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
Another aspect that came out of my research project is an improved vocabulary of silence. Although silence is notated unidimensionally (duration), there is much evidence for a multidimensionality of silence. These dimensions could include intentionality, source, direction, emotion, remembrance, and even speed. These dimensions easily mesh with techniques and theories that most musicians use in their practice. Although performed silences are often intuitive, unlabeled, or uncategorized, the very attempt to define performed silences through an archive has provided insight, building fluidity and potential into dimensions and offering new performance opportunities. A future step may be to create new notations for silence (see below), which could be helpful to performers and composers.
My Noisy Archive offers a chance to rethink silence, not simply as an absence of sound, not simply as a rest, and not simply as the spaces between notes. In each of the pieces I performed, silence took on a different shape, a different role, a different meaning, and a different position, and hence elicited a different approach, a different way of playing, a different ethic, and a different way of communicating to the audience.
The silence examples illustrate a “heterogenizing” of silence in and through music-making. As such, they may open new ideas, vocabulary, and gestures that, together, can add to this Noisy Archive: an archive of silences, for silences, found through silences. The archive reveals that each musical performance of silence gives rise to a distinct interplay of diverse elements, including markers, notations, framing techniques, and performative strategies. In some instances, only a single marker may manifest, or a dominant marker may prevail, while in other examples, a dynamic interplay of multiple markers influences the performance and/or the audience’s perceptions. The variances in silences in the musical examples can be attributed to a number of factors. These include the acoustic properties of the performance space, the choice of instruments, the guidance provided within a musical score, the autonomy exercised by the performer, the responsive behavior of the audience, and the role assigned to silences within a specific musical piece.
Silence is not a singular, homogeneous entity. Instead, silences exhibit substantial diversity, as was demonstrated through comparative examinations of 4’33” and opus 111. Furthermore, the contextual aspects of silence, which are influenced by both non-sounding and sounding elements, especially markers, highlight silence’s complex and often visual nature. My own research only begins to touch on the expressive possibilities of this diversity. Moreover, musicians are constantly inventing new modes of performed silence. The archive will get noisier, more alive, and perhaps more flexible as it opens up to further silences.
By working with many composers (in teaching and through the archive), I have influenced the amount and kind of repertoire related to silence by encouraging new possibilities. This can originate through my piano practice as a concert performer or through my teaching practice, encouraging students to experiment. I plan to continue creating new works around silence. (Some student examples and a commissioned example are discussed below.)
From Cage, I learned about intricate layers of embodiment, silence, gesture, and listening. Watching and listening to the YouTube performances of 4’33” underscored how silence can be embodied through the performer’s gestures. Gestures, whether they be the poised stillness of a pianist or the deliberate turning of a page, served as visual cues to communicate the character of silence. I realized that my earlier interpretations, based on Cage’s ideas, were not effectively communicating to the audience. This embodied silence is a performative act that shapes the listener’s perception, creating a reflective space for listening that magnifies the music’s expressive potential. My attempts to encourage active listening from the audience were not always successful, but experimentation on radio and in hospitals removed the artwork from its foundation and transformed it into a shared experience of attention and awareness. I began to “play” with the artwork more, deliberately destabilizing performance expectations to create more unexpected outcomes. By incorporating the lessons I learned from YouTube, I moved the foundation of the artwork again. By no longer focusing on “success,” “tradition,” or the “classical frame” in which the piece is anchored, I could make the artwork more playful and more responsive to the audience.
From Beethoven, I learned that silence can be descriptive when it punctuates musical phrases, creating a canvas upon which the music’s emotional and thematic textures are accentuated. It invites a reflective pause, enabling both performer and listener to inhabit the space between notes, thereby magnifying the work’s expressive capacity. Illustratively, silence guides the listener’s journey through the piece and highlights certain structural and emotive contrasts within the composition. Silence becomes a critical narrative tool that performers leverage to convey complexity, tension, resolution, and the inexpressible.
From Antheil, I learned that silence stands out as a radical and abstract structural component framed by various visual and physical markers that enhance its impact. Mechanical instruments and the sounds of airplane propellers, bells, and sirens serve as theatrical markers; their abrupt cessation of sound leaves a lingering black noise that intensifies the ensuing silences. In the Zürich performances, choreographic elements further embody these silences, with frenetic gestures shaping the audience’s perception. I learned to what extent these silences are used: not as interludes but as deliberate, structural voids that highlight Antheil’s strategy of using silence to disrupt and disconnect, creating a radical quiet amidst the chaotic noise. This transforms the “absence” of sound into a dynamic presence, a “noisy silence,” amplifying the preceding and following sonic chaos. Antheil’s integration of silence thus redefines it as a profound disruptor and an avant-garde structural element within the musical narrative. This experience, and the study of it, profoundly changed my knowledge of silence and increased my silence-performing skills.
How to Use Markers in Practice: A Guide to Performing Silences
From the Noisy Archive and the three case studies, I conclude that markers for silence are a multifaceted and complex phenomenon, integrating audible, notational, and visual elements that significantly shape the audience’s experience and interpretation.
The archive especially illustrates how heterogeneous, contingent and interconnected markers are and shows the potential artistic choices that they offer to the performer for communicating silences. A few main themes can be used very practically by performers:
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Dramatic gestures can summon, signal, or prepare silences. The performer’s choice of gesture, such as fingers hovering precisely above the keys or a head thrown back in a magisterial posture, provides visual cues that shape the silence, making it eloquent and communicating emotions to the audience.
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These gestures can intertwine with the architecture of the performance space, where the design of the hall, lighting, ambient noise levels, or the layout of the stage can emphasize or summon silences.
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Amplification, traditionally used to project sound, paradoxically can serve as a marker when turned off, leaving a resonant void.
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The contorted face of a performer in anticipation or a paused immobility can describe silence. The experience of silence can be informed by the performer’s deliberate poise and slow or motionless posture, ingredients that might describe breaks in the musical narrative.
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Audience (mis)understanding can add to the landscape of silence in performance, depending on awareness of the notated silences or the story behind the artwork.
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Sometimes, dramatic historical events can have an effect on silence perceptions and affect the performer/performance, such as the fall of the Soviet Union or the lockdowns of the pandemic. Events like these can force the performer to confront unexpected audience reactions or react to unfamiliar contexts. See for example how artists like Sis Leyin adapted 4’33” to a lockdown situation by embracing social media as a performance tool; or see my broadcast in Moscow (Chapter 4), during which exterior contextual markers completely overshadowed my own performed markers.
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Audience behavior itself can become a marker. When they yell instructional commands or refuse to applaud they can collectively reshape the performance. In these situations, the performer must make reactive decisions on how to behave (see my Checklist in Chapter 4).
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The performer’s unsuccessful efforts can serve as inadvertent markers of silence, where moments of hesitation or technical failure draw attention to the absence of sound.
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Silence might also be delineated by external actors like traffic sounds or a ticking clock, elements that frame the silence audibly, temporally, and spatially. In outdoor performances, natural elements, from birds to rocks to weather, can also create markers evoking silence.
Many of these markers offer options for performing silence and making it eloquent. Whether they summon, describe, or impose silence, these multifaceted markers afford performers a rich palette of artistic choices to communicate and enhance the silences within their music, transforming them into expressive, dynamic elements of the performance.
By embracing the audible, visual, and gestural aspects of silence, my performance has evolved to incorporate a broader range of expressive tools, enabling me to convey the music’s narrative depth more strongly. I began the project because I felt that there was such a lack of understanding about the role of silence in the field and that it needed attention. It is not so much how my performing has changed as how my attitudes and approach have changed. I suspected the importance of silence but did not foresee the importance of gestures. I saw many visible silences but did not realize the impact until studying them. As a performer, I became more aware of my fictional body and persona onstage, especially by copying other performers.
This dissertation has given me the language to explain what I assumed was behind and around the silences. Now, I am extremely aware of when I am creating a connection or a disconnection in performance. Now, I think through every silence I play in terms of its not/knot potential. New questions evolved that I did not ask myself before: what is being connected, what is being separated, and how should silence function on this sliding scale of connectivity?
Reflecting (both in thinking and playing) on other performances has proved rewarding. In Beethoven, tradition and ritual affect the performance of silence considerably, yet I discovered remarkable freedoms of movement and interpretation. Tradition and ritual also played a major role in performed silence in videos of Cage’s 4’33”, and my analyses of these embodiments led to new understandings of silence, which informed my own performance. In examining these performed renderings of silence, an intriguing dichotomy emerges: the ostensibly constrictive tradition around Beethoven’s compositions catalyzes a plethora of creative, balletic, interpretative embodiments of narrative silence. Conversely, the supposedly liberating role of Cage’s musical philosophy seems to find its strongest expression within structured, formal representations of stillness in which attitudes and gestures are codified and formalized. This contradictory result underscores the multifaceted nature of silence in musical performance, challenging performers to navigate the interplay between the (supposedly) prescriptive notational directives of classical composers and the conceptual freedoms afforded by Cage.
In order to experiment directly with new kinds of performed silence, I asked the Lyonnais experimental composer Jean-Charles François to write me a new piece. François created a composition that consists of fragments in alternating musical styles separated by silences. The work is deliberately conceived to highlight the possibilities of silence. The musical fragments are meant to recall the practice sessions of students of “Aunt” Phoebe, John Cage’s earliest piano teacher.
The process of learning this artwork was difficult. At first, I had no plan to illustrate the silences through gestures, but after a few test performances, I began to do so. I chose embodiments for each big silence and performed them as theatrically as possible. These silent exaggerations were drawn from the Beethoven case studies. The current result (as in this video) is more experimental than finished, more contingent than conclusive.
The second red rest is a surprising silence, which is prepared by the notes that precede it and draws from Richter’s opus 111 performance, in which he rips his hands off the keyboard like a reverse boxer. This gesture works so well for me that I also incorporated it into my Antheil performances.
The anticipatory silence of the second line is self-explanatory, though it might counter the composer’s indication to close the fallboard over the keys. While embodying anticipation, I also must complete a conclusive gesture: closing something as if ending the performance. And I chose to do that silently, making sure not to bang the cover as it descended.
The next silence is nostalgic and inspired by Chopin’s yearning silences (see Nocturne in the Noisy Archive). I was trained at the conservatory to perform this type of silence with a soulful look in my eyes or at least a downcast head. One might alternatively look off into the abstract distance, miles beyond the end of the piano, as in Trifonov’s performance.
The last rest seeks to counteract classical conventions of performed silence. This is a rest in which I look around. The red symbol indicates to me that I must look consecutively at three different points in the room, from left to right, in sequence. The audience perceives immediately that I look around, and then they also look, trying to follow the logic, examining the space around the performance. This particularly experimental notation is not meant to communicate something. Rather, this is an abstract and performative silence—inspired by the Sis Leyin performance in Chapter 4.
By shuffling the gestures around, I was soon able to create an entirely new interpretation of the piece, in which the silences came to the foreground. The piece does not specifically call for gestural silence. However, the gestured version is more performatively successful and communicative to the receiver. Indeed, some audience members said without irony that they had enjoyed the silences more than the notes. Like many experimentations, it did not lead to final or conclusive results. But it opened new doors to performing silences at the piano, especially suggesting that 1) anything can be a marker for silence, 2) even very subtle gestures can be effective, and 3) gestures play a large role in whether the silences seem connective or disconnective. All these subtleties will be explored further in my practice as I continue to work with composers on new works for understanding silence.
How My Teaching Practice Has Changed
During my five years compiling an archive for silence, I developed and taught new courses on silence for musicians and for architects.1 As part of the process, I often presented my ongoing research to the students for feedback. The classes I taught became laboratories for experimentation with the dimensions of silence. They are also promising results of my research because they illustrate how a new generation of composers and artists could use the vocabulary I suggest to create original experiences of silence.
Prior to this dissertation, my teaching practice focused on contemporary performance techniques and composition. I had never taught a class on sound or silence. Updating my teaching interests also encouraged me to update my teaching skills. I created toolkits for silence and for sound. These toolkits consisted of mind maps of dimensions, affects, functions, and motivations for silence, categorized by the students themselves into areas of interest. These informal and constantly changing toolkits were of great help in guiding my students through questions of tangibility, the sound object, the ineffable, hearing, listening, absence, presence, anticipation, resonance… and onwards.
Figure 1: images from brainstorming sessions on silence with interior architecture students (INSIDE, KABK, 2022)
I tried to guide students in isolating separate components of silence and understanding the complexity and interrelations of those components. The students brought their ideas and criticality, offering new directions and perspectives to add to my research, as well as completely new functionalities for and implementations of silence.
The following example is particularly compelling because the student engaged with the multidimensionality of silence (as mentioned in Chapter 2) to create new knowledge, not by duplicating my ideas but by challenging common preconceptions about hearing/perceiving silence in a vacuum.
Having been told (by me) that we cannot experience silence in a vacuum, this composition student set out to prove me wrong. Here is his scenario: the lights go up in a darkened room, and a blanket is pulled away to reveal an inverted glass bell. Inside the glass bell is a mini robot that turns a music box. The music box uses a long roll of punched paper that is curled around a metal can and gradually rotates in a sort of clumsy way, making music steadily.
Figure 2: preparing the vacuum machine for untitled by Mees van der Smagt, scored for piano four-hands, vacuum bell jar, coke can, motorized music box, and punched tape (HKU, December 17, 2020)
Two pianists sit at a grand piano, stage-left of the vacuum table and its operator. They begin playing a sort of lullaby, which becomes a moving duet between wonky machine and piano. The contrast is heightened by the loud noise of the vacuum, which is switched off once the air is evacuated from the bell. Of course, by then, we cannot hear the sound from the music box anymore because without air to transmit the waves, we only hear “silence” (or, in this case, we hear different levels of quiet sounds: the room tone, the hum of amplifiers, the sound of the two pianists still performing).
Littlefield’s examination of the framing elements that begin the musical work is given repeated substance in this example, as the composition seems to begin several times: at the vacuum installation, at the piano, and inside the jar.
There was a temporal and gestural symmetry to the performance—a rising tension as the air pressure decreased and then a lowering of tension as the air returned to the jar. This mix of the visible and the audible created sensorial confusion and conflation, as if the inaudible was made audible and the invisible was made tangible.
Figure 4: waveform of the performance
The composition and scenography were highly innovative: The machine seemed to have a life of its own, transmogrifying into a non-human embodiment of silencing, barely surviving a sort of asphyxiation, an apparent strangulation of the music box. And seeing the machine cranking away with no sound was impressive—our eyes and ears were transfixed. The composition successfully proved that audiences can experience the silence of a vacuum and that this particular silence can be personified and expressed in very understandable terms at a human scale.
The performances that originated in this class showed a great diversity of approaches to silence. Singer/songwriter Finja Verhoef, for example, wrote a layered composition that repeated loops of her voice over a light background of sometimes overlapping electric guitar chords. The main text, endlessly repeated, is: “een dag, niet mijzelf, wil ik wel….what the hell.” Verhoef explains that her text tells first of a struggle with insecurities and then of waking up one morning feeling more positive. What is fascinating to me is her use of stutter, delay, and other glitches. The silences seem to arise naturally from these glitches. That is her innovation: silences that are born from something else, from the glitches of Zoom and Facetime. The endless repetition, familiar from lockdowns, and the “what-the-hell” attitude also reflect pandemic anxiety. Her voice is closely-miked, and her breathing (as an expression of silence) increases the sensation of intimacy and vulnerability.
Audio: Finja Verhoef, een dag, niet mijzelf (HKU, 2021)
These examples of experimentation (also see Appendix) show the potential of my updated approach (listening, brainstorming, toolkit creation) to interest emerging artists and songwriters in innovative uses of silence. The enthusiastic responses from the students seem to represent a general increased interest in silence. Students have approached me in the last years with projects that evoke silence through meditation, shamanic practices, repetition, political censorship, conversational or social situations, and many more creative directions that I would not have anticipated but which are continually influencing my own ideas on performing and creating silence in music. The diversity of approaches and solutions amongst this generation of new artists suggests the potential of further exploring performed silence from a variety of perspectives and shows that the topic resonates with young musicians.