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
Through the lens of embodied silence, this research has demonstrated the importance and complexity of markers for performed silence. That the visual markers for performed silence often speak louder than the auditory components does not negate the importance of the audible. In many situations, sounds are the only way the audience knows that “silence” is happening. The silence gestures of performers, their physical presence and movements, and the deliberate and inadvertent sounds onstage do not merely accompany silences but become a critical text in themselves, recounting stories of pause, anticipation, memory, and continuation that are essential to the musical narration.
I equally hope that this dissertation and its outcomes create an improved discursive and interactive understanding of performed silence. By explicating on and through silence, I move between and around intangibility, absence, breath, pause, and gesture, between the not and the knot, thus finding new ways—often through my own instrument—of picturing silence.
Linking white spaces (les blancs) and structure in relation to his own poem “Musicienne de Silence,” the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé “evokes a singular silence, which is not the opposite of music, its negation, nor its absence, but which plays the same role as white space on the sheet of paper” (Margel, 2018, p. 30). Mallarmé himself advanced this argument in a letter to Charles Morice in 1892:
Despite the intervening years and the disparities between composing text and performing music, I suggest that Mallarmé’s evocation can hold for contemporary sound experience and that it coincides with many of my conclusions. He feels the visible space around the strophes and the whiteness of the paper to be as beautiful as the audible/inaudible text. Moreover, the white space is not ornament nor decoration; it is the intellectual framework (armature intellectuelle) around which the poem forms. Mallarmé’s term “significatif silence” corresponds well to my concept of eloquent silence. The markers of the silence are signifying, signing the communication of the silence, and pre-echoing Barthes.
I have focused in this research on captions/markers which reveal the dimensions of silences. But silence remains slippery (Bataille), ineffable (Jankélévitch), and indeterminate (Busoni). In the wake of all these examples, there are still so many approaches, and so many models to choose from. Silence can be regarded as the canvas on which musical notes become audible. Littlefield focusses on the frame that silence forms around the music. But for Cage, the canvas of silence becomes/is already music. Jankélévitch mostly considers silences as untouchable, ungraspable. As a kind of implicit response, I often approach silences as thingy (Voegelin), multidimensional (Margulis), and tangible. In yet other examples, silences arise from music, as something apart or spiritual, which may be felt as behind (Picard) or beneath (Merleau-Ponty) the music. Cobussen describes Pärt’s music as orbiting around a silence that it can never reach. There is no one model of silence that can match all the examples presented here.
From the viewpoint of my own artistic practice, Barthes’s model, though perhaps imperfect, supports my suggestion of markers for silence and seems to describe many of the silences I have performed. More poetically, the “significant silences” of Mallarmé map onto the artistic research I undertook in this study. Mallarmé’s evocation of white space, his interest in the hidden and the revealed, and his recognition of silences as an embodiment of structure, as both glue and isolation, as both hiding and holding, as knot and not, illustrate the audible and visible knowledge(s) revealed by the musician through silence.