SILENCE

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i am currently working on a piece dealing with silence and noize, and i am up to my ears in noisy noise. but, other than 4'33" and the works of bernhardt gunter, i am stumped for any pieces (avant, pop, or otherwise) which make extended, creative use of silence. refresh or educate me.

― jess, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

shhhhhhh.

― jess, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Try LaMonte Young's Trio for Strings (1959). Not only is it one of the first "minimalist" pieces in terms of the notes played, but there's also a number of extended silences throughout.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Every symphony ever written has got long pauses between movements, yes? Does this count?

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well, there are no "movements" in Young's Trio for Strings. So it's not like symphonies in where silence is used, generally, to distinguish one movement from another. The use of silence in Trio for Strings was really more to indicate a sort of compositional stasis.

― hstencil, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

You cd argue that pausing between movements isn't the most "creative" use of silence, but it does organize the work and give it structure and a kind of macro-rhythm, sort of the way a fade-out works in film.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well, the original question asked for "extended, creative use of silence."

― hstencil, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

like yr mister cage pointed out silence is theoretical cos ye still got hiss in yr head from yr blood & yr nerves even when there is no sound outside. so true silence exists without an audience maybe? i digress. cds of frogs & thunderstorms i find fantastic. maybe check out thomas kóner's "kaamos" - what i expected morton feldman to sound like (unfortunatley there is still so much classical rhetoric latent in feldman's work it still reeks of the redundant composer/ performer hierarchy & the limitations of classical technique) - i find it difficult to get to sleep w/out kaamos on - so very nothingy w/out being newagey at all. i think bernard is yr man though. i'd say steer clear of most of the jap "onkyo" shit as it's mostly self mythologizing tosh (ie. "no input mixing board" - oh, and what's this you've plugged into the input? a jack lead from the output? well who the fuck hasn't thought of that????). although taku sugimoto's guitar playing treads a similar path and is in the main lovely. can anyone suggest what the best entry point to luigi nono's work is? & does he escape that problem i have with morton feldman's work?

― bob snoom, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Search: Nobukazu Takemura's experiments with silence/noise and melody/dissonance.

― turner, Tuesday, 13 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Francisco Lopez. F-Lo???

― Kodanshi, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

John & Yoko, "2 Minutes Silence" on _Life With the Lions_ (a remarkably terrific experimental album)

Haven't heard much silence in Takemura pieces, though maybe Ryoji Ikeda counts...

Guy Debord's soundtrack to _Hurlements en faveur de Sade_, excerpted on the _Lipstick Traces_ compilation.

Hard to incorporate much silence in pop without becoming avant--the breakdown in Pere Ubu's "Final Solution" comes to mind, as does the bit in the bridge of James Brown's "There It Is" where all the various interlocking patterns reach their end and for a shocking moment there's NOTHING and then there it is again.

You could also argue that silence between end-of-album and bonus track (the "Endless, Nameless" effect) is a creative tool--and now I'm seeing an occasional twist on that where an album will end with 20 min. of silence with nothing hidden at the end of it!

― Douglas, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Oh, and also some stuff on Rehberg & Bauer's first album, _Fasst_.

― Douglas, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Not sure if this counts, but I've got a Laraaji CD which has five tracks of silence at the end, varying in length from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. The sleevenote points out that there is no 'correct' track listing for the CD, that the tracks can be played randomly or 'programmed randomly' (if you can do such a thing) and that the silences can be used to break up the listening experience.

― Rob M, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

They're not terribly long as silences go but the Beach Boys 'The Little Girl I Once Knew' has several pauses in the music before each chorus that was pretty expiremental for its day.

By all accounts it lost out on radio play because of these breaks in the music.

Certainly more of a pop example than anything mentioned so far.

― MarkS, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Douglas - F-Lo has already done that with his release on Alchemy records. He makes "silent" stuff, except this one suddenly bursts out with Metal guitars and beats for about 40 minutes. After its abrupt cessation it contains (as part of indexed track 1) 10 minutes of silence. Then it stops.

MASONNA's SUPER COMPACT DISC ends with 1 minute of silence.

― Kodanshi, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Cf. the magnificent flims of Gregory Markopoulos which I once saw where he cuts between shots and blank screens and creates a sort of refigured time.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"FLIMS" eh?

― Kodanshi, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

films.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Thanks. If you hadn't caught that typo, I'm sure nobody would have understood what I meant.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Stockhausen's Klavierstück X (that's a roman 10) does something similar to the La Monte Young piece mentioned upthread. The piece wouldn't work - for me, anyway - without the silences.

Don't know if this is any use to you, but picking up on Tracer Hand's observation, Lutoslawski's "Livre pour orchestre" is in 4 'chapters' (movements) but inserts music into the pauses between the chapters where "silence" (or rather, audience coughing and shifting in seats, conductor mopping brow, etc.) would normally go.

― Jeff, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

kodanshi, you'll be happy to know that i've already included masonna in the noise section...coupled with patty waters no less. ;)

― jess, Wednesday, 14 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

twelve years pass...

Carl Michael Von Hausswolff ‎– As Quiet As A Campfire Or Analogue Motoric And Electro-Magnetic Silence Disturbed By Intuitive Slumber

― macklin' rosie (crüt), Tuesday, 17 June 2014 18:46 (eleven years ago)

12 years pass...

― macklin' rosie (crüt), Tuesday, 17 June 2014 18:46 (eleven years ago)

digital silence is the only true silence

― Karl Malone, Tuesday, 17 June 2014 18:53 (eleven years ago)

anything wandelweiser

― sisilafami, Wednesday, 18 June 2014 01:23 (eleven years ago)

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