What is silent music?
There is a Japanese concept called ma that has no equivalent in English. I first learned about it years ago from an architect friend, who described it as the empty spaces in built human structures. Although we talk about buildings in terms of their walls and doors, it is the space between those things that we live and exist in. The notion of ma is equally applicable to sound and music. The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu described it as ‘the unsounded part of the experience of sound’. According to Takemitsu, it is ma, ‘this powerful silence … that gives life to the sound’. This concept is also essential in the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text for Taoism:
‘Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.’
One of the key missions of Tangram as an artist collective is to dissolve boundaries – especially between Chinese and Western musics – and one of the goals of this specific concert is to think beyond a clear-cut dichotomy between sound and silence. While it is easy to simply think of silence as the ‘opposite’ of sound, the reality is much more complex. Is silence a kind of sound? Is silence the condition that makes sound possible? Is silence a feeling?
Where is silent music?
When John Cage wrote his now-famous 4’33” of ‘silent music’, he was inspired by Asian philosophy – Zen Buddhism, the divination book I Ching, and more. On the 70th anniversary of the first performance of 4’33”, with our concert Our Silence is Your Silence, we aim to honour Cage through the lens of Chinese composers for whom Taoism is not simply an ‘exotic inspiration’, but also a fundamental part of their cultural upbringing and a way of life. We’ll present a response to 4’33” composed by Reylon Yount and performed by their alter-ego, Mantawoman. They will enter into a silent, cross-temporal conversation with Cage, at the centre of our 75-minute concert.
Surrounding the arrangement will be music by Chinese-born composers Huang Ruo and Qu Xiao-Song, both of whom now live in the United States, and by Tangram artist Sun Keting (Rockey), who was born in China and now lives and works in London. All of these pieces allude to silence, but none of them are silent in exactly the way that 4’33” is. Huang Ruo’s A DUST IN TIME was written at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, as a ‘meditation and medication’ against the isolation and despair of that moment. The music is quiet, but there is almost no silence in it. Instead, its stasis and slow transformation seems to offer space – ‘to reflect, to express, to mourn, to bury, to heal, to find internal peace…’, in the composer’s words. Rockey’s piece, it’s distance that makes mountains mountains, challenges the instrumental performers to sit silently and listen to recordings of their own playing. It places the musicians in the role of the audience, recognising that in Western Classical performance traditions, the silent audience member is an essential collaborator to the music. Whose music is this? Whose silence?
Why silent music?
Interspersed between all of the pieces in the concert, we are delighted to welcome special guest soprano Inna Husieva, performing excerpts from Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Silent Songs. In these songs, the singer is asked to push the limits of their dynamic range, performing at the quietest volumes throughout – ‘in a poetic half-light on the threshold between sound and silence’. Written in the 1970s, these pieces were part of what Silvestrov describes as a ‘voluntary disarmament’ from the maximalism and the avant-garde aesthetics of his contemporaries and his earlier music. This ‘voluntary disarmament’ was also distinctly political at the time.
Today, this quiet music also holds renewed political stakes as a statement against totalitarianism and violence; against Russian imperialism in Ukraine. Silvestrov himself was living in Kyiv until a few months ago when he escaped with his family to Berlin. In a recent interview, Silvestrov said: ‘It is now clear how little we appreciate the times when peace reigns. And how fragile civilization is, despite all its magnificence. That’s why the reaction of music to this fragility can’t be powerful and pompous … This monumentalism is already unbearable. You want to go back to the silent, quiet, quiet.’
On 28 and 29 August, in Our Silence is Your Silence, we as Tangram want to go back to the silent: to reframe cultural and social hierarchies, to stand against totalitarianism, to ‘voluntarily disarm’. We hope you’ll join us in sharing silences together and imagining the world anew.
Our Silence is Your Silence
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Huang Ruo A DUST IN TIME
Valentyn Sylvestrov Selections from ‘Silent Songs’
Qu Xiao-Song Ji No 1
Reylon Yount Everything is Music 萬物皆音樂 – A Response to John Cage (world premiere)
Sun Keting it’s distance that makes mountains mountains (world premiere)
Naomi Woo conductor & director
Mantawoman yangqin
Daniel Shao flute
Beibei Wang percussion
Ligeti Quartet string quartet
Inna Husieva soprano
Satoshi Kubo piano
Anna Hashimoto clarinet
Emma Prince double bass
Alex Ho creative producer
