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
Specks is a composition that Robert Eidschun wrote for me, in which silence plays equally a structural and an interruptive role. The rests occupy a lot of the composition, and indeed, for every set of notes, there appears to be a balancing set of rests. These serve an interrupting and a connecting function for the individual short phrases of notes.
Figure 4: second line from Specks (Eidschun, 1999)
Interruptions have the power to help us remember something that has just happened. They signal one’s brain in such a way that one later recalls the event better than if it had not been interrupted. Composer and sound artist Paul Craenen writes about cuts and interruptions never being absolute but always affording a kind of “bleeding” or “afterglow” of the interrupted events (Craenen, 2024). This might suggest a small-scale version of DJ Jacques van Zyl’s black noise or even an alternate interpretation of composer George Antheil’s hectic silences.