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
A first idea that can be further investigated is what music can suggest about the political and societal implications of silencing. The concept of silencing, which is important for my work, is too large a topic to explore fully here and would require many separate research projects. Silencing in a political or societal context includes genocide, racism, and many other horrors. These societal silencings are not musically performed, but their impact can be felt personally, locally, and globally and can be musically documented or commented upon. Indeed, the ineffability of performed silence can be used as a unique and interdisciplinary opportunity to voice the unspeakable elements of societal silencing. Or the role of music itself as a method of silencing or torture can be critically investigated.
Politicized/performed silences are important to me in my own practice, and in the Noisy Archive I give a few examples from my own pianistic experience (see my performances of the works of T.J. Anderson, Mauricio Kagel, Pamela Z). But there are many more to be studied, such as the Los Angeles queer collective UltraRed and their albums of silence which used Cage’s music for political engagement. There is also research being created in international law that comments on silencing. For example, Elizabeth Schweiger’s dissertation “Listening to Silence: ‘Targeted Killing’ and the Politics of Silence in Customary International Law” uses Cage’s Lecture on Nothing as a framework and draws parallels between listening in diplomatic/political circles and listening in music (Schweiger & Wilde, 2018). Other commonalities exist; perhaps studies of performing musical silences can also influence the understanding of political and societal silences.
A second idea that can be developed in future research can depart from the question of what the possibilities are for new silence notations. An important area for future research is the creation of new symbols for silence, which could become a silence alphabet useful to composers and performers alike. Such a potential alphabet would contain new symbols for silence beyond common musical rests and could encode some of the multiple dimensions of silence that are missing from standard western music notation. Is it possible to create a series of notations for silence that are open enough to offer composers new paths but specific and practical enough that performers will find them useful? Admittedly, the very idea of an alphabet offers challenges (such as an implied hierarchy) that would have to be addressed. Musicologist John Potter offers a caveat about such an alphabet:
In theory, it should be possible to propose a taxonomy of rests. While this has a certain academic appeal and might also resonate with a composerly control of the music, reducing such powerful communicative devices to simple functions would be to deny the ambiguities involved in the creative performer’s role of storyteller. (Potter in Brooks et al., 2017, p. 168)
I believe Potter’s hierarchical concern is but one of many possible outcomes. The academic appeal and the composerly control he refers to can lead to compositions like Boulez’s third piano sonata, in which every note seems over-notated, and every event is circumscribed by rules, accents, and extra markings. Boulez’s hyper-difficult sonata is an extreme example of composerly control and one I do not want to overly promote, for it removes some freedoms from the performer. Nonetheless, the result for the pianist is rewarding, as I know from personal experience. With time and extensive practice of this sonata, new freedoms arise for the interpreter; new sounds are experienced, and new effects are achieved.
A more influential and more accessible example can be found in composer and pianist Henry Cowell’s extensive attempts to update musical notation in his book New Musical Resources (Cowell, 1930). Prior to this work, no reliable notation existed for playing clusters of notes on the piano. Cowell championed a simplified new notation for clusters—designating the white keys, the black keys, or both; and playing with the fist, the hand, the forearm, or the whole arm. Cowell’s instructions were widely adopted by publishers and, eventually, other composers. As a pianist himself, he had tested all the cluster techniques in the bombastic piano miniature Tides of Manaunaun (1912), so pianists and publishers appreciated the tried-and-true practicality of these new notations.1 The shift in attention that resulted from a precise notation of the physical engagement with clusters freed the pianist for other tasks. In this situation, encoding a complex and multidimensional phenomenon in accessible notation was worthwhile and unlocked new compositional and performative potential. Like all historical developments in music notation, new symbols will be adapted, updated, and gradually repurposed by performers, thereby creating new performance practices.
The discovery of communicative functions and the understanding of ambiguities afforded by practical, performer-tested new symbols for silence would benefit performers and composers alike. I see this as a promising future project that could begin with the highly heterogenous silences in the Noisy Archive.
A third new research project could start from the question of how silence can be experienced in non-neuro-typical situations. Silence experiences for non-neurotypical and differently-abled persons deserve further consideration. Many researchers have attempted to understand Beethoven’s deafness and its implications for his music, as well as for the audience’s understanding of it. How do deaf persons experience performed silence, and how do blind persons experience the visual markers I have presented here? My research suggests that musical narratives can be partly communicated through visible gestures, a finding which may also be relevant in some cases for communicating sounding music to deaf persons.
In an example from fiction, Jennifer Egan wrote a story within a story in her novel The Goon Squad. Chapter 12, narrated as a series of PowerPoint slides, documents the work of a child on the autism spectrum who obsessively analyzes the silences in rock songs (Egan, 2010, p. 242). The author describes this silence inspiration as “pause power,” and it becomes a means of communication for the child.
In an example from performance art, Deaf artist and activist Christine Sun Kim has transposed Max Neuhaus’s famous 1970s New York City silence walk. Her version of LISTEN is a (silence) walk along the Lower East Side neighborhood, including American Sign Language narration, and thus accessible to those with differing levels of hearing (Eppley, 2021, p. 102). Indirectly, her walk is a response to Neuhaus’s own response to Cage’s 4’33”.
And in an example that arose from my own pedagogical practice, one of my students at HKU created an artwork that attempted to explain his audio world to the rest of the class.
Figure 2: Stach Platenkamp performing untitled for voice and electronics (HKU, Utrecht, December 17, 2020)
Platenkamp’s composition reflected his daily experience with tinnitus. The music featured a complex layering of found audio, everyday sounds, beats, and the bells of the Utrecht Cathedral. It was a gripping performance that was just at the limits of being painfully loud, offering a remarkable insight into his musical habitus and new understandings of silence and listening, the shared and the personal.
