The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 1)
I’ve written a short chapter titled ‘The Poetry of Intentional Silence’ for an anthology of poetry (in pre-print) and thought I’d serialise shortened sections on this site…
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Nestled between tall trees at the end of a dirt road just outside of Woodstock, roughly two hours north of New York, sits The Maverick Concert Hall, the century old brainchild of the late utopian poet, Hervey White. The barn-like building with its gambrel roof was built by hand by White in 1916 to fulfil his personal quest for a space that cultivated creativity with few constraints. On one side of the lop-sided structure, a huge oak tree grows through an opening in the moss-covered roof, symbolic of the connection between nature and sound. The doorways, like uncorrected teeth, sit askew of each other and glass panes are scattered across the whitewashed pine walls like fractal dreamscapes. With a roof of wood shingles, large support beams of stripped logs and a frame of weighty timber, the natural construction and luminous acoustics ultimately creates an open-air cocoon environment perfectly suited to the intimacy of live chamber music.
On a humid evening in 1952, the ‘music chapel in the woods’ hosted an audience making up a cross-section of the city's classical music community and some curious members of the New York Philharmonic, escaping for a night into the outer edges of music composition. The innovative composer John Cage was premiering two new works. For the first, which would later become known as "Water Music," pianist David Tudor, a lifelong Cage collaborator, played piano, a duck call and a transistor radio. For the second, the provisionally entitled "Four Pieces," Tudor started a stopwatch, sat in front of the piano, carefully closed the lid and began a performance in which intentional silence was the only key.
After thirty seconds of silence, Tudor reset the stopwatch and timed another two minutes, 23 seconds of silence. Then another one minute, 40 seconds of silence. But in the Maverick that night, “there was no such thing as silence,” Cage later recalled. “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out”.
Later retitled ‘4’33”’, the silent performance that night was a radical kind of nondual poetry for Cage. Unlike compositions designed to make the outside world fall away, here was a performance that made the whole world unfold akin to the experience of surfing in the green hollow of a breaking wave. The ambient sounds surrounding the audience became the vehicle for a kind of mindful soundscape and a momentary portal into direct perception of what Cage previously called the isness of life. In Zen spirit, Cage introduced his audience to the notion of intentional silence as a turning of mind towards the intense poetry of the moment.
"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it" (John Cage)
4'33" was borne of Cage’s earnest engagement with silence as much as a protest against noise. When Tudor did nothing more than lift and close the instrument's lid, it was (and is) a stunningly potent invitation into what Kyle Gann recently defined as the “act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind.” This is the silence prized by the Tukano Indians of Brazil when they speak in praise of the Quiet – a realm of life that cannot be sensed until one overcomes the damage done to perception by long exposure to inescapable noise. Most poets know something of the tension between poetry and language, of silence and all kinds of noise. “The name of a plant”, wrote the novelist John Fowles, “is a plane of dirty glass between you and it”. Fowles echoes the wisdom of Zen and of contemplative traditions; that language and the concepts expressed in it are a barrier to direct, undistorted experience of plants, trees and all other beings.
And silence is, of course, normative for the human being. Humans have been around for about 2 million years but we only started talking about 200,000 years ago, and writing about 9,000 years ago. For most of our evolutionary existence our innate core silence enabled us to survive in the wilderness whilst the poetry of natural sound resonated with our deepest layers of mind. And we haven't wholly lost this innate bend towards silence; It's perhaps the reason a fascination remains with wildlife programmes on TV, because as we watch the animals' core silence enable them to be at home in their environment and their relationships with one another, we are looking at our own lost nature.
…to be continued…