Richard A. Ujvary ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>You know besides the sounds of silence sometimes there are sounds that
>aren't even there!  Holland, the music critic of the Times, alludes in a
>piece on musical silence to an example by Rosen in his book "The Romantic
>Generation"..."where at the end of Ludwig B's C-minor piano sonata there's
>a B-flat-to-A-natural resolution.  By the time the A-natural actually
>arrives the resonating B-flat has long since evaporated from the vibrating
>piano strings.  But we want to hear it and so our imaginations aided by the
>surrounding harmonic events keep it alive.  We in our small way have become
>composers too".

Or, how about Bruno-Heinz Jaja's Punkt-kontrapunkt, whose palindromic
structure revolves around three bars of silence (the middle on of which,
being in 3/4 "gives the entire work a quasi-Viennese flavour") during which
"the silence makes a crescendo" because the violas have a bottom B flat
marked "tremolando ma quasi pensato".  They "must not play this note, only
think it.  In fact they can only think it, because the bottom B flat is not
on the instrument."

deryk barker
([log in to unmask], http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~dbarker)