Walter Meyer:

>If silence w/in a musical work are an acceptable part of music, why can't
>a relatively brief period of silence of specified duration, admittedly a
>bit longer than the rests or pauses usually encountered as parts of
>conventional musical works, be accepted as an integral musical work in
>its own right?

That's an easy one.  A period of "silence" within a piece of music -
whether it's just a brief rest or a 5-minute pause between movements -
is a part of an overall organisation of sound-experience.  A period of
"silence" by itself is not a part of a larger stucture; it *is* the whole
thing.  There is no organised overall structure, so there is no music.
No composer of music is required to write it, no copyists to copy out the
parts, no performers to deliver and interpret it, no conductor to shape it,
no instruments to turn notes into sound-waves, and no musical sensitivity
whatsoever is required on the part of the audience.

You might as well argue that a stack of unprinted paper is a novel (or a
telephone directory), that a blank, unpainted canvas is a picture, that
a jar of silver nitrate crystals is a photograph, that a dictionary is a
poem, that un-quarried rock still buried underground is a sculpture, an
empty theatre is a play.  All obvious nonsense.  And silence isn't music
either, even if it isn't silent.  Once a human intelligence has begun to
impose structure on random noise, puts letters on a page to build up a
narrative, throws most of the words out of the dictionary and retains just
a few that work together to carry a meaning, then we have the beginnings of
music, a novel, a poem.  But not until then.

Ian
[log in to unmask]