Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
7.1. Conceptual Contributions 7.2. Practical Contributions 7.3. Ideas for Future Research 7.4. Coda
The central aspect of my research has been the creation of an open archive of performed silences. This ever-expanding Noisy Archive has transformed my understanding of silence, giving me the tools to identify and compare silences, explain them, and perform them.
Performed silence is little documented in music studies and is often poorly understood by musicians, even when skillfully played. By examining different eloquent silences in performances of composed music, I have illustrated and tried to open up new options for understanding and engaging with silence.
Notated rests communicate very little information in and of themselves. But within the printed score, multiple options for interpretation arise from these rests: “The communicative rest almost always has more than one potential function, which the performer is at liberty to reveal or create” (Potter, 2017, p. 168). Often more so than the notes, the rests in a score give the performer the liberty to reveal or create, and affordance to communicate via gestures and embodiments.
How can performers engage with the multiple dimensions of silence in composed music? This research question, arising from the act of performing, investigates and unpacks the relationship between notated rests and “audible” silences by focusing on the role of visible, audible, and notational markers. Early in the research process, it became clear that the means of expressing silence are diverse, complex, conflicting, and overlapping. Musicians will not find this surprising. But what was surprising was how much of this diversity was tacit knowledge. This knowledge is commonly shared amongst musicians but is tacit in the sense of not being studied and documented more systematically. Moreover, it is tacit in the sense that the common means of expressing silence are not notated, as traditional notational symbols overlook the multidimensional contingencies and potentialities of performing silence.
This became the motivation for my archive: creating an open catalog of techniques and inspiration and making it available to other musicians to further their knowledge of performing silences. The archive became more and more multidimensional as I made links between performed silence and other disciplines and engaged with a great variety of composers and performers. My archive became both a tool for analysis and a means of generating new embodiments of silence in my practice and in my teaching.
The Noisy Archive’s examples underscore a pivotal point within this research: understanding and considering what silence represents is crucial for the engaged performer. By discerning the role that silence plays and how it functions (how it acts and what it does), new ideas on how to perform silence emerge. Conversely, delving into the actions and modes of execution in performance leads to a nuanced comprehension of the function, role, and position of silence in music.
My exploration of silences was furthered through the analysis and embodiment of three canonical works (4’33” by John Cage, opus 111 by Ludwig van Beethoven, and Ballet mécanique by George Antheil). I studied other performers and used reflective imitation videos as a technique for investigating manners of performing silence. Research methods further included reading, teaching, graphic analysis, field recording, interviewing, video analysis, auto-ethnography, storytelling, and reflective imitation of other pianists. The outcomes included radio shows, podcasts, a mini festival of silence, piano performances, student artworks, published articles, and a collaboration with dancers. The cross-networking of these methods attests to how this artistic research has helped me find ways to work from practice to theory and back to practice.
As I explored the case studies and archive examples, I developed responses to the research question:
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There are many markers (especially audible and visible) that a performer can use which lead the audience to expect or experience silence. They are signals that the performer employs to embody silence or make it eloquent. Frequently, silences are multidimensional, communicating information about temporality, function, and emotion. The use of markers by the performer can shape the audience experience of these dimensions;
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Some silence markers (including architectural, ritual, and iconic ones) may exist outside of the notated music as meta-silences that stem from the performance (context) of the work, impacting the audience’s experience and potentially framing the composition. The audience itself can collectively create markers for silence with a ritual, spiritual, or behavioral component;
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Performers embody silence through a rich vocabulary of gestures that has no notation and which is not widely documented;
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Performed silence often highlights the visual, as I have shown in traditional performances of opus 111 or experimental videos of 4’33”. Indeed, the visual component of musical silence can often be stronger than the auditory, taking precedence in shaping audience awareness of silence;
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Silence serves a connective as well as a disconnective function in musical experience, sometimes simultaneously, a phenomenon I refer to as the not/knot. Whether connecting or disconnecting, silence is often felt as tangible by musicians.
My results are intended for all musicians, not just pianists. It is true that many of the examples included here focus on the piano and its resistances and affordances. In most of the examples, the performer (whether myself or others) is in profile, seated at a bench, in the customary stance of a classical pianist. But in the Cage examples, other attitudes for silences are revealed. These possibilities can extend back to the confines of the piano itself, or forward to other instruments and other musical disciplines. A vocabulary of markers can offer performers many new ways of interpretation and can be applied equally to the classical repertoire and new experimental works. Composers can also benefit from these tools in that they can better label, strategize, and comprehend their use of silences.
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Markers for silence are visible or audible signals used to shift attention and thus impose silence, summon silence, or shape the perception of silence. They can also have a ritual characteristic, or they can arise from cultural norms.
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I have drawn from conversational theory to suggest the term eloquent silence based on its rhetorical component and its potential for communication. Eloquent silence, which is usually thought of as a purely acoustic experience, is more often indicated to us by performed gestures and visual markers than by actual silence.
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Gestural markers were explored with contrasting examples from Beethoven’s last sonata, in which concert pianists deploy exaggerated gestures to embody performed silence. Although constrained by their instruments, their clothing, and their training, their embodiments seem to represent an outlet.
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In my performances of Antheil with the Zürich Ballet, rapid gestures and agitated choreography were effective in communicating the hectic pulse of the silences which arose from notational markers. Our experimentations on stage revealed a plethora of gestural possibilities both for the embodiments of the silences and the effects thereby created.
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The performances of Cage’s 4’33” highlighted the complexity and interest of visual attitudes and postures for silence. But the sounds created by the performers, and the sounds around the performance are audible markers for silence, which help the audience parse and comprehend the artwork.
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As discussed in Chapter 2 and the Noisy Archive, meta-silences are silences that usually arise from rituals, norms or other contextual matters. They play an important role in framing works of classical music and in shaping our experience of contemplation.
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Visual markers refer to an important suggestion—that silence in live performance is often reliant on the visual. They seem to play an outsize role, often taking precedence over the other senses, a multimodality of perception. In live performance, the performative aspect of silence is often more seen than heard, reinforcing the theory that the visual experience is integral to the emotional and interpretative depth of eloquent silence.
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This dissertation proposes silences as multifaceted entities within the performance space, capable of delineating and blending musical phrases and invoking a reevaluation of their performative function. As such, silence offers the capacity for delimitation and assemblage, positioning the performer as the one who navigates these dualities in each singular event. This model of “not and knot”—its capacity to serve simultaneously as connector and separator—challenges the conventional binary perspectives that typically categorize silence as either presence or absence or as either active or inactive. These co-existing dualities are, for example, present in the silence that separates the fanfares of Beethoven’s opus 111. Some pianists emphasize the separation (Richter); others emphasize the connection (Pires). This emphasis is created by the use of markers, both audible and visible.
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One question that often arose in my discussions with other musicians was a search for the motivations behind embodied silence. Some pianists are overtly seeking to communicate specific emotions through their embodiments of silence. Other pianists use gestures to illustrate the sound of silence, perhaps just for themselves. Their gestures stem from the practice room as a type of self-conducting. Or pianists gesture through the silences to retain the audience’s interest. In my own practice, I often try to articulate the breaths, the phrasing, or the structure of the composition. All of these are valid reasons for embodying silence, and many of them can exist and function simultaneously, even in the shortest rest.
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Silence and time are intricately related. The pauses or spaces afforded by rests help performers feel and process the present. Some silences let the audience listen backward to the past (the silence at the end of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum) or forward to the future (the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). Still others (Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6) seem to be without reference to time or duration. Gestures and embodiments of silence can be rapid or slow, overlapping or discontinuous, or any combination. The silences of 4’33” might be assumed to be timeless, but many of the videos in Chapter 4 demonstrate a strong dialogue between silence and time. The members of the band Dead Territory beat time quietly with their heads. Pianist David Tudor marks multiple time scales: a slow one of turning pages (a visual marker for time) and a fast one of a clicking stopwatch (an audible marker for time). Markers for time and silence can overlap, as in my performances with the Zürich Ballet. Antheil hoped for an audible sensation of time running through the silences without being touched. The choreographer in the Zürich performance experimented visually with abrupt falls during the silences. As the dancers collapsed, they were marking both time and the drama of the silences. Several time scales, marked both visibly and audibly, were thus present in the finished performance of the silences.