The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

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After seven months of musical silence, I feel very fortunate to be giving a public concert this week with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The auditorium in Glasgow’s City Halls will be empty, but people can still listen to the performance live thanks to a simultaneous broadcast on Radio 3. Invisible listeners are not ideal, but in the context of this year a live orchestral experience of any sort is much appreciated. A musician’s need to be heard is not just psychological inspiration, needy approbation, or box office compensation. We need audiences because without anyone listening, the music doesn’t exist – merely proverbial trees falling unheard in the distant forest. silent; notated in great rhythmic detail, employing bizarre time signatures and intricate rhythmic patterns. [5] Unlike a caesura, it is not meant to change the tempo, but tends to shorten the note before it, so that the next note can be played on the beat it’s supposed to.

The choices and situations related in this wonderful book are so very accurate. It is fabulous to know that now there is a way for people to find out the deep truth of this business of conducting. Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, the work we are performing this week, uses only a small number of musicians to express a vast range of emotions – an ideal combination for the specific limitations and needs of our time. Written in isolation while in hospital during a flu epidemic, the work expresses the pain of being alone, the importance of trying to live life to the full even amid a maelstrom of struggles and fears, and the value of art as a source of truth and cohesion in society. It is both realistic and uplifting. The researchers knew that time (specifically keeping their participants in time with music while imagining it) would be key to the success of the study, and so they wired up their volunteers with tactile metronomes that vibrated at a steady beat to keep their imagined music at a steady pace. In the first paper, the researchers played 4 different Bach melodies 11 times each to their participants, who were allowed to read the sheet music. Then, they were placed in the same scenario but with the music switched off. The researchers’ companion study looked at a more natural form of silence – the rests and pauses written into Bach’s melodies. Previous studies on this topic tended to artificially cut out notes from a melody, leaving unexpected silence. But Marion and DiLiberto wanted to study the structured silences that naturally crop up in musical structures. Sometimes in Jazz music you could see a box with the phrase “1 x Tacet”, which means “First time Tacet”, which just means don’t play the first time through a repeated section. First time tacet Caesura and Breath MarksThere are times when I feel a book should be written about the good and bad of listening to recordings of works that you are preparing or studying. I like the above quote as one version of coping with the dilemma of being influenced by what others have done. Reylon is a founding member of Tangram, a UK-based music collective of artists who play both Chinese and Western instruments. Through musical projects, Tangram seeks to ‘cross the China-West divide, and explore the richness of diasporic experience’. It was with this in mind that Reylon first conceived of their performance, while considering the benefits of silence to cross-cultural barriers. Oliveros, who died in 2016, was a contemporary and friend of John Cage’s. Despite her influence on contemporary music history as a performer, composer and mentor, she is not always found in the mainstream narrative of that history. To those who know her work, she is often spoken of with something akin to reverence. After Paul Hindemith read this, he suggested a work consisting of nothing but pauses and fermatas in 1916. [2] Classical compositions [ edit ] Anniversary Of World War III" by The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band on Volume 3: A Child's Guide to Good and Evil (1968)

I don’t see Cage himself as an authoritarian. He was no stranger to marginilisation as a queer man and avant-garde artist, who often funded his practice through mycology. (21) However, I see the limits of the system in which he practiced and under which his legacy has been appraised. A cultural obsession with 4’33’’ as a single watershed event, or a literal interpretation of its intentions, can narrow the potential of what we find in silence. Reaching for its roots, we might find new ways of interpreting the meaning of both silence and sound. I could easily go on and on about what Mr Wigglesworth has to say about such things as surtitles at the opera, observing other conductors in rehearsal, the various challenges of conducting opera versus concerts, coping with singers versus instrumentalists and the zillion other things about what a conductor faces, decides, likes, dislikes, accomplishes, succeeds, fails and on and on. I was drawn to Oliveros’ work after an ecstatic experience listening to ambient sounds while visiting my parents in Hong Kong. Learning that Deep Listening made use of Chinese movement practices, I signed up for one of two intensive courses at the Centre for Deep Listening®. In doing so, I hoped to combine an interest in ambient sound with questions concerning my own roots as a mixed-Chinese person who has lived in both the UK and Asia.

The University of Chicago Press

The Heart Sutra – https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation For thousands of years, the qin was considered the supreme example of Chinese instruments, and a symbol of the literati (to play the qin was one of the “Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments of the Literati Lifestyle”) (2). Tao Yuanming’s poem alludes to the instrument’s greatest appeal - its relationship to personal and spiritual development. The qin was said to “restrain evil thoughts”; in literature, it was used by sages to manifest supernatural powers. (3) DeWoskin, Kenneth J. – A Song for One or Two, Center for Chinese Studies, the University of Michigan, 1982 (p. 117) Fellow Tangram member Alex Ho wrote, “Narratives that assume Cage as the centre who implicitly conquered an East Asian philosophy, that itself is millennia-old, are frequent and misleading. Although not necessarily through Cage's own active shaping, this aligns with western classical music's long history of marginalising and misrepresenting East Asian cultures and identities.” (16) It is so wonderful to be able to read a beautifully written and constructed book which exactlyinforms the reader what a conductor is with disarming accuracy and humility and with a touch of humour when needed.