
P.S.: I revisited a video portraying Glenn Gould the other day. to say the least, he abandoned his glorious concert career and resided in studios and devoted most of his time recording music, over and over again. Now my point being: the silence in a recording studio is different from the silence in a concert hall. Doing live performance, we experience a unique kind of sound that we know, there will always be someone out there to receive and enjoy the music; whereas in a studio, you become your own most unforgiving critic.
P.S.S.: At the time of writing, I forgot to put in an important piece of information that I made myself clear that I must put that in. There is a different way of pausing between movements, which is not to pause at all. Although this approach may seems irrational at first glance, as the whole point of dividing into movements is to separate the pieces into chunks with different characteristics, and it would reasonable to leave a gap to let the audience know. However, in some instances, it might be even more appropriate to play without breaks. I find this interpreting technique, when used properly, could emphasize the contrasts and distincts in the two movements. Here is one example by Paul Galbraith: