tell us how much you love silence in music

[alocispepraluger102]

those pregnant spaces between notes in a paul bley, bill evans, motian, or a red garland trio are prime examples, to me, of one of the most beautiful parts of music, to let the harmonics of a drum or piano or bass "visible."

folks who 'pound' a piano or horn ceaselessly without catching the waves are missing a major part of the richness of the music, the silence.

Edited September 13, 2012 by alocispepraluger102

[rostasi]

...even more, after just coming back from a week+ long festival of Cage...

[Simon8]

Beautiful piece beautifully done, that "Seven".

I think there was a recent, similar thread on silence (there called "minimalism"):

I was always struck by Monk's use of space on his record with Art Blakey's Messenger: looong moments in his solos when you just hear Spanky DeBrest walking and Blakey sizzling under the echo of Monk's last note. Love it.

[alocispepraluger102]

2 splendid comments (thanks), but the cage comment was hilarious, his ode to silence notwithstanding.

cage never got around to the silence blues. i hope someone does....

Edited September 13, 2012 by alocispepraluger102

[rostasi]

You may have misinterpreted what I stated.

[PHILLYQ]

shh

[alocispepraluger102]

[BeBop]

My MP3 player shuffle function hit Keith Jarrett's "Silence" and the David Murray/Mal Wadron collab "Silence" this morning. And it was a fine morning.

[AllenLowe]

I don't know how I feel about this one; I like a lot of action. Too much space and I doze off. I like a musician who sounds like, if he doesn't get it all out, he may die.

but I do like: Baker, Fruscella, Haig, Evans, Konitz, Sharkey Bonnano, Johnny Wiggs, all players on the cooler side. But that's a different kind of cool; real heavy, if-you-look-closer-they-are-really-angry cool.

[JSngry]

Silence is only meaningful if there's sound to define it, so if you love one, you gotta love the other, unless you're weird or something.

On the other hand, sometimes you can get a certain "stillness" out of a wall of sound/noise/relentless energy/whatever that is so....solid that it might as well be silence, since nothing is gonna either come in or go out of it. But that silence of noise exists on another plane than does the silence of quiet (which if you really think about it, is a bit of a misconception, because where is there ever total "quiet", and really is that not a sound unto itself, like "black" is perceived as a color even though it's defined as the total absence of color, and for htat matter so is "white", which is the sum total of all colors, right? so once again, we're back to rhythm, the rhythm between "sound" and "silence", because if there's one, sure enough there will be the other (unless and until the world as we know it ceases to exist) and there's a rhythm to every sequence of events, maybe not a "regular" rhythm, but once "A" is followed by "B" you've established both an expectation/conclusion and a space in between, and if that's not rhythm, then what is?)

Are my parenthesis balanced?

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Silence is only meaningful if there's sound to define it, so if you love one, you gotta love the other, unless you're weird or something.

On the other hand, sometimes you can get a certain "stillness" out of a wall of sound/noise/relentless energy/whatever that is so....solid that it might as well be silence, since nothing is gonna either come in or go out of it. But that silence of noise exists on another plane than does the silence of quiet (which if you really think about it, is a bit of a misconception, because where is there ever total "quiet", and really is that not a sound unto itself, like "black" is perceived as a color even though it's defined as the total absence of color, and for htat matter so is "white", which is the sum total of all colors, right? so once again, we're back to rhythm, the rhythm between "sound" and "silence", because if there's one, sure enough there will be the other (unless and until the world as we know it ceases to exist) and there's a rhythm to every sequence of events, maybe not a "regular" rhythm, but once "A" is followed by "B" you've established both an expectation/conclusion and a space in between, and if that's not rhythm, then what is?)

Are my parenthesis balanced?

No, you skipped a bar.

MG

[alocispepraluger102]

My MP3 player shuffle function hit Keith Jarrett's "Silence" and the David Murray/Mal Wadron collab "Silence" this morning. And it was a fine morning.

OFTEN, THOSE RANDOM SELECTIONS WORK WONDERS, BUT I NEVER USE THEM.

ABOUT ONCE A WEEK I MAKE A 4 HOUR SPOTIFY LIST, RECORD IT AND MAKE AN MP3 FILE. MAKES FOR JOLLY GOOD LISTENING. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

[cih]

Two kinds of silence which have a different relationship to the 'noise' against which it stands (to my ears) - first the kind of solid silence which a musician seems to carve into (as though it was a solid block) - like Monk does maybe, or early John Lee Hooker with that menacing kind of pulse and slash ...

and then the other kind, usually very rhythmic where the silence is revealed underneath the noise when there's a pause (dictated by the rhythm, as a dramatic device for dancers I suppose), especially frequent for me with that kind of habanera rhythm (as on Jelly Roll Morton's 'The Crave'..)

so in terms of the 'black' and 'white' mentioned above, one seems to me to be white on black, the other black on white

fig 1

fig 2

[johnlitweiler]

[Chuck Nessa]

.

.

.

.

[danasgoodstuff]

.

.

.

.

I was going to [not] say that!