Silence and Music
Before the pandemic I was on a huge Leonard Cohen binge, in particular his album, You Want it Darker. Then came my Springsteen phase (which TBH I’m still in). And I’ve found that what has been saving me these last couple of years is music. Which probably sounds a bit silly to any serious music aficionado. For a lot of writers, they can listen to music while they’re going about their business, but me, not so much. I can listen but it has to be something without words and usually it’s something on repeat. So for example, the entire time I was writing Everything Affects Everyone, I started my writing session with Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. Sometimes I would move to his Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works, but more often, I would just head into the music of silence. I need a great deal of silence to write, to think. In Edmonton right now, in the midst of a three week cold snap, the silence is permeated by the sounds of our furnace, and wow are we thankful for that! (The last time it was this cold for this long was 1969).
(Possible fun fact: the Xaviere scenes in EAE were mainly written to On the Nature of Daylight).
So yes, music has been saving me, but I don’t know a lot about music. I often start my day doodling and listening to CKUA which I definitely recommend to get those positive vibes going first thing. I love music but I also love the silence of the written word (even if later it’s read aloud). I love the silence of writing things down. I love the lines in Clarice Lispector’s The Stream of Life / Agua Viva in the Lowe and Fitz translation: “I want the vibrancy of joy. I want the sovereignty of Mozart. But I also want inconsequence.”
I was recently re-reading Adam Zagajewski’s essays, Slight Exaggeration, and was arrested by him quoting Karl Barth: “It may be that when the angels go about their task of praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.” Well, who knows what the angels play these days. But I’m sure they’re playing something.
Do you remember when the movie A Star is Born came out and everyone was quoting this:
“Music is essentially 12 notes between any octave. Twelve notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over. All the artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.”
Which leads me to John Cage, because what this post is really about is his 4’ 33”. I’m kind of obsessed with it right now (and have been and I think if you’ve read EAE you might see a bit of that interest embedded). You can see a number of performances of it on YouTube and it’s honestly just a very peaceful thing to do, listen and watch. (If you’re reading this in the email newsletter you might need to click here or read in the browser).
Silence is such a big part of music, of writing, of experiencing any work of art. Silence, too, is a big part of life, though as Cage has said, there’s no such thing as silence. There is silence and silence within the silences and there are the sounds and worlds inside of each silence. I’ve often written about the subjects of silence, solitude, stillness. Subjects which go so well together. In his well-known lecture, Silence, Cage says,
“Nothing more than nothing can be said. We make our lives by what we love. Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big. Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: “I take all the tones there are, leave out the one’s I don’t want, and use all the others.””
In Kay Larson’s book on Cage, Where the Heart Beats, she talks about how he created “an imaginary dialogue between himself and a composer he fiercely admired: Erik Satie.” But because, “Satie was long dead, Cage made up both halves of their conversation, mingling his own thoughts with borrowed fragments of Satie’s writings.” Cage: “because he died over thirty years before, neither of us hears what the other says.” When I made up the conversations that in part comprise EAE, it was not unlike this.
In Satie’s voice: “Nevertheless, we must bring about a music which is like furniture — a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself.”
I guess I keep going back to 4’33” because I strive to be a better listener. I’m interested in hearing things that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It’s a collaborative work of listening, too, and that’s something that I think is needed right now. The act of sitting in a room together and listening into the unknown for sounds and silence. Notes that may or may not be musical, human or not human. Just the thought of gathering a crowd right now seems quite wild, of course. But the whole enterprise seems to me to be so delightfully radical. This listening, leaning into a future of unknown sounds, expecting nothing, everything.
