The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (48 page)

Ceremonies of Silence
      In the park near the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne there is a sign:

IN MEMORY OF

E
DWARD
G
EORGE
H
ONEY

1855–1922

A Melbourne journalist, who,

while

living in London, first suggested

the solemn ceremony of

SILENCE

now observed in all British countries

in remembrance of those who died

in the War.

The fact is that as the memory of the world wars has receded, the observance of silence at 11 a.m. on November 11 has each year become more straggled. It will be the responsibility of the acoustic designers to work not only for the repatriation of quiet groves, but also to lobby for the reintro-duction of quiet times. As a matter of fact, Yehudi Menuhin, President of the International Music Council of UNESCO, proposed at the 1975 congress that World Music Day should in the future be celebrated by a minute of silence. We are discussing here something much more important than setting time limits on noisy sounds; we are discussing the deliberate celebration of stillness, which, when observed by an entire society together, is breathtakingly magnificent. Here is an example: the program of the War Remembrance as commemorated each May 4 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Attending this ceremony Barry Truax recalled:

It is a unique acoustic ritual in the community. Nothing in the experience of a North American can match it for depth of emotion. As you approach the square, the thundering mass of the largest Cathedral bells rolls over you, enforcing a hypnotic and fearful silence on everyone gathering. The entire weight of the tragedy of the War seems expressed in the heavy low-pitched mass of sound emanating from the high tower.

Slowly, one by one, the bells end and the texture thins as the procession emerges from the passageway under the Tower and slowly divides into rows in front of the Memorial.

The noisy city has become deathly quiet. Now the silence seems as oppressive as the bells did a few moments before. That heavy bombardment seems to have cleansed the air of the city’s usual profanity, leaving a strange and nervous calm.

Very quietly a handful of musicians sound the opening chords of the National Anthem in muted low registers. There is an electric moment as a slow unison vibration is born in the throats of all present. The ground itself seems to rise to emit a resonating cry, slowly rising and turning around you in every direction. For a moment the unity these gentle and defiant people felt in the face of the Occupation seems rekindled.

Yet the military is absent. Slowly the individual mourners file past the Memorial to lay their own flowers after the young lad and girl have lifted the city’s wreath into place. The number of mourners has fallen off in recent years, but for these few, the experience is relived in a profound and beautiful ceremony, which ends as we enter the Cathedral to the reverberant tones of the organ.

Western Man and Negative Silence
     Man likes to makesounds to remind himself that he is not alone. From this point of view total silence is the rejection of the human personality. Man fears the absence of sound as he fears the absence of life. As the ultimate silence is death, it achieves its highest dignity in the memorial service.

Since modern man fears death as none before him, he avoids silence to nourish his fantasy of perpetual life. In Western society, silence is a negative, a vacuum. Silence for Western Man equals communication hangup. If one has nothing to say, the other will speak; hence the garrulity of modern life which is extended by all kinds of sonic jabberware.

The contemplation of absolute silence has become negative and terrifying for Western Man. Thus when the infinity of space was first suggested by Galileo’s telescope, the philosopher Pascal was deeply afraid of the prospect of eternal silence. “Le silence etemel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.”

When one stays for a while in an anechoic chamber—that is, a completely soundproof room—one feels a little of the same terror. One speaks and the sound seems to drop from one’s lips to the floor. The ears strain to pick up evidence that there is still life in the world. When John Cage went into such a room, however, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. “When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” Cage’s conclusion: “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.”

When man regards himself as central in the universe, silence can only be considered as approximate, never absolute. Cage detected this relativity and in choosing
Silence
as the title for his book, he emphasized that for modern man any use of this term must be qualified or assumed to be ironical. Edgar Allan Poe touched on the same thing when in “Al Aaraaf” he wrote: “Quiet we call ‘Silence’—which is the merest word of all.”

The negative character of silence has made it the most potentialized feature of Western art, where nothingness constitutes the eternal threat to being. Because music represents the ultimate intoxication of life, it is carefully placed in a container of silence. When silence precedes sound, nervous anticipation makes it more vibrant. When it interrupts or follows sound, it reverberates with the tissue of that which sounded, and this state continues as long as the memory holds it. Ergo, however dimly, silence sounds.

Because it is being lost, the composer today is more concerned with silence; he composes with it. Anton Webem moved composition to the brink of silence. The ecstasy of his music is enhanced by his sublime and stunning use of rests, for Webern’s is music composed with an eraser. What irony, that the last sound of his life was the explosion of the soldier’s gun that shot him.

In
Dummiyah
the Canadian composer John Weinzweig has the conductor conduct long passages of silence in memory of Hitler’s victims. “Silence,” he says, “is the final sound of the Nazi holocaust.”

In dumb silence I held my peace.

So my agony was quickened,

  and my heart burned within me.

      [Psalms 39:2–3]

Simultaneously with Webern’s discovery of the value of silence in music, his compatriot Freud discovered its value for psychoanalysis. “The analyst is not afraid of silence. As Saussure remarked, the unconnected monologue of the patient on the one side and the almost absolute silence of the psychiatrist on the other was never made a methodological principle before Freud.”

The relationship between music and psychoanalysis is by no means fortuitous. Like the music teacher, Freud made regular appointments to see his patients and listened to them at length. In psychoanalysis, as in much modern poetry, that which is not said is pregnant with potential meaning. Philosophy too terminates in silence. Wittgenstein wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”

But these things do not reduce my contention that for Western Man silence somehow represents an unutterable impasse, a negative state beyond the realm of the possible, of the attainable. The same semantic complexion is borne out in Western lexicography. The following is the complete entry under “Silence” in
Roget’s New Pocket Thesaurus
(New York, 1969). Read it and you will understand that what is described is not a felicitous or positive state but rather merely the muzzling of sound.

SILENCE—
N. silence, quiet, quietude, hush, still; sullenness, sulk, saturninity, taciturnity, laconism, reticence, reserve.

muteness
, mutism, deaf-mutism, laloplegia, anarthria, aphasia, aphonia, dysphasia.

speech impediment
, stammering, stuttering, baryphony, dysphonia, paralalia.

dummy
, sphinx, sulk, sulker, calm; mute, deaf-mute, laloplegic,

aphasiac, aphonic, dysphasiac.

v.
silence
, quiet, quieten, still, hush; gag, muzzle, squelch, tongue-tie; muffle, stifle, strike dumb.

be silent
, quiet down, quiet, hush, dummy up, hold one’s tongue, sulk,

say nothing, keep silent, shut up (slang).

ADJ
.
silent
, noiseless, soundless, quiet, hushed, still.
speechless
, wordless, voiceless, mute, dumb, inarticulate, tongue-tied,

mousy, mum, sphinxian.

sullen
, sulky, glum, saturnine.

taciturn
, uncommunicative, close-mouthed, tight-lipped, unvocal,

nonvocal, laconic; reticent, reserved, shy, bashful.

unspoken
, tacit, wordless, implied, implicit, understood, unsaid, unut

tered, unexpressed, unvoiced, unbreathed, unmentioned, untold.
unpronounced
, mute, silent, unsounded, surd, voiceless.

inaudible
, indistinct, unclear, faint, unheard.

inexpressible
, unutterable, indescribable, ineffable, unspeakable, nameless, unnamable; fabulous.

See also
MODESTY, PEACE
. Antonyms—see
LOUDNESS, SHOUT
.

The Recovery of Positive Silence
     In the West we may assume that silence as a condition of life and a workable concept disappeared sometime toward the end of the thirteenth century, with the death of Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Angela de Foligno and the anonymous English author of
The Cloud of Unknowing
. This is the era of the last great Christian mystics and contemplation as a habit and skill began to disappear about that time.

Today, as a result of increasing sonic incursions, we are even beginning to lose an understanding of the word concentration. The words survive all right, that is to say, their skeletons lie in dictionaries; but there are few who know how to breathe life into them. A recovery of contemplation would teach us how to regard silence as a positive and felicitous state in itself, as the great and beautiful backdrop over which our actions are sketched and without which they would be incomprehensible, indeed could not even exist. There have been numerous philosophies expressing this idea and we know that great periods of human history have been conditioned by them. Such was the message of Lao-tzu: “Give up haste and activity. Close your mouth. Only then will you comprehend the spirit of Tâo.”

No philosophy or religion catches the positive felicity of stillness better than Taoism. It is a philosophy that would make all noise abatement legislation unnecessary. This is also the message of Jalal-ud-din Rumi, whoadvised his disciples to “Keep silence like the points of the compass, for the king has erased thy name from the book of speech.” Rumi sought to discover that world where “speaking is without letters or sounds.” Even today one may observe Bedouins sitting quietly in a circle saying nothing, caught perhaps somewhere between the past and the future—for silence and eternity are bound in mystic union. I recall also the slow stillness of certain Persian villages, where there is still time to sit or squat and think, or merely to sit or squat; time to walk very slowly alongside a child on crutches or a blind grandfather; time to await food or the passage of the sun.

We need to regain quietude in order that fewer sounds can intrude on it with pristine brilliance. The Indian mystic Kirpal Singh expresses this eloquently:

The essence of sound
is felt in both motion and silence, it passes from
existent to nonexistent
. When there is no sound, it is said that there is no hearing, but that does not mean that hearing has lost its preparedness. Indeed, when there is no sound, hearing is most alert, and when there is sound the hearing nature is least developed.