Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
3.1. Integrated Silences 3.2. Inherent Silences 3.3. Silent Discourse 3.4. Meta-Silences 3.5. Silencings
EXPLANATORY VIDEO
NOTATION: random rests are distributed on a field of white, floating around three notes.
MARKERS: The three notes can be interpreted as markers, which make the silence audible or tangible. Or the white space or the traffic can be audible/contextual markers for silence. The white space on the page offers a notational marker for silence.
Tom Johnson’s book of pictures, Imaginary Music, is intended as a Cage- and Fluxus-influenced book of nonsense notations. These whimsical drawings stretch conceptual limits by creating unplayable music meant to be looked at and admired. Deliberately unframed, the score lacks a timeline and has neither a beginning nor an end.
Figure 3: Quiet Music for an Imaginary Celeste, by Tom Johnson (Editions 75: 1974)
Quiet Music for an Imaginary Celeste consists of forty rests and three half-notes evenly distributed on the page. It is cheekily decorative but simultaneously cries out to be performed. Johnson cites turn-of-the-19th-century Parisian provocateur Alphonse Allais as an influence (Johnson, 2015, p. 46). Like Allais, he initially intended his experiments more as graphic design than as musical works.1
Like Dieter Schnebel’s imaginary compositions, this score uses the icons of silence (rests) as graphic elements to be whimsically played with. Johnson’s drawings have no indicated beginning and end; they exist abstractly as directionless random fields, potentially extending far beyond the page. The score looks a bit like a crowd of musicians on their day off, hanging around for a picnic in a field of silence.
I have interpreted the three half-notes variously as a cue for three musicians or a cue for three sounds—the resonant bowls in this video. Those three half-notes are perhaps the gestural and audible markers that highlight the silences around them. The white space in my video is the space between the plants, although the plants themselves or the traffic noise in the video might be the white space. The work leaves much space for imagination. Perhaps the traffic noise is the knot that holds this particular video performance together. It is the background to the background.
In terms of the dimensions of silence, this particular score also offers a perspective on silence’s source: the spatial layout2 of the rests on the page, and the lack of a clear frame, both suggest that silence is going on everywhere, all around us; and that it is composed of small bits of information.