The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

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The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

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This truly underlines the complicated business of performing what a composer wrote honestly and is the constant challenge we as performers face. Eleven years later, avant-garde composer John Cage would present his most famous composition, 4’33” – a piece of three movements written with the sole instruction that the musician must not make any deliberate sound.

Even 4’33” may have partly been a response to the ‘muzak’ piped over telephone lines into elevators, lobbies and train stations. Besides framing ambient sounds, a silent composition may therefore incite us to pay more attention to our mind’s wanderings – a blank backdrop against which our thoughts and feelings are thrown into greater relief.The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Mattersmay be read straight through or picked up and put down at leisure, always with profit. They both have very small rests of silence, and these rests are used as part of the harmonic and percussive rhythm of the piece. It may be a favourite joke among the musicians in an orchestra, but Wigglesworth wants to find a more thoughtful answer. In the Shurangama Sutra, Guanyin listens to waves washing up on a shore, until the sounds of waves are indistinguishable to the silence between them.

One of the most challenging aspects of conducting is to avoid coming under the spell of a particular recording. When we listen to music, we might feel our skin tingle, a rush of nostalgia or perhaps a sudden desire to stick our fingers in our ears. Much like the non-sounding qin , the aim is not particularly related to heard sounds, but a deeper, more full definition of where listening can take you. In doing so, I hoped to combine an interest in ambient sound with questions concerning my own roots as a mixed-Chinese person who has lived in both the UK and Asia. The conductor's job spec includes refining colour, manipulating sound and balance, interpretation and philosophy.

Sometimes we sit or move in silence, sometimes we talk about sounds that we have enjoyed or ways that we have enjoyed them. Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony, the work we are performing this week, uses only a small number of musicians to express a vast range of emotions – an ideal combination for the specific limitations and needs of our time. Possibly the most famous silent composition, avant-garde composer John Cage created “4’33″” in 1952. A joke in Manchester might not go down so well in Munich and what could be considered a light touch in Paris might well be thought of as superficial in St Petersburg.

In 1960, in the only documented performance of the symphony during Klein’s lifetime, ten musicians participated in performing the piece.In this text, I have spent a lot of time on Chinese ideas of silence which, while helpful for understanding and expanding our own language of silence and sound, are rooted in hierarchy. Wigglesworth sums up the profession with such clarity and perfection: “In a nutshell, conducting is about knowing what is important and what is not… In that sense, though the circumstances might be uncommon, conducting is a rather normal profession. The Silent Musician may be read straight through or picked up and put down at leisure, always with profit. As these clichés betray, there is an aura of mystery around what a conductor actually does, often coupled with disbelief that he or she really makes a difference to the performance we hear.

In a new body of work, they ask an unusual question that takes full advantage of the brain’s predictive abilities: what is our response to music that can’t be heard?This introspection is familiar, of course, whenever we participate in a moment’s silence to remember the dead. Mark Wigglesworth conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performing Britten and Shostakovich on 1 October at 2pm. In July Batt attempted to prove his silent track differed from Cage's by staging a performance of the piece. In his book Listen to This, Alex Ross describes Cage’s life as ruled by the thought that “all sounds are music”.



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