An Introduction to Silences
19 February 2025
This blog is intended to be a place where I can collate and consider encounters with musical ‘silences’1. These encounters are random in the sense that they are silences which I come across in music I am conducting, playing or listening to on an everyday basis.
In his writings, John Cage – the composer of 4’33” (1952) - identifies the historical functions of musical silences as
the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends, among them that of tasteful arrangement, where by separating two sounds or two groups of sounds their differences of relationships might receive emphasis; or that of expressivity where silences in a musical discourse might provide pause or punctuation; or again, that of architecture, where the introduction or interruption of silence might give definition either to a predetermined structure or to an organically developing one. (Cage: 22)2
This statement and my own experience of performing and listening to musical silences lead me to consider what is the context, duration, content and expressive or structural function of a musical silence? And how - maybe even why - do we create meaning from musical silences?
With these questions in mind, I have created an initial taxonomy of musical silences:
1. Inhalation
2. Exhalation
3. Exclamation
4. Interruption
5. Reflection
6. Veneration
7. Inertia
8. Disorientation
9. Jest
10. Lacuna
Going forward I will consider whether these categories are useful and, if so, whether historical or other patterns of musical silences emerge.
1 I have used inverted commas to signal phenomenological impossibility of absolute silence here but will having made this understanding clear will dispense with the signal going forward.
2 Cage, J. (1973) Silence: Lecture and Writings by John Cage, Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press