Home 1. Introduction 2. Markers 3. Archive 4. Audible Markers 5. Visible Markers 6. Notational Markers 7. Conclusion
5.1. The Sonata 5.2. Examples 5.3. Learning from Embodiments
In Chapter 1, I posited that, in some situations, the visual elements of silence are more important for the receiver than the auditory elements. The examples above may support my theory of the visual as a valuable marker in perceiving silence. I chose the opening section of Beethoven’s last sonata because it seemed emblematic of his masterful use of silence. Yet, when I began studying performances of the fanfares, I realized how few of the pianists employed any silence at all. Instead, they were creating elaborate bodily gestures during the rests to communicate “silence.” Eloquent silence became more about embodiment than about silence itself. The public had to paradoxically attend to the visual rather than the audible to understand the rests.
Marking can be done in many ways, as these examples illustrate. Speed or pulse can be shown with the hands; color or affect might be suggested with facial expressions; shoulders could communicate peace or intensity; power or force might be shown by throwing the head back. While visual markers may not be necessary to hear silence, they contribute to how an audience understands silence in live performances.
Each pianist—through their unique interaction with silence and mediated by a complex interplay of embodiments, facial expressions, and gestures—opens a dialogue with Beethoven and with the audience, inviting an exploration of the spaces between the notes. Far from rendering silence as just non-playing, these performances elevate it to a visible gestural narrative.
Figure 3: ten different embodiments of the rest at 1F
These ten pictures show a remarkable variety of gestures in the same instant. The embodiments of silence inform us of otherwise inexpressible struggles.1 The pictures demonstrate how rests offer a unique opportunity for storytelling. During a rest, the performer has full rein to “conduct” the phrasing, to “show” the line or to “mold” the audience’s experience visually. In my opinion, embodiments during rests can offer a resistance to the homogenization of pedagogy, conservatories, performance practice, and even Mann’s texts: performers can express themselves more bodily in Beethoven’s rests than they can in the notes. The rests afford a less scripted and potentially less rehearsed (re-repeated) creative outlet for the pianists. The rests offer the chance for a freer, non-traditional vocabulary which can also allow the pianists a means to align with the music, “to go with,” to emotionally engage with the sounds through gesture. These embodiments are not disciplined by pedagogy or standard practice, so they provide a zone of freedom for individuality in classical music performance.
Figure 4: screenshots showing facial expressions in opus 111
The gestures of these pianists inhabit an ambiguous bodily world between the fictional and the real, a dichotomy that is sometimes mentioned in the world of theater. Derived from the ideas of enlightenment philosopher Johann Jakob Engel, this contrasts the “real body” with the “fictional body” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 85). The real body is supposed to be one’s physical, actual body, containing the gestures of our daily life. The fictional body at its most extreme is the dancer in Swan Lake, who is radiant and smiling onstage despite the agonizing pain in her bloody feet. The fictional body is a performative one created to entertain the audience. But it can also be a kind of armor, a defense.
Where can we situate the bodily gestures of the concert pianist? Speaking from my own experience, a concert is a performative situation in which I have chosen to place myself. My gestures are considered, thought out, and practiced. Over years of performing, I have created an internal code of accepted gestures for myself. These have been studied and repeated. To borrow another theatrical term, I am in character. But I am not trained per se: I am not an actor. Like most classical pianists, I have not studied movement. My body is more controlled than fictionalized. Many gestures are motivated, but I also make non-intentional gestures and inadvertent facial expressions out of nervousness or tension, engagement or excitement. Hence not every gesture is re-rehearsed. But all are part of my performing persona.
The motivated gestures might correspond to the training and approach of concert pianists, whose artistic practice is a repetition, a choreography of the performable. In the classic conservatory-trained model of an interpreter, the transmission of the pianist’s emotions is made audible via the notes and the silences, and made visible via the gestures and embodiments. And in the here-ness and now-ness of a performance, the pianist is simultaneously inhabiting multiple characters, some more fictional than others. The gestural freedom afforded by rests helps make the depiction of these characters possible.
Theater scholar Richard Schechner suggests that all performance comes from repeated embodied behavior: “Performances—of art, rituals, or ordinary life—are restored bits of behaviors, twice behaved behaviors, in other words—repeated behaviors that we learned, trained for, rehearsed, etc.” (Schechner, 2013, p. 60). Pianists are constantly training and constantly practicing. Pianists repeat gestures for a living.
The repetition involved in presenting these gestures to the public, the degree of virtuosity needed to perform the gestures between the notes, and the scale of the gestures (very large, compared to the note gestures) all seem to indicate a strong degree of motivation on the part of the performers.2
What might those motivations be? Kissin’s approach to the silences suggests an emotional wrestling with the piano, a sort of clash of titans (Kissin versus the Steinway), while Richter is stoic, as the lonely prince. Both pianists’ gestures seem as motivated and emotional as their notes: strongly argued and powerfully illustrated. The markers for silence (even when there is no actual silence) that these pianists so dramatically embody may be, in some cases, illustrations, a mimesis of the silence or the decaying notes, a picturing of the reverberation of the hall (such as Mahan’s flowing arm movements). Gestures for something that isn’t there (the rests that are obscured by the pedal) give the impression of eloquent silence. Some of these pianists are pretending to perform silence, thus fictionalizing silence (Kissin especially) while others are obscuring the rests (Pollini) without a gesture of eloquent silence. The markers that Kissin and Pollini provide do not correspond with audible silence—they are markers for silences that are not really there.
Another motivator for silence is reflection, as in a means of thinking through, and understanding.
We tend to identify the delivery of a piece of music with its notes, and it is perhaps in part because of this that our attention increases when there is an absence of notes. The reflective element is primarily for the benefit of the listener: it has the capacity to enable him or her to make sense of what has gone before, to enter into the creative process of reconstructing the performer’s meaning […]. (Potter, 2017, p. 156)
The audience needs time to process a piece of music, not only after but also during the performance itself. In Anton Webern’s Variations, there are very frequent and very notable rests that offset the short phrases. These rests fulfill a structural function, separating out essential material so that the audience can digest Webern’s new musical language and understand something of the complex form. This does not mean that the silences are subordinated to the sounds. In fact it is the opposite: without the silences, the sounds would not make sense. The silences are essential for Webern’s audience to understand his new language. Opus 111 also seemed modern to audiences of Beethoven’s time, and thus structural clarity could have been a motivation for silences.3 The best example might be Pires. Even though she shortens the silences, they are presented as counterweights to the notes in a structuring, reflective manner. The silences have a retrospective quality that helps the audience digest the notes that have recently sounded.
Performed silences may arise through providing the audience time or space for reflection. But the pianists themselves might also use silence embodiment for reflection or understanding. When learning a new piece of music, I often find myself practicing with one hand while conducting with the other. At some point, as the learning advances closer to a performance, both hands are working at the piano, and much of that conducting is tucked away into my mental and bodily memory, no longer visible to the audience. However, some vestiges remain and are incorporated into the performance. The process of rehearsing and re-rehearsing has inadvertently created new gestures that are visible when the hands are not playing notes; the rests can be a glimpse into the performer’s rehearsal technique, their private practice.
Other variations are also possible. Pianists may conduct themselves during rehearsal or performance. This self-conducting can be quite visible, especially with the left hand in Richter’s or Trifonov’s performances. Gestures can be a tool to engage and immerse oneself in the music. In these cases, gesturing can be a way of opening. Gestures may even constitute a mode of listening. In these performed silences, facial and gestural expressions of pianists might not be pictured as deliberate communication with the audience but rather understood as a side-effect of communication with oneself as a musician.
There might be other less physical motivations for exaggerating performed silence. Many musicians relish the audience’s silence during a particularly gripping performance. Onstage, I try to have an extra ear pointing out at the audience, gauging their attention—from their silence. The more perfect the audience’s silence, the more engaged they are. This silence behind the music is a form of audience approbation. A rest in the score can signal a chance for the performer to test the room’s temperature, to check the focus of the crowd. Listening to the audience during a gesture can thus be a motivator for eloquent silence.
Silences separate the fanfares that open the sonata, and the notes of the fanfares mark the silences but are equally marked by the silences. A heterogeneous performance tradition has developed around these fanfares. Key ingredients are teaching traditions, the score, associated texts, concert hall acoustics, the rituals and socio-cultural context of the concert, and other factors, including piano, stage, and costumes.
Looking-at and listening-to the silences of virtuoso pianists gave me a chance to pull apart the gestures, to isolate them, and to experiment with them. Far beyond mere entertainment, these gestures are themselves a musical or theatrical communication. I see them as an unwritten vocabulary for communicating silence’s multidimensionality (see Chapter 2) to the audience.
What they communicate and how they do so depends also on the performer’s persona and their apparent gestural motivations. These performers are often working from the same score, interpreting the same rests. Yet, even more so than with the notes, the silence differences are extreme. Freed of their attachment to the keyboard, pianists create strange and eccentric means of capturing the audience’s attention and describing or conducting the silences.
I suggest some conclusions:
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The visual curates/narrates our perception of eloquent silence in concert; pianists consciously or unconsciously understand that, and visibly embody the silences;
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The rests afford a freedom of movement to the performer.
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The visual constantly influences our perception of music. As such, these performers embody silence vividly. They are picturing silence for us, even if they are not playing it. Few of the pianists respect the rests; the sound level is often loud. Instead, they illustrate eloquent silence for us.
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When pianists conduct, choreograph, and embody the rests, the audience visually understands—more cognitively than perceptually—that silence is happening and how silence is happening.