photo by Kimberly Aichinger
story by S.R. Aichinger
In the Beginning
There was silence.
Then
There was a bang.
A Long Time Ago
Our word “music” comes from the Greek mousike, “art of the Muses.” The early Muses were daughters of Apollo, god of music among other things. Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the nine Muses that appear later in Greek mythology were the personification of knowledge and the arts, and followed Apollo as their leader. Originally, each Muse was not associated with specific arts forms, but during the Hellenistic period, they developed specialties. Euterpe, for example, had domain over song and elegiac poetry, and Polymynia over hymn. For centuries, we have credited Euterpe, Polyhymnia and their seven sisters with bringing artists inspiration from, it would seem, nothing: from silence.
Our word “silence” came to the English language sometime around the 13th century, from the French silence, which means just what you might expect: “the absence of sound.” Further back, “silence” comes from the Latin silentium, meaning “a being silent,” which suggests to me that silence is not a mere absence of sound. There needs an agent being who is silent in order for there to be silence. Which raises a question: If there were no agent to be silent, what do we call the sonic emptiness?
Sometime During the Second Century C.E.
Saint Cecelia of Rome, the patron of musicians, refused to be silent. She was ordered to burn in Sicily, but when the flames didn’t kill her, she was beheaded. It is said that after three strikes of the executioner’s sword, Cecelia lived for three days and asked the pope to make her home a church.
March 20, 1393
John of Nepomuk is the national saint of the Czech Republic. He was the confessor of the queen of Bohemia and refused to divulge the contents of her confessions. So on March 20, 1393, he was drowned in the Vltava River by order of Wenceslaus IV, king of the Romans and Bohemia, for his silence. Because of this, John of Nepomuk is patron of floods and silence — not the kind of silence that exists in the absence of sound, but the silence of refusing to betray a secret.
1949
French artist Yves Klein’s Monoton-Silence Symphony is a 40-minute, two-movement composition. The first movement is a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, the second a 20-minute silence.
1952–1962
John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” (“Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”) is a three-movement arrangement, composed for any instrument (or combination of instruments), but performed originally on the piano. Often, it is called “four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence,” but it is not. 4’33” is, according to interviews with Cage and presented in Richard Kostelanetz’s 2003 Conversing with Cage, a composition that incorporates the sounds of the environment listeners hear during the performance.
Cage’s 1962 composition 4’33” No. 2 (or 0’0”) is a similar composition, but without a predetermined duration, the performer controls the length of the piece and the “silence” the audience experiences.
1978
“When the claims of creation cannot be primary,” Tillie Olsen writes in Silences, “the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences.”
1989
“Writing, reading, thinking, imagining, speculating,” writes Trin T. Minh-ha in Woman, Native, Other. “These are luxury activities, so I am reminded, permitted to a privileged few.”
In the same year bell hooks published Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, in which she writes, “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.”
Music is, for the privileged few, a way to cover the discomfort of silence. Music is, for the oppressed, the colonized and the exploited, a refusal of silence. Song can be a distraction or an act of political defiance and a movement toward spiritual freedom.
1992
Here is the chorus from “Silent All These Years,” from Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes:
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his with her name still on it
But I don’t care ‘cause sometimes I hear my voice
And it’s been here, silent all these years
Sometimes the silence is temporary or intermittent. Sometimes we are surprised to hear a sound coming from ourselves after all these years of silence.
1996
In the February 1996 issue of College Composition and Communication is an essay by Jacqueline Jones Royster: “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” In it Royster discusses the challenge the voiceless and oppressed experience being locked into a dance with the voice of dominant society.
When the first voice you hear is not your own, you have heard another kind of silence.
1997
“18 sekúndur fyrir sólarupprás” (“18 Seconds before Sunrise”) is an 18-second silent track before “Hafssól” (“The Sea’s Sun”) on Sigur Rós’s debut album Von.
1999
In the title song from Ani DiFranco’s 1999 album Up Up Up Up Up Up, she sings, “Half of learning how to play is learning what not to play, and she’s learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say.”
Light is light only if there is also darkness. There is no concept of virtue without the concept of sin. Music works only if there is a silence to fill or punctuate or decorate.
2009
The fifteenth and final track of Neko Case’s album, Middle Cyclone, is called “Marais la Nuit,” French for “swamp at night.” At 31 minutes and 39 seconds, the looped track is four minutes of a field recording of frogs taken at a pond on Case’s Vermont farm.
The previous fourteen tracks on Middle Cyclone add up to a little more than 42 minutes. “Marais la Nuit” occupies roughly 43 percent of Middle Cyclone.
The track reminds me of John Cage’s 4’33”. The album reminds me of Yves Klein’s Monotone-Silence Symphony. A comment, perhaps, on the importance of non-music in music composition. Or perhaps a comment on the noise that occurs alongside music.
September 21, 2010
I have on my wall a promotional poster advertising a show School of Seven Bells and Active Child played at The Waiting Room.
The image is of the Big Bad Wolf, and in his stomach is Little Red Riding Hood. Big Bad’s muzzle is in profile over the moon, held in what appears to be a howl. Little Red is walking along in his belly, her hair tousled a bit, but her cape and hood are unruffled.
Why is Big Bad silent? Why does he only pretend to sing?
Fall 2010
Philip Zach’s vocal folds had developed nodules. They threatened his ability to vocalize through silence. So for a month he was silent. When that didn’t resolve the problem, the nodules were surgically removed — a relatively safe procedure, but risky for a singer. Julie Andrews and Ryan Key of Yellowcard both underwent vocal nodule surgery, affecting both singers’ vocal abilities.
Philip Zach took that chance, and after surgery, he spent another month in silence.
From that silence came Arrows and Sound. From that silence came sound. Saint Cecelia refused to be silent, but Philip Zach refused to speak or sing so that he could sing.
September–December 2011
With her twelfth studio album, Night of Hunters, Tori Amos was the first woman in history to have an album appear simultaneously in the top 10 of Billboard’s Alternative, Classical and Rock charts. As a lifelong Toriphile, this news was to me a kind of music all its own. But three months later, Amos silenced herself and the album’s other two vocalists — Amos’s daughter, Natashya Hawley, and niece, Kelsey Dobyns — with the release of Night of Hunters: Sin Palabras.
Sin palabras is Spanish for “without words.” The vocal silence of the album created a space where the album’s instrumentation — Amos’s piano, the Apollon Musagéte string quartet and five woodwind musicians — were given their own kinds of voice.
Sometime Soon
Next time a concert ends and you’re in the car on your way home, turn off the music in your car. Ask your friends not to talk. Feel the ring in your ears. Try if you can to make it last as long as the concert did.
Enjoy the silence.
Coda
Lately, I’ve spent a good majority of my time at home and in a peculiar sort of silence.
At home in the rented three-bedroom house where until last month I have lived for two years with a friend, Kirsten, and a constantly changing cast of third roommates. At home where until last month I have been in the company of cats (Bill, The General, Pocket and Cosmos) and often one or both roommates. At home, where I am now unequivocally alone.
The General and Cosmos are now living with Kirsten’s ex-husband, Pocket lives up the street from the Side Door Lounge, and Bill is in Portland. After our most recent third roommate moved home earlier this spring and Kirsten packed as much as she could into her car and moved to Portland with Bill, I am now unequivocally alone.
I have spent a great majority of my time alone at home not because it suits me, but because gas is expensive, money is tight, and I can walk around the neighborhood looking at unkempt lawns only so many times. After exhausting my patience for cleaning and growing bored of internet TV, I found myself sitting on the front porch for long stretches of time. Sometimes I would play a record in my room and leave the window open, but more often I sat quietly, adding nothing but my breathing to the noise on the block, listening to the rain, the cars passing up the block on 72nd Street, and the bell-like voices of the girls next door playing in their yard.
There is a simple kind of grace in silence — the grace of trees and waiting. There is a spiritual calm in slowing down, willing my heart to stall and extending the intervals between beats.
On Saturday afternoon, I sat on the porch with a book in my hand but not really reading. The neighbor girls kept me entertained with their playing. I think they were in Africa from their talk about lions and giraffes, but they were definitely exploring. The older sister, who finished kindergarten this spring, ordered her younger sister, perhaps 3, to check a hydrangea bush for zebras and make sure the lions didn’t eat the elephants.
When I hear these noises, I think of my niece, G, who is 5 and lives out west. She is an intuitive and musical child, always making up songs to sing and dancing. I wonder if she understands a song’s political and spiritual power. I wonder, too, what it is she is trying to do with the silence she decorates. I wonder if she is not merely trying to fill a void, but intuitively appreciating the history of silence.
S.R. Aichinger is a Hear Nebraska editorial intern. Comment below with what you think of when you hear the word “silence,” are in silence or can’t find any. He’d love to hear from you, and you can reach him at sraichinger@hearnebraska.org.