Music is Not Rocket Science #8: Silent Musical Compositions

I won't keep you in suspense any longer and answer straight away that we can definitely consider silence to be absolutely inseparable and fully-fledged music. Let's start right away with the example of a famous silent composition, 4′33″, composed in 1952 by John Cage (1912-1992). It is a composition in three parts, with a total length of 4 minutes and 33 seconds (ahem, the title, right?), for any instrument or combination of instruments.

Ten years later came 4'33" No. 2, which is also known as 0'00". In this case, the performer determines how quiet, mostly quiet, noisy or very noisy the piece will be in their performance. John Cage adds a rather complicated philosophical instruction on its interpretation: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or part, an obligation to others. No two performances should be of the same action, nor may that action be the performance of a “musical” composition.” Makes any sense to you?

I'm sure by now you're thinking that this case is yet another alternative art joke or anti-art. A provocation, a prank, a desire for media coverage, an absurdity. Perhaps, but certainly John Cage has managed to manifest quite obviously the argument about silence in music.

In the big picture, when we look at the whole universe, we see that it is made up of a symbiosis of matter and space. One cannot exist without the other. People are taught from a very young age to put a label on everything, to put it in the appropriate box, and then the matter is closed to them. We see a tree, say it's an oak, maybe throw in a few interesting facts about its fruit or the shape of its leaves, and move on.

But if we look at the tree in question through the eyes of a philosopher who is open to the burning questions of existence, we suddenly see the laws of the entire universe. Namely, the intangible space between the leaves or branches of the tree is as real as those tangible (physical) leaves and branches made of the stuff that we call wood, cellulose, and who knows how many other scientific names.

How does all this relate to music? By the fact that music is made up of notes as much as it is made up of pauses. So both have the same value and reality – both what you play and what you don't play. The length of the pause between notes determines their placement in the composition, their sound in space, their dynamics, and so on. So silence, and the degree of it in a given composition or real-time performance, is an integral part of the music, and therefore the music itself.

Let's now look at a few examples of compositions and pieces by both classical composers and modern pop rock bands that have taken this philosophical concept literally and put silence in a lead role.

The very first composition that was exclusive to silence is "Il Silenzio: pezzo caratteristico e descrittivo (stile modern)", written in 1896 by a composer with the pseudonym Samuel (probably Edgardo Del Valle de Paz.) “Samuel was attempting a different means of writing one of his humorous critiques on musical society, mainly in Florence. All the techniques used are well developed and extremely diversified for a piece having no pitch and with a skill that only Erik Satie could match at that time. He highlights and questions every compositional cliché that was in vogue during the period among traditional Italian composers and the growth of modernist avant-garde arts, using humour as a mechanism of critique." (Source: Wikipedia)

Another piece is a musical parody of twenty-four blank bars called "Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man" (1897) by the French writer and humorist Alphonse Allais (1854-1905). The composer's sense of humour is reflected in a note on the performance of the composition: "Great mourning is silent; performers should occupy themselves solely with counting the bars, instead of indulging in indecent quarrels which destroy the noble character of the best ceremonies." (Source: Wikipedia)

This approach reminds me somehow of Frank Zappa's brilliant musical spoofs. Zappa didn't end up composing the silent composition, but a surprising number of bands and musicians in the pop scene picked up on the idea.

Probably one of the cleverest and funniest ideas for applying silence in the modern streaming age is Sleepify, the 2014 album by the band Vulfpeck, which consists of 10 tracks of silence. The album was released on streaming giant Spotify and managed to earn over 20,000 dollars in two months on high user downloads. As a result, it not only exposed a loophole in the streaming service's royalty calculation model, but also helped cover the costs of the band's planned tour. Vulpeck offered people free tickets and even picked the venues from which their silent album had the most streams. Brilliant on so many levels!

Finally, let's give some examples of silent songs from well-known bands and artists:

• "12:97:24:99" by Mudvayne (2002)
• The "Nutopian International Anthem" by John Lennon (1973) and, of course, "Two Minutes Silence", which also features his muse Yoko Ono as a co-writer
• "One Minute of Silence" by Soundgarden
• Eminem, Korn, Tommy Cash, Wilco, Kaiser Chiefs, Karnivool and Melvins have also worked with silence as a form of musical protest, humour or surprise on their albums.

Silence not only heals, but as you can see, it also brings an extremely important space in music, without which no musical composition could actually exist.  

(Source of quotes used: Wikipedia)