The Sound of Silence

The week has passed noisily. Mahler, Shostakovich, life.

I am on a bus. The woman next to me is, inevitably, on the phone. I listen. I have no choice. After five minutes, shaken by the intimate details she has shared exclusively with her friend and the rest of the known universe, I’ve decided to hate her with the passion we reserve for total strangers. My heart goes out to the hapless Dave, who is really sweet, don’t get her wrong, but babe honestly it’s like going out with a puppy. It’s doing her head in. It can’t go on.

Neither can I.

I get off a stop early, suddenly craving solitude and silence.

The relative peace of the Horseferry Road on a weekday lunchtime is welcome. Silent it is not. There’s the constant hum of London traffic, the low murmur of passing conversations, the shuffle of feet on wet pavement, the muted but insistent summoning call of a Pret Chocolate Brownie – but the sum of these is more soothing than the insensitive bark of Dave’s soon-to-be-ex, and with a rehearsal and concert to negotiate, soothing is good.

Concert days have a different feel, partly determined by the schedule, partly by the realisation afterwards that you were nervous without knowing it. When the ‘me me look at me’ side of my personality, vital to any conductor, is in the ascendant, all goes smoothly enough; but when I’ve failed to don that persona, when my ‘go away everyone I just want to sit quietly in the corner reading my book’ side is still in control, it all becomes hard work. People, looking to the conductor as a figure of authority, ask questions.

Where’s the music? I don’t know, I’m not the librarian.

What’s the code for the dressing room door? I don’t know, I’m not the orchestra manager.

What speed will the last movement go? This one I do know, but as it happens I take it faster in the concert, a heinous habit of which I’m afraid I shall never be cured. I kid myself that it adds an extra frisson of fear to the performance, and that this is entirely appropriate for Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony – I’m right on both counts, in a way, but it’s no excuse for making the players’ lives that bit harder.

After the tumult of the ending (‘our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’) comes that moment, familiar to concertgoers worldwide. It’s a moment of stasis – after the music, before the applause – in which the air is imprinted with the unique memory of what has just ended. Whatever the performance’s merits, that moment has significance. Whether it’s relief or embarrassment or sympathy or triumph or exhilaration or just plain tiredness, the silence, heavy with what has gone before, always means something to someone.

Its length varies. Sometimes there’s a buffoon in the audience, desperate to impress everyone with their knowledge of the piece, their unique appreciation of the performance. They hurrah the moment the music stops, sometimes dead-heating with the final chord in their eagerness to display to the world something or other, I don’t know, honestly it numbs the brain.

You’re the musical equivalent of golf’s ‘get in the hole!’ guy. Not big. Not clever. Now stop it.

When the ending is slow, quiet and solemn, the ham conductor tries to extend the silence artificially. Arms outstretched, eyes closed, they milk it for all its worth, as if its length equates to the gravitas of their interpretation. Eventually they lower their arms with an exhausted smile and a slight nod, as if to say ‘Well done everyone, you were great’. (The true meaning – ‘Well done me, I’m great, aren’t I?’ – is only too evident to those on stage).

On this occasion, the Shostakovich’s faux-triumphant ending enables me to finish with a topspin double-handed forehand and a slight swivel to the audience. And then there’s the silence. It’s a good one, as it goes, and followed by enthusiastic applause. Well done us. Never mind what happened before. All is forgiven.

Shostakovich understood the importance of silence well enough. There are moments in his music, often between slow portentous sections and fast violent ones, in which the air is thick with the threat of impending brutality. But mostly, once his music is on the march, it ploughs through everything it meets.

When I think of silence in music, though, thoughts turn to Sibelius. Damn, he knew. His silent moments invite you to look over the edge into the abyss, or place you in a boat on a Finnish lake, the scent of pine trees in your nostrils, surrounded by eternal sky and about to be engulfed by whooper swans.

‘The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.’ That quote has been attributed to both Mozart and Debussy. Miles Davis said something similar. Like so many of these easy quotes, it’s both true and not. The music is in the notes, but the silences allow it to sink in.

Let’s look at the ending of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. No really, let’s. We have time.

Here it is twice. First the original version. It differs in many ways from the final version, but listen to the last minute (13’00” or so). Loud chords, progressive exclamations of the approaching ending, the culmination of half an hour of vibrating air, linked by a musical trembling, as if coaxing the listener towards throbbing exultation. ‘Here it is,’ it’s saying. ‘This is it. Do you feel it? Are you excited yet?’

Now the final version, the one we know today (start at around 29’45”, although if you have half an hour to spare just listen to the whole thing – it’s magnificent. Honestly, if you don’t know Sibelius I both pity and envy you – you’ve missed out all your life, but you’ve got so much to discover).

Anyway, by now, four years on, it’s been honed and edited to sublime perfection.

Pillar.
Nothing.
Pillar.
Nothing.
Pillar.
Nothing.
Pillar. Pillar.

https://youtu.be/TX\_J7ZSUmts?t=29m50s

When did he realise? At what point did he think ‘ah yes, THAT’S what I must do’? Talk about killing your darlings.

Any discussion of silence in music must mention John Cage. His most famous piece, 4’33”, is easy to mock. The performances I’ve attended have often been played for laughs, which is a shame. Here’s Cage himself, talking about the audience at the first performance.

‘They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.’

When we talk about silence, as with darkness, we don’t mean the real thing. As Cage pointed out, there’s always something. Total silence, the silence of outer space, would be impossibly unnerving. We need crackles and rustles and the sound of a fellow human’s lungs.

As if to prove the point Cage visited an anechoic chamber, a soundproofed room where every surface is designed to absorb sound rather than reflect it. He entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but he wrote later, ‘I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.’

I sit in a room, everything switched off, and listen. Hint of clock, radiator flow (yes, the heating is on – sue me), the rustle of trouser on sofa as I shift into a more comfortable position, the occasional creak as the house does likewise. If I’m sitting in a quiet room I’m usually filling my head with words, either my own or someone else’s. The conscious focus on the quality of silence takes some getting used to.

I don’t embrace silence enough. I fill my life with sounds: music, words, general hubbub. A psychologist might have a field day with this information. I prefer to avoid thinking about it by listening to yet another podcast.

But increasingly I dare to submit myself to whatever silence I can, imagining that in some way the quiet of nature, in whatever form it manifests itself, will filter through and calm my brain. So I tramp through woods (this is apparently now called ‘forest bathing’ – shoot me now), traipse round reserves, absorb the rustling, chirping, squawking, swishing, cawing, wriggling and occasional roaring of nature.

And then I return to the world, where humans interact, and silences are laden with our myriad individual interpretations: the silence after a backfiring joke when nobody in the room can quite summon even a sympathy laugh; the silence of eloquent eye contact; the silence as a quarrel forms in the atmosphere and neither party has the desire nor the energy to stop it; the silence that follows bad news; the silence when someone forgets the word for an everyday object like ‘dishwasher’ and their daughter, exhausted by caring, tries uselessly to will it into their head; the silence of two people sitting in a room, completely comfortable in each other’s company; the silence after the words ‘we need to talk’.

Poor Dave.

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