It's silent in my backyard, relatively speaking. There's the sound of a plane overhead. A car turns out of the alley to the north, and another drives past my yard and turns into the alley. There's the sound of traffic a block away, and more city noise further in the distance. No dogs, no people walking past. It's gone dark in the time I've been out here with my Oktoberfest beer, finishing a crossword puzzle before looking at the empty white space in a new blog post.
It's silent—noticeably silent after a noisy afternoon of music: Vaughan William's Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis stretched and held, pushed forward and held back, shaping silence into human need and yearning. (Listen here.) The main event that followed was a Bach cantata (BWV 119) with many, many four-trumpet fanfares lavishing praise on the people of Leipzig and their new town council. (Program notes here.) One has to admire the great man, who kept all this pompous flatter just this side of winking humor without tipping over from sincerity into satire. There were plenty of big finishes and more high As than I can remember in the hymn settings. (It is nice when the choir director smiles at the soprano section as we hold one of these high notes for a full measure or more. I know he's smiling to be encouraging because he thinks it will help the tuning, but I do hope some percentage of the pleased look was genuine pleasure.)
After that smashing late-afternoon hour and a half, the evening quiet and even the chill in the air are welcome. What is God speaking now?
A book I read recently spoke of all music beginning in silence. It was historical fiction about J. S. Bach and his family ("The Great Passion" by James Runcie), told through the voice of a student soloist in the choir. The remark about silence was attributed to Bach, who in this novel has to speak in sermons rather than melody and counterpoint. It seems like I read this remark somewhere else as well. I've fallen into a habit of reading two or three books at once, and sometimes the characters and/or the philosophy melt from one into the other.
Does all music begin in silence? What does that mean?
I guess there has to be silence before the music begins. I guess there has to be silence waiting to be broken by a tune or a fanfare. I guess silence — absence — calls, at least to some of us, for a statement. It's asking to be filled or pushed aside. Or we are compelled to separate ourselves from the silence and be noticed, heard. We need to be making something where there was nothing before. Like God at creation. Like a third-grade boy who can't sit still. Or me, who has opened up an empty white page in the blogging browser window not sure if she has anything to say.
When the music is over, the order imposed on the sound is let go, the ears stop ringing and the trumpeters and sopranos and the rest of the musicians go home to dinner and a nice glass of beer or whisky.
Music ends in silence, though we are, most certainly, changed. As surely as God spoke, let there be light.
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| St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig where BWV 119 was first performed. |
