Pondering Silence
Posted by ben on 17 Aug 2007 at 10:30 pm | Tagged as: essays, music, sound art
Andrew Waggoner sends a 3,000 word battle cry into the ether, begging us to beat back the “colonization of silence” before it’s too late. He juxtaposes complaints about the overabundance of music in modern life (music while we shop; music while we drive; music while we wait for the AT&T customer service rep to answer our calls) with praise for the powerful use of silence by composers such as Webern and Morton Feldman. I can’t help but wonder if the solution to this problem is as simple as replacing Muzak with, say, the Lovely Music catalog.
On the other hand, here’s a video of John Cage . He, too, waxes eloquent on the limitations of “what we call music” (does this include Feldman?), and the power of silence. And somehow, in this 4-minute video, Cage seems to say more than Wagonner can pack into 3,000 words. You get the feeling that Cage has absorbed silence, that he embodies silence, while Wagonner pines away for it.
PS. Here’s another discussion of silence in the context of poetry for those that missed it.
i think this hits home for me quite well.. As a child I gre up in a home where music was played 24/7 , there was a radio on in every room of the house including the garage (although the garage was lucky enough to be relegated to the classic country station… ) It took me years to be able to sleep in silence, with no music playing in the background. I thought it had a lot to do with a feeling of loneliness or companionship that i was yearning for in my non waking hours for many years, until the last 2 where I’ve lived almost entirely in silence for days at a time. I’ve even gotten to the point where I’ll drive all over town and not realize that the music in my head, is just that.. in my head and not playing over the speakers. silence IS golden.
http://comp.uark.edu/~cotwell/march.mp3
Touched with fire, to the portal