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
About the experience of listening to Feldman, English musician David Toop writes:
[…] washed by infinitely subtle traditions of tone that linger after the echoes of repetition, the room becomes silent sound, the memory of sound and the future of sound. (Toop, 2005, p. 93)
From Toop’s viewpoint, silence in Feldman’s music is about place, memory, and potential. These are expressed through a sonic vocabulary of non-action, non-moving. Many people remember his music as “silent.” Yet Feldman requests the use of the pedal during the performance of the white spaces so that the sound seldom stops; there is always a very quiet sound, always something.
Figure 5: excerpt from Intermission 6 (Peters: 1953)
The absence of detail and the withholding of information between sounding and silent music in Feldman’s scores is what creates the knot, the connection between events. Indeed, my experience as a performer suggests that this music is about time; about slowing time down and relishing the feel, the tangibility, and the long-term elongated relationships between sounds. In that sense, my experience as a performer differs from Toop’s observations: from my point of view, the room does not become silent sound, because I know that the next note will inevitably come. The listener’s experience is different, for there is less certitude of the arrival of the next note. For them, this is an artwork in which the not aspect of silence is much stronger than the knot. The distance between the notes is so far that the connecting characteristics of silence are strained. And as Toop says, the memory of sound (which is probably not silence) is also strong for the listener. This gives these silences a retroactively “descriptive” function; these silences summon themselves.