Typically, music is the artform of sounds. You hear it, you feel its vibrations and you embrace it moving through you.
Silence is the absence of sound. So can silence be considered as music?
Is this mysteriously true or is it some kind of joke?
VERDICT:
TRUE
According to the BBC, in March 1941, a New York audience gathered outside a Broadway theatre to experience a rather unusual concert.
A 13-piece orchestra was led by Raymond Scott and made a spectacular performance playing their instruments, but interestingly the only sounds to emerge were the quiet swishing of the trap drummer and the gentle slapping of the double bass.
The sole aim was to produce “silent music”, though a Time magazine reviewer reported that this message by Scott had “fallen on deaf ears.”
“It was just provocative enough to make listeners wonder whether the silence of other bands might sound better than Scott’s,” the reviewer wrote.
Eleven years later, the famous 4’33 composed by avant-garde composer John Cage was created. It was a piece of three movements written with the sole instruction that the musician must not make any deliberate sound.
The famous 4’33 inspired compositions by John Lennon and Yoko Onom, Korn, Sigur Ros and the hip-hop group Slum Village.
In a bid to use the royalties to fund a tour and what can be looked at as a playful stunt, the funk band, Vulfpeck in 2014 released 10 tracks of silence on Spotify and encouraged fans to stream it while they slept.
This idea came to the advantage of the band, as it helped highlight the band’s issues with the economics of the streaming platform.
As much as many have misunderstood Cage’s 4’33, it remains a masterpiece.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/
https://www.artnews.com/art-
