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Modern SilenceAuthor(s): DAVID METZERSource: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer 2006), pp. 331-374Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2006.23.3.331 .

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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 23, Issue 3, pp. 331374, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. 2006 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California PresssRights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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For their advice and encouragement, I wish to thank RichardKurth, Sherry Lee, Richard Leppert, and Anne Shreffler. I wouldalso like to acknowledge the support provided by a grant fromthe Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1 The characters are also called Joe and Bob, respectively.

Modern Silence

DAVID METZER

Theirs is a closed relationshipalways two,never three. When brought together, words and music keep to them-selves. There may be others but they are merely observers, standing on

the outside listening in. They are the ones who discuss the ups anddowns of the relationship: how well the two get along with each other,which one has more to say, and who does so more clearly. Some of theobservers have even written dramatic works about the two. Think ofSalieris Prima la musica, poi le paroleand Strausss Capriccio.

Think of Becketts Words and Music. Turning to the radio play, wecan hear a very different presentation of the starring pair. With Beckett,Words and Music are actual characters instead of being represented bythe stand-in poets and composers of the earlier two operas.1 More than

that, they speak their own languagesWords utters words and Music ut-ters only music. There is no Countess to choose between them, as inStrauss; rather, a tyrant named Croak bullies the two and commandsthem to elaborate upon a series of words and images, including love,age, and the face. Imploring them to be friends, he grows tired ofthem talking past each other and departs. Words and Music are left intantrums and despair.

Pettiness, ennui, and quarrels are not ways in which the relation-ship between words and music is usually depicted. Amid all the squab-

bling, an even more shocking departure from convention can go unno-ticed. Beckett breaks up the closed relationship by adding a third

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the journal of musicology

character. The character does not say a word nor play a note. How canit, when the part belongs to silence. Throughout the play, as in many ofBecketts works, extended moments of silence set in, marked either as

such or as pauses. As the play goes on, the moments grow moreprominent, reaching an unsettling climax for the title characters whenthe sounds of the departing Croak trail off into nothingness. What dis-turbs them is a new and persistent sound, one that is neither speechnor tone. Silence interrupts their private dialogue, demanding theirattention and ours.2

It is hardly surprising that quiet broods in Becketts drama anddoes not play even the smallest part in Salieri and Strausss works. Mod-ernist arts have engaged silence to an unprecedented degree. Silence,

of course, has been a long-standing site of artistic, philosophical, andspiritual rumination, but it was not until the 20th century that it as-sumed such an extensive presence in artistic creation. As for music, si-lence forms a large part of the sound worlds explored by modernistcomposers. To be sure, silence appears prominently in works from pre-vious periods, as in the engulfing pauses of Beethoven and Bellini, forexample, but it was never mined so deeply or used to such diverse ef-fects prior to the last century. As Salvatore Sciarrino, a master calligra-pher of quiet, has remarked: Sound has an intimate relationship with

silence, the consciousness of that connection is new.3The intimate relationship between modernism and silence has

been interpreted in different ways. In what has become a critical trope,silence stands as the larger artistic and social oblivion awaiting mod-ernist arts. Adorno, for example, calls attention to the irreversible slideof new music into silence. So removed has this music grown from audi-ences and so absorbed has it become in its own practices that it recedesfurther and further away until it becomes unheard, or silent.4 SusanSontag situates silence as a termination for contemporary art. Accord-

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2 Morton Feldman wrote incidental music for the radio drama. Surprisingly, hisscore does not engage silence, or near silence, as much as do some of his other works.

3 Salvatore Sciarrino, Entretien, Entretemps 9 (1991): 139. Some studies deal ex-clusively with the role of silence in 20th-century music. Notable ones include MartinZenck, Dal nienteVom Verlschen der Musik, MusikTexte55 (1994): 1521, and Ger-hard Stbler, About Silence or What Happens When Nothing Happens? EONTA 1(1991/92): 6881. A modified version of the latter appears as Stille Schrei Stille,Positionen10 (1992): 2426. This volume ofPositionendeals exclusively with the topic ofsilence.

4 This view is reinforced in the sections dealing with Schoenberg in the Philosophy ofModern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (New York: Seabury Press,1973), 11233. Elaborating upon Adornos negative teleology, Edward Said has re-marked that the reversed course toward silence becomes [modern musics] raisondtre, its final cadence. Said, From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Litera-ture, and History, Raritan17 (1997): 10.

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ing to her, art, as material or even ideal, torments the modern artist,who views it as an impediment to a desired transcendence. The blockcan only be removed by silencingno longer creatingthe work of art,

a step taken by Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, and Duchamp.5 Umberto Ecodescribes a less severe form of renunciation. Restlessly stripping awaythe superfluous, be it the familiar or the past, modernism reaches apoint of nullity, attained in the white canvas, the blank page, or fourminutes and some of silence.6

These writers show little interest in silence as artistic material. It re-mains first and foremost a broad cultural and aesthetic fate. Sontagmentions the self-conscious and traditional use of silence but seesit as unrelated, even antithetical, to the larger termination, an in-

significance making it unworthy of critical elaboration.7 Adorno maydiscuss the role of silence in the music of Webern and others, but hesubsumes that role into the cultural morendoof modernism.

From another vantage point, however, we can see how silence hasbeen used as artistic material in ways that speak to the creative vigorand longevity of modernism. This line of exploration approachessilence in two ways: as a compositional state and as an expressive scene. A state, as used here, is a sonic and/or conceptual ideal to which awork aspires. Silence is one such ideal, as are purity, complexity, and

the fragmentary.8 Works aim to achieve a state by having the musicallanguage emulate qualities of a condition; for example, having musicbecome pure or approach silence. In this sense, a state can providecompositional focus, a concept toward which the handling of differentparameterstexture, harmony, melodyis geared. Late modernistcomposers have shown a strong interest in states. One reason for thisattention has been the unique sonic and textural properties calledupon by different conditions. Interest may also be driven by a searchfor new compositional focal points to replace the labored rigor of seri-

alism and other systematic approaches.9 In contrast to such intricate

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5 Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, in Styles of Radical Will(New York: Far-rar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 37. Sontag, like Adorno, sees the alienation of new stylesas leading into a larger cultural silence.

6 Umberto Eco, Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable, in Postscript to The Name ofthe Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67.

7 Sontag, Aesthetics of Silence, 6. In a 1964 article on Michel Leiriss Manhood,Sontag briefly mentions that silence has become a positive, structural element in con-temporary music since Webern. Sontag, Against Interpretation(New York: Farrar, Straus, &Giroux, 1967), 68.

8 A discussion of the state of purity can be found in Metzer, The Paths from and toAbstraction in Stockhausens Gesang der Jnglinge, Modernism/Modernity11 (2004): 695721.

9 It is possible to combine the two, as heard in the emphasis placed on purity inpost-World War II serialism and electronic music.

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schemes, states offer broad ideals, which can be defined in many differ-ent ways.

As a state, silence proves more elusive than such conditions as the

fragmentary or complexity. After all, absolute silence, as Cage re-minded us, does not exist. Pure silence may not exist, but silence does.It takes various forms, including an ideal (that of absence), symbol (ofmystery and death, for instance), a sensation (unease, tranquility), oreven as a sound (stillness). This essay will discuss how three composershave used these different forms in creating the state of silence: Anton Webern, the first modernist composer to scrutinize silence, and twoItalian successors of his in the latter half of the century, Luigi Nono andSalvatore Sciarrino, each equally captivated by quiet.

All three composers have had to evoke silence in some way. Musi-cians, unlike artists in other fields, have access to the real thing, thepatches of quiet gapped in rests and pauses. Surprisingly, many com-posers, notably Webern, do not exploit this resource. They instead relyon musical means of evoking quiet, a paradox of having somethingconvey nothing. The means include chromatic clusters played verysoftly; extended stretches of low dynamics; short, murmured phrases which quickly yield to nothingness; and transitory tones which nosooner emerge from quiet than they return to it. Gestures of this kind

do not give us silence but rather qualities of silence, such things as still-ness, hush, and fragility. It is through these traits that silence, the idealof nothingness, can be evoked; but of course they can also convey sen-sations and settings distinct from silence. For instance, clusters havebeen used to suggest expectancy (Sciarrino), nature (Webern), andnight (Ives and Bartk). The varied uses serve as a reminder of howvague and multivalent silence can be, as it easily melds with differentideas and feelings.

The same gestures have been employed by composers to evoke

quiet for centuries. Softly played chords, fragmentary phrases, and muf-fled tones are hardly modernist discoveries. Modernism, though, hasrendered them in new ways by having them partake in its harmonic andsonic liberties. The chords become clusters, the phrases grow moresparse and perishable, the tones, now typically produced by extendedtechniques, sit awkwardly on top of a bubble of sound. The transforma-tions in turn heighten evocations of silence. Clusters weave a thicker,eerier quiet; multiphonics barely whisper.

These means are crucial to the second conception of silence pro-

posed here. Webern, Nono, and Sciarrino employ them to set an ex-pressive scene that situates silence in a specific role and place. Thescene occurs at the border between sound/music and silence. All three

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composers locate their works in that ephemeral realm. For his part,Cage sought to erase once and for all the line between sound and si-lence (and, along with it, that between music and sound). It would

seem easy to do. The line is very thin, for at this point, music is close todisappearing. The borderland is a realm of traces, where soundstheclusters, the faint toneswaver before an expanse that appears to beempty of sound.

Modernist artists have frequently settled this space, drawn there bythe perishibility of sound and the proximity to the nothingness prizedand feared in silence. For insights about the terrain, we should onceagain turn to Beckett. In The Unnamable, the title character exists in aliminal realm, caught between the fracas and refuse of the everyday

worldtrash cans, a back alley, and a slaughterhouseand an ultimatesilence. Like many of Becketts characters, he cannot stop talking. Oneof the things that he chatters about is silence, of two different kinds.On one hand, there are the spells of quiet that visit him, grey silenceas he calls it, since it is besmirched by murmurs. Beyond the doorand walls, a more imposing quiet awaits. Black or real silence per-plexes himDoes it even exist? Doubts aside, he feels that it is outthere, in some removed space. Obsessed by it, he at once dreads it andyearns for it, as this form of quiet would bring an end to his unceasing

words and life.The works discussed in this essay create spaces similar to Becketts

limbo. Murmurs, faint tones and fragments, and grey silence, defiledrests and pauses, fill the pieces. They make up the state of silence, mate-rials with which composers work. The sounds are as close as we can getto silence, the black or real kind. As in Beckett, that realm exists out-side of a piece. It is a void into which we will never cross. Although Beck-etts language lends itself to the works of Webern, Nono, and Sciarrino,each sets the scene of a borderland in a unique manner. One of the ap-

peals of the scene is its flexibility, allowing artists to establish all sorts ofrelationship between fragile sounds and the unknown realm of silence. With each work, we look to see where the line has been placed andwhat type of mystery lies on the other side. Webern locates the bound-ary in the tranquility of nature, having reflections on loss point to adeeper silence. Nono and Sciarrino inscribe a line between the emo-tional interior of the individual and the external social world.10 The

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10 In the case of Webern, the two lines can overlap, as the inner reflections on loss

often take place in nature. As Anne Shreffler remarks on the texts chosen by the com-poser in his early songs, these poems are concerned primarily with nature images asmetaphors for the subjects inner state. Shreffler, review of Julian Johnson, Webern andthe Transformation of Nature, in Music Theory Spectrum24 (2002): 295.

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former is a space of silence, holding either deep feelings (Nono) or theobscurity of madness and spiritual communion (Sciarrino).

The different settings reveal the borderland to be an expressive

place. Indeed, expression has driven many composers to the realm. Aswith such other states as the fragmentary, the pursuit of silence not onlyprovides a compositional focus but also new means of expression. Manyof the states have unique potential for expression. Silence offers com-posers two rich meansone age-old, the other relatively new. The for-mer, the expressive quiet experienced in tense pauses and serene still-ness, is not the main concern of this essay. The works discussed here doindulge in many such gestures, but they bring out a different expressiveside of silence, one exploited by late modernist composers. They have

us focus on expression as an actthe moment at which the utteranceof an emotion or idea is initiated and the means by which it is con-veyed. Particular emotions or ideas are secondary to the inner workingsof the act. For us to observe the act, it has to be isolated. Silence can dothis. Just as silence, a supposed non-sound, can serve as a backdropagainst which sound can be presented and dissected, so too can itthesupposed absence of expressive utterancesthrow into relief the act ofexpression. Once it has been exposed, we can study the act and ask per-tinent questions: Where does it come from, how is it done, and what

happens to it?Raising these and other questions, modernist music has used si-

lence as a way of commenting on the act of expression. Weberns pieceshint at this commentary. His works make us wonder what happens tothe voicing of loss when the musical utterances so quickly evanesce. In-deed, what happens to the need or desire to voice loss under such con-ditions? Late modernist pieces, like those of Nono and Sciarrino, havegrown more pointed and analytical. They depict the act in detail andpose specific questions about how it proceeds. The commentary raised

by the three composers forms part of a larger modernist interrogationof expression, an inquiry which, as seen in such early positions asSecond Viennese School Expressionism and Stravinskian Neoclassicism,has responded to the emotional abundance of Romanticism. Silencehas served the interrogation well. As witnessed in Weberns music, quietrefutes the fulsomeness of Romanticism. In the works of Nono andSciarrino, it also reveals expression not to be the natural and effortlessimpulse that Romanticism had presumed it to be. When set against si-lence, expression can emerge as forced, violent, or withdrawn. Its out-

comes can be ambiguous and scattered. However, as realized in latemodernist styles, the depictions of expression are not merely analytical.Rather, they can transcend commentary and become expressive.

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Webern

People rarely boast about silence. But that is what Schoenberg did.

In a preface to Weberns Six Bagatelles for String Quartet (op. 9,1913), he divided the heathen from the believers, that is, the foesand friends of new music. For the latter, he held up a prize, proclaim-ing may this silence (Stille) sound for them.11 The heathen, their earsblocked by ignorance, could never appreciate the cultivation of quiet in Weberns work. Silence would forever remain silent to them. On theother hand, the believers, their ears quickened to the modern, couldappreciate the quiet folds, which amounted to a new kind of sound. ToSchoenberg, silence was another modernist innovation, one more new

direction taken, one more new element uncovered.In many ways, he was right. Modernism focused on sonic aspects ofmusic to a degree unequaled in earlier music. With the idea of Klang-farbenmelodie, Schoenberg isolated the color of sound, using it as aprimaryeven structuralelement rather than as mere gloss. It wasperhaps inevitable that modernist composers would eventually turn tosilence, the non-color of sound. It was perhaps also inevitable that thecomposer to do so would be Webern, the disciple who often pursuedSchoenbergs ideas to understated extremes. No other early modernist

who explored timbreDebussy, Schoenberg, and Varsetook to si-lence with comparable intensity. Only in Weberns works does silencehave a strong presence, which is quite remarkable given that true silencerests and pausesappears only here and there. What does soundare the brief phrases, very soft dynamics, and fleeting timbres, all ofwhich place the listener at the border realm between music and silence.

The pursuit of silence provides one narrative to describe the direc-tion taken by Webern in what Adorno refers to as his second period,which produced such works as the Bagatelles for String Quartet, op. 9,

and the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10, both from 1913. Composi-tions from this time are characterized by concise forms, extremely frag-mentary thematic writing, and thinner textures.12 Adorno offered an-other narrative, one built around expression and silence. He depicts amusic not headed toward silence but rather toward pure expression

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11 Webern, Sechs Bagatellen fr Streichquartett(Vienna: Universal, 1952), 2. The Ger-man word Stille enfolds more meanings than the English word silence, as it evokes si-

lence, stillness, and peace, among other things. Such breadth is appropriate, for Webernsworks offer various forms of quiet.12 Theodor Adorno, Anton Webern, in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingtsone

(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), 96.

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and pure lyricism.13 Purity, it should be mentioned, is just as much anaction, a way of attaining a state, as it is an actual state. It is achievedthrough some means, for example reduction, refinement, or isolation,

which in turn becomes a force that shapes a piece.14Adorno focuses onreduction. The Bagatelles and other second-period works shed any-thing extraneous, ranging from pre-existing forms to melodic con-nective tissue.15 Through this purging, the music attains such a concen-trated lyricism that so much can be encapsulated in just four notes, or,as Schoenberg memorably put it, a novel in a single gesture.16 The indi-vidual subject, the site of expression in Adornos criticism, is also puri-fied. Raising an expressive voice in those few germane pitches, the sub-ject attains a pure sonority.17

Silence is apparently not part of this purity, which is not to say thatit is impure. It exists outside Adornos purity/impurity opposition. In-deed, it exists outside the work altogether. Adorno does acknowledgethe silence at the end of a piece, but he points to a greater end and agreater silence, that of death. The incessant casting-off eventually leadsmusic to a point of silence. Once there, a work takes on new expres-sive meaning as it becomes a simile for the moment of deathspecifically the moment when the soul takes flight and departs thebody. The expressivity in Weberns music arises in part from the faint

musical sounds suggesting the disembodied beating of wings in thatflight.18

The idea of a piece tarrying at the border between music and si-lence plays no role in Adornos account of Webern. How could it? Sucha realm would amount to a purgatory, not the afterlife of silence. ForAdorno, silence points to an end and beyond, the impending momentof death: The pockets of quiet that emerge here and there are barely

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13 This essay will focus on Adornos 1959 essay on Webern. It first appeared in thejournal Merkur(13/1959) and was included in the collection of essays Klangfigurenpub-lished the same year. An English translation can be found in Sound Figures, 91105. Overthe course of his career, Adornos conceptions of composers would change, as hebrought out different emphases at different times. Weberns music is a case in point, ascan be seen in comparing a 1926 review of Weberns Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10 andthe above essay. The concept of purity does not appear in any extended fashion in theearlier review (there is a mention of absolute lyricism). For the earlier review, see An-ton Webern. Zur Auffhrung der fnf Orchesterstcke, op. 10, in Zrich, in GesammelteSchriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 18: 51316.

14 This idea is developed in Metzer, Paths from and to Abstraction, 7026.15

Adorno, Anton Webern, 93.16 Webern, Sechs Bagattelen, 217 Adorno, Anton Webern, 93.18 Ibid., 1045.

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mentioned. Even the faint sounds exist in some sort of quiet welkinbeyond the piece they inhabit. Yet to insist on purgatorythe timbralvarietyoffers insights, as it presents a different type of relationship be-

tween silence and expression from the one described by Adorno.Webern situates us at the border by evoking different forms of si-

lence. Like purity and the fragmentary, silence is a state that often ex-ists in multiplicity, made up of distinct, individual forms of the state.The borderland scene set by Webern and other composers depends onthis plurality. Various types are required to sustain the realm, even if foronly ephemeral stretches. In Weberns music, four types appear promi-nently: stillness, extremely soft dynamics, brevity, and fragmentation.Stillness, the blank background against which other sounds emerge,

comes across through repeated or sustained figures, which are per-formed ppp. For many composers, the marking amounts to an end-point, as it either approximates silence or acts as the last stage before.In Weberns music, though, it can be a starting point. His works, as hasoften been pointed out, scale gradations ofpiano. The movement fromppp to pp, infinitesimal to some, can be dramatic in his compositions.So too can movement in the opposite direction: Webern exploresranges belowppp, a realm that is barely audible (kaum hrbar) as henotes in his scores. Beyond this level, he can only point, telling the per-

former to play a tone verklingendthe gradual fade into nothing-ness. The dynamic markings and score indications serve as signposts inthe borderland between music and silence, showing it to be so vast thatdirections are needed for moving from here to there.

The severe brevity of individual pieces and movements also servesto heighten the presence of silence. In so little time, the work arisesfrom and retreats into quiet, making us more aware of the pool of si-lence around it. Janklvitch claimed that brief pieces tie music closerto silence not so much because they exist as mere bubbles on its surface

but because they respect quiet, desiring to trouble it as little aspossible.19 Briefer yet are Weberns melodic phrases. Like fragments,the phrases are surrounded by silence, which they barely break beforedisappearing. They are sometimes fragmented, in the more conven-tional sense of being broken down into smaller parts, so that the pres-ence of silence is intensified. Adorno does not point out these instancesof disintegration, preferring the phrases to remain expressive essences.

We can now turn to one of the first pieces to settle the borderland,the Five Pieces for Orchestra, particularly movements 3 and 4. The two

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19 Vladimir Janklvitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 141.

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movements bring together ideas of silence, nature, and loss, all of which have played a role in criticism by Adorno and Julian Johnson.The following discussion relates the three elements in ways different

from those two authors, in particular showing how the mediation ofloss through silence deepens both the sense of loss and the level of si-lence. The third movement is one of many evocations of nature to ap-pear in Weberns oeuvre; this one and others, as described by Adornoand Johnson, offers a mountain vista, evoked in particular by the use ofcowbells (Ex. 1).20 In the opening Asection of the overall ternary form(mm. 14), the cowbells help create a spell of stillness, which is en-hanced by the shimmering sound of plucked strings (mandolin, guitar,and harp), bells, and celesta.21 The sound inheres in an almost com-

plete chromatic cluster made up of pitch classes bounded by an aug-mented fifth (AAB CDE; the actual sounding pitches stretchout over a range of29 semitones; Ex. 2a). The individual tones are ei-ther struck repeatedly or rolled to create a sustained yet vibratingsonorityand a very quiet one, the dynamic markings hugging ppp.The sonority calls to mind the stillness of nature, particularly the quietresiding in the mountains. It also calls to mind works by other earlymodernist composers who similarly used chromatic collections in softlyplayed sustained or repeated patterns to evoke stillness. In the third

movement of his Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, Schoenberg de-picted a summer morning by a lake through a sustained collection thatconstantly changes tone color. In Wozzeck (III/iii), Berg chose similarmeans to create a very different lake scene, the nighttime quiet thatemerges after Wozzeck drowns. Night has especially attracted the use ofsuch patterns and sonorities, as heard in Ivess Central Park in the Darkand Bartks Night Music (Out of Doors Suite, iii).

In these last two works, sounds, particularly man-made ones, jostleevening tranquility. Weberns mountain serenity is similarly interrupted:

One of his pure melodies, a four-note phrase played by solo violin,breaks the stillness by entering at a relatively loudpianissimo. The phrasesuggests a voice calling out into the dell, an impression reinforced by an

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20 For a discussion of the importance of nature in Weberns musical thought, see Ju-lian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1999). The cowbell connection has been mentioned by several commentators. Adornoheard cowbells as referring to mountain scenes, commenting on the cowbell-like soundof harps in the Symphony, op. 21. For Adornos remarks and Weberns appreciative re-sponse, see Johnson, Webern, 7.

21 A fair copy of the movement provides a written list (no music) of the instrumen-tation: trombone, harmonium, mandolin, celesta, harp, bass drum, snare drum, and dou-ble bass. The instrumentation in the final published version expands upon this early con-ception, but we can already see that the instruments involved in the stillness sonority werecentral to Weberns conception of the movement. Fair copy, third movement, Five Piecesfor Orchestra, op. 10, Sammlung Anton Webern, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.

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example 1. Webern, Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10 no. 3. 1923Universal Edition A.G., Wien. renewed. All rights re-served. Used by permission of European American Music

Distributors LLC, U.S. and Canadian agent for UniversalEdition A.G., Wien

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example 1. (continued)

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343

example 1. (continued)

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echo-like response in the muted horn. As with Echos replies, this phraserepeats only the end of the call. The four-note figure becomes a three-note phrase, the melodic intervals of which restate the last two of the call

(perfect fifth and tritone, now descending instead of ascending).22 Theecho characteristically fades away. Silence uncharacteristically does soas well. Even before the echo, the stillness sonority dwindles as it goesfrom ppp to nothing, following the favorite Webern exit-cue verklin-gend. Only the bells and rolled bass drum are left to absorb the fadedecho.

The extremely brief central section of the ternary design (mm. 56) contains little of the stillness sonority (except for bells and cowbells)and instead concentrates on overlapped melodic statements. With the

concluding Asection (mm. 711), the stillness sonority settles back in,now rescored (harmonium, mandolin, celesta, harp, bells, cowbells,and cello playing harmonics) and placed in a higher register, all ofwhich make it sound more ethereal and faint (Ex. 2b).23 Webern alsoreconfigures the harmonic makeup of the sonority. The pitches createa smaller collection of a diminished fourth (CF), which is now con-centrated in an actual cluster rather being dispersed over more thantwo octaves as in the opening collection. As before, the sonority fadesaway into nothingness, but unlike the first statement, it breaks apart

during the withdrawal. Small rests disrupt the repeated pitches and sus-tained sonorities, leaving us with flecks of stillness. This crumbling awayhints at fragmentation, but we get only a hint, for pieces of the sonorityare quickly claimed in the final verklingend. The calling phrase alsoreturns in the last A section, thereby adding to the impression of adeeper silence. The trombone plays a four-note phrase (which beginswith the same tritone pair, CF/G , which closed the opening violinline). It receives no answer. Echo has been struck mute. The call meetssilence, which, as heard in the treatment of the stillness sonority, is not

only growing fainter but also breaking apart.The unrequited call and fractured quiet point to a silence beyond

stillness. The fourth movement takes us into such a silence, inchingcloser to the border. It does so through connections with the previousmovement. Given that the two movements were written at differenttimes and originally intended for different works, the possibility of con-nections between them needs to be clarified. As argued here, there areno direct motivic ties but rather similarities in pitch and instrumenta-

344

22 Moreover, the three-note phrase contains the 35 pitch-class set (0,1,6) part ofthe larger four-note set. The pitch class system developed by Allen Forte is used here.

Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973).23 Shreffler describes this sonority as capturing a moment of stasis and mentions

other works by the composer featuring such moments. Shreffler, Review, 296.

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tion which serve to link the two in general ways.24 The first link is an

echo. The forlorn trombone call may yet stir a response. In measures23 of the fourth movement, the clarinet plays an A, the pitch in thesame register sounded at the end of the trombone phrase. It may seemfanciful to hear the clarinet pitch as an echo, especially across the di-vide of separate movements, but manuscript materials for the work in- vite such an interpretation. In manuscripts of earlier versions of themovement, Webern marks the repeated A in the clarinet (mm. 23)echoton.25 This creates an extremely soft, muted sound. Contempo-rary Viennese composers, notably Mahler and Berg, used the sound to

345

24 Movement4 was the first to be composed (dated 19 July1911 by Webern) andwas to be part of a never-completed set of seven pieces for orchestra. Movement3 waswritten two years later (8 September 1913, Weberns date) for a group of four orchestralpieces that also went unrealized. Webern most likely assembled the collection making upop. 10 for a performance of an arranged version of the work by the Society for PrivateMusical Performances in 1919. As Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler point out, the compo-sition history of the work should be kept in mind in any attempts to describe op. 10 as acycle, and should also caution us against finding specific motivic connections betweenmovements. This study does not claim the work to be a cycle nor does it point out spe-cific motivic relationships. As described below, it focuses on similarities between the twomovements, one in terms of pitch (a shared prominent A) and the evocation of stillnessin each through similar means. That the movements were conceived of independentlydoes not rule out such similarities. Webern may have been aware of affinities betweenthe two. In assembling op. 10, he could draw upon 18 short pieces, including the 11writ-ten for the two abandoned sets. That he put these two pieces side by side suggests that heperceived some affinity between them, perhaps one dealing with the evocation of silence.

What Webern planned is, of course, unknowable and ultimately beside the point. As thisstudy argues, there are similarities between the two movements and it is the job of analy-sis to call attention to those connections and to interpret them. The topics of silence andloss provide one way to understand the connections. Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler,Weberns Revisions: Some Analytical Implications, Music Analysis12 (1993): 357. On acompositional history of op. 10, see Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern:A Chronicle of His Life and Work(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 19499.

25 The marking can be found in two different manuscripts. The first is a copy of theoriginal 1911 version of the movement. The manuscript was discovered in the Stadtbib-liothek in Winterthur. It is reproduced in Meyer and Shreffler, Weberns Revisions, 358.The second is a fair copy of the fourth movement found in the Sammlung Anton We-bern, Paul Sacher Stiftung.

$%$%

(a) (b) (c)

example 2. Stillness sonorities in Webern, Five Pieces for Orchestra,nos. 3 and 4

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evoke echoes and other effects.26 Whereas the manuscript evidenceadds to the suggestion of an echo, the composition history of the workcomplicates such an idea: The fourth movement was written two years

before the third, thus making for the rather unlikely case of an echo ofa piece yet to be composed. Moreover, Webern deleted the marking inthe final published version. This study, though, deals with connectionsthat emerge between the movements as heard in a performance of op.10. One such bond is the A left hanging by the trombone at the end ofthe third movement and sounded by the clarinet at the beginning ofthe fourth. The connection raises the possibility of hearing the latter asan echo, especially given the prominent role of echoes at the beginningof the third movement. The direction echoton is an archival detail

that encourages us to hear it that way. It is also raises the possibility ofanother type of echo: Taking the fourth movement by itself, we couldbe listening to the echo of a call that was lost to us, a fitting role giventhe prevailing emphasis on loss and disintegration.

Besides an echo, the fourth movement also evokes stillness, doingso in ways similar to those heard in the third movement. The instru-mentation and part-writing have strong similarities with that used tocreate the stillness sonority at the end of the previous movement. Statedin the order in which they appear, the orchestration elements include

sustained viola harmonics (evoking the previous cello harmonics),snare drum (not part of the stillness sonority yet present at the end ofthe third movement), harp harmonics, half steps in the celesta (nowplayed simultaneously instead of in alternation), and repeated pitchesin the mandolin, although now with longer rhythmic values (Ex. 3).27

The instrumentation of the two sonorities may be similar but the regis-tration is very different. The collection at the end of the third move-ment is packed into a tight cluster set in a high range (Ex. 2b), whereasthe sonority in the fourth movement, like that in the opening of the

third, is spread out over a broader range (18 semitones compared to

346

26 See Mahlers Second Symphony (i, m. 126) and the second of Bergs Four Piecesfor Clarinet and Piano (mm. 3 and 7). The Mahler symphony offers a good example ofhow the technique is not limited to imitation of echoes. A few measures after the exam-ple cited above, Mahler uses the tone to set off a new theme as being distant (i, m. 135).Berlioz praised the clarinet for its precious capacity to produce distant effects or echoes,or echoes of echoes, or half-shades of sound. He does not describe the specificechoton technique, but he does mention muting the instrument by placing it in aleather bag. Hugh Macdonald, ed. Berliozs Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commen-tary(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 12527.

27 Discussing the earlier manuscript version of the work, Meyer and Shreffler pointto some noisy elements in the original orchestration, specifically a glissando in thetrombone part and the concluding clarinet trill being played by the horn. Meyer andShreffler, Weberns Revisions, 360.

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347

example 3. Webern, Five Pieces for Orchestra, no. 4. 1923 Univer-sal Edition A.G., Wien. renewed. All rights reserved.Used by permission of European American Music Distrib-

utors LLC, U.S. and Canadian agent for Universal EditionA.G., Wien

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29). The harmonic makeup of the fourth-movement sonority and thatof the initial sonority in the third are similar. The pitch classes in theformer create a cluster a perfect fifth in range (EFF B B), one

semitone smaller than the augmented-fifth group in the latter (AAB CDE). Moreover, both contain a prominent 45 set (0,1,2,6)sequence.

Despite these parallels, we never hear stretches of stillness as in thethird movement. The flecks are too diffuse for it to inhere. To buttressquiet, other types of silence appear, including quiet dynamics and frag-ments. The movement offers an intriguing case of how Webern handlesthe plurality of silence. Different kinds of silence are needed to sustainthe faint borderland. One is not enough. One, though, is required to

give quiet a particular cast. As in such states as purity and the fragmen-tary, a selected type assumes prominence over the other kinds.28 Inthe third movement, stillness sets the scene of tranquil quiet. With thefourth movement, fragmentation ascends. Only it can take us into amore removed and engulfing silence.

Fragmentation pervades the movement, to the point that we getfragments of fragments. Disintegration can be heard in the openingand closing phrases.29 The opening six-note line in the mandolinstands out by virtue of being the loudest (piano) and longest phrase in

both this movement and the preceding one. The closing line in the vio-lin amounts to a reduced form of the mandolin line (another echo?),consisting of only five notes which share key intervallic correspon-dences to the earlier phrase.30 Now played very softly, it is, as Webernindicates, barely more than a breath.31 Adding to the fragmentationis the brevity of the movement (a mere six measures), which soundslike a fragment itself. What is most remarkable is the fragmentation ofsilence, the stillness sonority. Webern breaks it into pieces so as to giveus a more heightened form of the state. How different from the evoca-

348

28 The plurality of purity is discussed in Metzer, Paths from and to Abstraction,7026.

29 Meyer and Shreffler discuss the role of disintegration in the movement. They,however, hear the final violin phrase as re-establishing order. Meyer and Shreffler, We-berns Revisions, 360.

30 There are clear parallels between the opening and closing phrases. They sharesome pitch classes (D, E , E, A), feature a prominent tritone (AD), begin with anopening whole-step movement (displaced by an octave in the last phrase) followed by atritone, and end with half-step movement around E. More elaborate analytical observa-tions on this connection can be found in Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music, 8990, andDavid Lewin, Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytical Essays (New Haven: YaleUniv. Press, 1993), 6896.

31 The last line is marked wie ein Hauch, a marking used by Schoenberg in thequiet aphoristic closing movement of the Six Little Piano Pieces (op. 19).

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tion of stillness in the works by Schoenberg, Berg, Ives, and Bartkcited above. They maintain the sustained sonorities or repeated pat-terns throughout the movements in question. If anything breaks apart

and disperses it is the sounds of man, not quiet. These works cannotimagine a silence beyond stillness; Weberns pieces can, and they createit by fracturing the peacefulness of quiet.

For a performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces in 1919, Weberngave titles to the individual movements: Urbild (original form), Ver- wandlung (transformation), Rckkehr (return), Erinnerung (re-membrance), and Seele (soul).32 He urged listeners not to interpretthem programmatically.33 Needless to say, many have done so. Johnson,for instance, sees in the work a response to the death of Weberns

mother. In particular, the third movement restages a scene in which themother assumes an angelic presence in the splendor of nature.34 ToJohnson, the sonorities of bells, plucked strings, and celesta in the com-posers works do not so much evoke stillness as brightness and thesparkling of sunlight on reflective surfaces, all of which are emblem-atic of the mountains, even heaven.35 To hear a silence (especially anexpanding silence) that signifies loss forces us to experience loss in avery different way. Instead of being mollified by nature, it is intensifiedthrough silence. Weberns works testify to a search for new means of ex-

pressing loss, different from the thick and protracted emotionality ofRomanticism. A refracted natural serenity may be one such way. Silenceis another.

It proves an efficacious way. In the approach to silence, so much islostmelodic loquacity, accompaniment, answering phrases. For Adorno,the approach is to a purified space, and beyond that, death. But fromour perspective it is to a borderland between music and silence, wheremany elements exist in a lost state, having either disappeared or beingpoised to do so. Such a space is of course enigmatic and can be open to

different interpretations (Adornos purity, Johnsons Alpine radiance),but loss exerts a strong presence (as it does for both Adorno and John-son).36 It emerges especially in the third and fourth movements ofthe Orchestral Pieces, where musical depletion offers a way to interpret Weberns sparse titles. The person or object returnedperhapsWeberns mothernow exists as a remembrance. Yet memory falters.

349

32 Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern, 198.33 Ibid.34 Johnson, Webern, 38127.35 Ibid., 120.36 Anne Shreffler offers a contrasting interpretation of the third movement, one

that emphasizes the unreachability of the heavenly music. Shreffler, Review, 298.

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Everything falters, the musical fragments and even silence. The objector person can never be restored. The piece underscores a larger mod-ernist statement about the fragility of memory.37 Many of Ivess works

unfold nostalgic dramas in which the object of memory (often a tuneassociated with the composers childhood and father) is evoked, takesform, and breaks apart, once again consigned to the irrecoverablepast.38 Weberns work takes a characteristically more oblique and reti-cent approach. There is no musical entity standing in for the object ofmemory, as with Ivess quotations; there is indeed little to suggest suchan object. Instead we encounter an atmosphere hospitable to recollec-tion, be it the natural tranquility described by Johnson or what Adornocalls a mysterious dimension of an endlessly questioning contempla-

tiveness.39 Rather than effacing the object of memory, Weberns worktakes the unique step of dissipating the contemplative atmosphere,thereby diminishing the space for reminiscence. Silence, particularlystillness, can be conducive to recollection, but now that particular typeof quiet is fragmented. The disintegration takes us closer to the borderbetween music and silence, where memories of a loved one and piecesof silence crumble. At this point, the feeling of loss deepens as does thepresence of silence.

Like memory, expression wavers in this space. The closer one gets

to the border, the more the musical materialsthe means used tocommunicatefall apart, as do certain types of silence, themselves ex-pressive. There are fewer and fewer materials to enlist, a diminishmentthat has repercussions for the individual subject. The drive toward pureexpression and lyricism in Weberns music crystallizes around whatAdorno calls the pure sonority of the subject.40 It is a curious phrase,for purity implies wholenesssome sort of essence being achieved withnothing missing or broken off. Adorno built his theoretical elabora-tions on modernism around the fragmented subject, a state inevitable

given the stresses and strains of historical influence, the alienation ofthe new, and the regimentation of capitalist society.41 Weberns music,it appears, offers the possibility of wholeness, albeit fleetingly. If onehears a growing silence in lieu of purity, the expressive subject takes ona different guise. It is once again fragmented. The more the subject

350

37 For a discussion of modernist perspectives on memory, see Richard Terdiman,Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993).

38 For a discussion of such scenarios, see Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning inTwentieth-Century Music(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 1942.

39 Adorno, Anton Webern, 93.40 Ibid.41 For a discussion of Adornos views of the historical subject, see Sherry Lee,

Opera, Narrative, and the Modernist Crisis of Historical Subjectivity (Ph.D. diss., Univ.of British Columbia, 2003).

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nears the border realm, the more it falls apart. Drawn there by thepromise of new expressive means, the subject forfeits the means it oncepossessed and must now rely on comparatively thin and evanescent ges-

tures. The expressive voice of loss may even fall silent. Sonic fascinationalso lures the subject into the liminal realm; however, the soundsclaimed there, those making up its sonority, barely stay intact, existingas shards.42

The liminal state is not without its dangers, but is also not withoutrewards, for the realm does offer new expressive and sonic resources.Expression not only succumbs to fragility and fragmentation but alsoemerges from them. In other words, the growing fleetingness of thesubject becomes expressive, just like the fragmentation of the subject

that Adorno heard in such works as Erwartung. The sonic shards, thepieces of the subjects sonority, also have sonic value, as music hadnever explored such timbral ephemera before. Fragility and loss arecentral to the borderland opened up in Weberns works. In pursuing si-lence, the musical language and the subject experience those qualities,to the point of breaking apart and possibly disappearing. It is throughthat process, though, that the expression of fragility and loss becomesso much richer.

Nono

Since its premiere in 1980, Nonos QuartetFragmente-Stille, An Dio-tima has attracted much critical attention, including two book-lengthanalytical studies.43 The rich scholarly discussion covers issues to betaken up here: the titular fragments and silence as well as expression,contemplated now at the borderland between sound and music. Aswith Weberns work, we will consider how Nono sets the scene, particu-larly what types of silence he draws upon and how they relate to each

other, and here we find that these issues become even more intriguing.

351

42 This idea of fragmentation (of music and implicitly the subject) appears in We-berns 1926 review of the Five Orchestral Pieces, which describes a general disintegrationof melody, harmony, and form. Adorno, Fnf Orchesterstcke, 51516.

43 The two book-length studies are Werner Linden, Luigi Nonos Weg zum Streichquar-tett(Kassel: Brenreiter, 1989), and Herman Spree, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima: Ein ana-lytischer Versuch zu Luigi Nonos Streichquartett(Saarbrcken: Pfau, 1992). Other noteworthystudies include Doris Dpke, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima: Rflexions fragmentaires sur lapotique musicale du quator cordes de Luigi Nono, in Luigi Nono(Paris: Festival dAu-tomne, 1987), 98114 (orig. in German as Fragmente-Stille: An Diotima: FragmentarischeGedanken zur musikalischen Poetik von Luigi Nonos Streichquartett, Zeitschrift frMusikpdogogik36/9 [1986]); Nicola Gess, Dichtung und Musik: Luigi NonosFragmente-Stille, An Diotima, MusikTexte 65 (1996): 1830; Wolf Frobenius, Luigi Nonos Stre-ichquartettFragmente-Stille: An Diotima, Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft 54 (1997): 17793;and Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Quiet Revolutions: Hlderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and

Wolfgang Rihm, Music & Letters81 (2000): 24574.

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Instead of Weberns one- or two-minute forays into the borderland,Nonos work lasts around 40 minutes, a long period of time to sustainsuch an ephemeral realm. The Quartet situates the border in a differ-

ent location than Weberns Orchestral Pieces. It separates the silentemotional interior of the self from the surrounding outside world ofsound. The equation between silence and interiority has significant im-plications for the act of expression. It shapes the forms assumed by theexpressive utterance and sways where it will ultimately head, either to si-lence or to sound.

The Quartet not only approaches the borderland, it also enters thestate of the fragmentary, as it consists of a series of brief sections, manyless than a minute in length, that contrast with each other to create the

impression of sharp discontinuities and juxtapositions.44 The units bearheadings drawn from poems by Friedrich Hlderlin, some of which re- volve around the character Diotima, who appears prominently in thewriters oeuvre.45 The headings too are fragments, comprising individ-ual lines, groups of words, or just single words shorn from a largerwhole.46 Surrounded by ellipses, they remain incomplete and cryptic:. . . geheimere Welt . . . (world of deep secrets), . . . ich sollte ruhn? . . .(should I rest?), and . . . Staunend . . . (wondering). In discussing thework, Nono offers a paradoxical conception of the fragment, the qual-

ity of being simultaneously momentary and endless.47 Isolated fromthe original text, fragments come across as transitory, thoughts thatevanesce and can never cohere into a larger whole. At the same time,freed from the specific meaning of the original, they, in their incom-pleteness, can take on a vast range of meanings, as if following an infi-nite trail of ellipsis dots.48

For Nono, silence too can be paradoxical.49 Tristan und Isoldehar-bors what he calls an infinite silence.50 His own Quartet, on the other

352

44 I plan to discuss the role of fragments in the work in a future book dealing withthe evocation of states in late modernist music.

45 Many writers have expanded on the significance of Hlderlin in the works aes-thetics and political import. See Linden, Luigi Nons Weg zum Streichquartett, 481; Spree,Fragmente-Stille: An Diotima, 7987; Gess, Dichtung und Musik, 2124; and Nielinger-

Vakil, Quiet Revolutions, 24558.46 In an earlier conception of the piece, Nono had decided to use fragments taken

from the diaries of Franz Kakfa. Archivio Luigi Nono, Venice, Folio 44.04.01/01vDx.47 This conception of the fragment appears in a talk that Nono gave before the pre-

miere of the Quartet. StreichquartettFragmente-Stille, An Diotima, in Luigi Nono: Doku-mente, Materialien, ed. Andreas Wagner (Saarbrcken: Pfau, 2003), 15667.

48 Froebenius, Luigi Nonos Streichquartett, 182n9.49 For a dialectic view of silence, see Stbler, About Silence, 74.50 Enzo Restagno, ed., Luigi Nono(Turin: Edizioni di Torino, 1987), 256. It should

be mentioned that Nono does not see a strict opposition between silence and sound. Hementions that silence is also sound and that silence can be filled with sounds, even ifthey are the listeners memories of other sounds (ibid., 1617).

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hand, collects terse, self-contained units of quiet, fragments of nothing-ness. Silence is also dynamic. As depicted by Nono, it does thingsanticipates, derives, and dreams.51 Immersed in this activity, we be-

come aware, alert to all the things it can do and to all the places it canlead.52 Helmut Lachenmann has aptly described silence in Nonos workas a fortissimo of agitated perception.53 Silence can do so manythings because it takes so many different forms.54 Many of these formsappear in Weberns works, including fragmentation, stillness, soft dy-namics, and the gradual fade to nothingness, whereas others signifi-cantly extend elements in those pieces or are altogether new. TheQuartet features numerous long and prominent rests, large stretches ofquiet as opposed to the fissures in Weberns music. Nono also high-

lights fragile sonorities, ones that barely emergeor can barely emergebefore subsiding. Many of these sonorities are produced through ex-tended techniques. In his Bagatelles for String Quartet, Webern alsoused such gestures, notably pizzicato and tremolo. Nono, however, as-sembles a lexicon of techniques, around 40 altogether. Some of themore percussive ones, like gettato and spicato, produce fleeting, brittlesounds. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the sustained pitchesand chords. Out of all the extended-technique sonorities, these are theones that bring us closest to silence. Nono selects sounds that are diffi-

cult to produce in the first place, like harmonics and awkward chords,and asks the players to hold them at very quiet dynamic levels and usu-ally with special bowing techniques (for instance, flautato and playingclose to the bridge). Making matters more difficult, they are to be sus-tained for 20 or so seconds or, in some cases, as long as possibleaparadox for a fragment. These sounds are fragile to begin with, butnow they become perilous, as we hear them struggle to keep above si-lence and then finally relent. As silence becomes sonic destiny, its pres-ence becomes all the stronger.55

353

51 Ibid., 61.52 Klaus Kropfinger, . . . kein Anfangkein Ende . . . Aus Gesprchen mit Luigi

Nono, Musica42 (1988): 167.53 Helmut Lachenmann, Touched by Nono, Contemporary Music Review18 (1999):

27.54 In his discussion of silence in the Quartet, Guy Gosselin also distinguishes be-

tween different types of silences, not so much the compositional means discussed herebut more conceptual varieties. Gosselin too places the work at the frontiers of silence.Gosselin, Le silence comme matriau premier de la composition du quator cordes deLuigi Nono, C.I.R.E.M, nos. 3234 (1994), 81. Another extended account of silence inthe work can be found in Linden, Luigi Nonos Weg zum Streichquartett, 8291.

55 Martin Zenck sees silence in the work playing a larger role of destiny. He viewsthe work as nearing the end of a paradigm shift in 20th-century music, one from soundto silence. Nonos Quartet, the last piece he discusses, represents the fading away (Ver-lschen) of music. Zenck, Dal niente, 2021.

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Underneath the various forms of quiet lies another type of silence,one we dont hear, or dont hear directly. This silence gathers aroundthe Hlderlin texts. Nono directs that the headings are not to be re-

cited or even interpreted programmatically. As he wrote to members ofthe LaSalle Quartet (the ensemble that premiered the piece), to ren-der them in such a way would debase them to the level of vulgarexcerpts.56 If the fragments are mute, why have they been included inthe first place? In fact, they turn out to possess a voice. The performersare to sing them inwardly, within their hearts. The silent chantswill resonate within the individual players and perhaps by doing so in-flect the music that they produce. According to the composer, thesongs are of other spaces, other skies.57 Consistent with the imagery

developed in this essay, they do belong to another realm, the far side ofthe border between music and silence. Whether or not the songs exerta sonic presence, they command our attention, for they represent anattempt to cross over the border and create from the other side. Theborder now emerges as a two-sided space instead of a one-sided realmin which we can only imagine or sense the sphere of true (or Beckett-ian black) silence. The latter is still ultimately mysterious and un-claimable, but Nono has found a way to send messages from there, nomatter how faint or vague.

With silent songs and imperiled sonorities, the Quartet yields acompendium of ways to approach quiet, including two particularstrands of silence that merit attention here: stillness and fragmentation.Appearing beside each other, the two offer insight into how Nono han-dles the plurality of silence through means quite different from thoseemployed by Webern. Three sections in the quartet (nos. 18, 20, and22) bear the heading wenn in reicher Stille (if in richer stillness/silence). The proscription not to link textual and musical fragmentsin any illustrative way seems rather forced here, as the music strongly

suggests stillness. It does so through a conventional gesture, a high sus-tained G played softly and often in harmonics and/or flautato (Ex. 4).58

The gesture had appeared earlier, but it and the quiet it imparts cometo the fore in these sections. Nono ensconces the pitch within a micro-tonal cluster, thereby expanding upon the chromatic clusters used byWebern and other earlier modernist composers to convey stillness. He

354

56 Archivio Luigi Nono, folio 44.32/08rsx.57 Nono,Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima(Milan: Ricordi, 1980), Introduction. Letter to

the LaSalle Quartet, Archivio Luigi Nono, folio 44.32/08rsx.58 In the letter to the LaSalle Quaret, Nono equates the sonority with a Mirage air-

plane, a comparison which underscores not only the high range of the sonority but itssense of being removed and quiet. Archivio Luigi Nono, folio 44.32/04v. I would like tothank Erika Schaller at the Archivio Luigi Nono for making this aeronautical suggestion.

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355

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also subjects the cluster to different bowing techniques, which ripplethe sustained sonority.59 Some of the gestures (like the gettato in no.18) agitate the sonority, whereas others (the flautato in no. 20) en-

hance its ethereality.This rich stillness is interrupted by a particularly fragmentary

phrase. In a piece in which everything is a fragment (including thehigh G stillness), it would be hard to isolate any one gesture for beingdistinctly so. This one stands out nonetheless, as it amounts to littlemore than a sonic scrawl. The gesture first appears in section no. 5 andconsists of a rapid series of16th notes (often grouped as a quintuplet)performed with very soft dynamics and either on the bridge or movingnear it so as to create a splintery sound (Ex. 5). Like the wispy pencil

scratches in a Cy Twombly canvas, the sonic splinters prove insubstan-tial, a mere trace on the surface of silenceso ephemeral that they, likeTwomblys scratches, have to be grouped together in order to givethem, and the silence they signify, a marked presence.

Two means of silence appear, but neither ascends here as in theend of the fourth movement in Weberns work. The stillness and scrawlfigures keep side by side for most of the first half of the composition.60

Rather than one lording over the other, each pursues its own purpose.The stillness sonority returns in a fourth section (no. 24, ruht [sleep]),

by which time it is no longer nettled by percussive bowing. It now soarsin an aerial flautato, with each part dropping out (sleeping?) until onlythe cello sounds. Hovering in a lone line playedpppin harmonics, still-ness almost becomes silence.61 In the following section (no. 25), thescrawl figure becomes even more shadowy, the culmination of gradualdisintegration. Now it is a mere wisp within a crowd of more solid frag-ments, near to being a rest, a moment of silence, amid the other lines.In these sections, both gestures have come closer to attaining a particu-lar type of quiet, and by doing so they take us closer to the border line.

Near the end of the work, we cross over that line, or the Quartetsuggests that we do. One of the final sections (no. 48) features a quota-tion from the Renaissance chanson Malheur me bat, attributed to

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59 Adding to the shifting effect are the constant and overlapping small crescendoand decrescendo patterns, most of which move in between different degrees ofpiano.

60 The work is not clearly demarcated into halves, but one can hear the piece moreor less breaking into two sections (nos. 124, 2552), each of which concentrates on spe-cific material. For instance the first half deals more extensively with the high stillness andscrawl gestures. Many of these gestures do return in the second part of the work, al-though not as prominently.

61 Nicola Gess offers a similar account of this group of fragments, seeing themreaching a more quiet point in the last unit, among other changes. Gess, Dichtung undMusik, 2728.

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Ockeghem in some sources (Ex. 6).62 The inclusion of a quotation en-hances the fragmentary scheme, as the phrase is excised from a largerwhole. Quotations are also outside elements, snippets that breach the

borders of a work, settle in the piece, and force the new musical sur-roundings to respond to them in some way. Nonos silent songsemerge from the other side of the border between music and silence,cross the line, and inflect the music that we hear to some unknown de-gree. Given the parallels, we can imagine the quotation as the voicingof a silent song. Songlike it is, as the stepwise motion and smallmelodic range make it the most conventionally lyrical moment in theQuartet. Moreover, the somber text (misfortune strikes me) and Phry-gian mode are suitable to the type of song that could be inspired by the

accompanying Hlderlin fragment: . . . wenn ich trauernd versank, . . .das zweifelnde haupt . . . (if I sink into sadness . . . the head consumedby doubt).

The viola alone takes up the chanson, thereby making the quota-tion seem like a melody sung by an individual. A mere fragment, theopening phrase from the tenor line, it becomes more fragmentary in itsnew surroundings, as it is shattered into smaller phrases, each sepa-rated by either rests or long-held pitches. It also becomes graduallysofter, entering piano and concluding ppp. If the melody has broken

into the world of sound, it can barely sustain itself there, for it crumblesand fades awayall the time returning to silence.

The other parts adhere to the quotation in a strict homophonicfashion, creating chords or sounds that move with each pitch of themelody. They spin out figures, harmonies, and timbres heard elsewherein the piece, including high-pitched stillness, the major structural inter-vals of the tritone and augmented octave, the low G string in the violin,the GD open fifth, sharply ascending and descending melodic phrases(reminiscent of the opening and no. 26), and flautato, gettato, and bat-

tuto bowings. The appearance of so many of these elements in this pas-sage inspires a new way of appreciating them and other similar ges-tures. These ephemeral materials seem to be sitting on the surface ofsilence, and now we can hear them as hovering over a specific strand ofquiet, the silent song, as materialized in the quotation.63 They hoverso closely that they react to every move in the borrowed melody. Thissensitivity suggests that the twitching and shadowy phrases throughout

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62 Doris Dpke proposes that the quotation may be a memorial to Nonos teacherBruno Maderna, who made an arrangement of the chanson for three violas. Dpke,Rflexions fragmentaires, 1068.

63 Gosselin hears these effects as another type of silence, one that silences the nor-mal bowing and more conventionally lyric sound of the viola (discussed below). Gosselin,Le silence, 81.

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the work are responding to silent songs, the voices from beyondthe border. Silence, be it Nonos chants or merely the idea of anotherrealm, acts as a force beneath the music, a force felt on an ever-shifting

surface.The Quartet features another borrowing, not a melody but rather a

score direction.64 Midway through the work, there appears a fragment(no. 26) marked mit innigster Empfindung, a line used by Beethovenin the third movement of his String Quartet no. 15 (A ConvalescentsHoly Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity) and the third movement ofthe Piano Sonata no. 30 (Ex. 7).65 The call for deep feelings befits thisparticular passage. The fragment offers some of the more lyricalphrases of the work, lines more suited to imparting deep feelings than

scrawls or still clusters. The lyricism, though, is short-lived, as it, like allpassages in the work, is abruptly cut off. Even briefer are five followingsections (nos. 34, 36, 38, 43, and 45) which draw upon chords fromno. 26 and also bear the Beethoven direction.66 They are left with onlythe upper and lower chords in the arching phrases, nothing in betweena gap that makes them sound all the more fragmentary and nonlyri-cal. The intense emotion called upon by the Beethoven direction is tobe thrown across a melodic chasm, the wide gap in range between thechords in some of the phrases. It is also to be winnowed down to noth-

ing. All five sections begin pianissimoand decrescendo al niente, slid-ing to emptiness. Moreover, they use normal bowing as opposed to thearray of extended techniques heard otherwise throughout the Quartet.In fact, these sections and the chanson quotation are among the few toemploy normal bowing, making it clear that Nono reserves such pro-duction for lyrical and expressive momentsin particular, momentsthat suggest some sort of voice singing to us.67

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64 There is another borrowing not discussed here. Nono draws upon the scala enig-matica used by Verdi in the Ave Mariaof his Quattro pezzi sacri. The scale serves as a largerpitch collection upon which many of the chords and melodic lines draw; however, thestrong emphasis on quarter-tones makes hearing the scale difficult in many cases. For adiscussion of Nonos use of the scale, see Dpke, Rflexions fragmentaires, 1015; Lin-den, Luigi Nonos Weg zum Streichquartett, 18793; Spree, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima, 2732. Just as the Ockeghem quotation was a memorial to Maderna, the Verdi scale is mostlikely a tribute to Nonos teacher Hermann Scherchen, with whom he studied the Verdi

work. The sketches contain a brief note connecting the two men with these two works.Archivio Luigi Nono, folio 44.04.01/01vDx.

65 The direction also appears in the Adagietto of Mahlers Fifth Symphony.66 They also share the Hlderlin fragment das weisst aber du nicht (however, this

you do not know). The four phrases in no. 26 appear in later fragments (nos. 39, 40, and50), this time without the Beethoven direction.

67 Dpke refers to this type of production as le beau son, which becomes a quota-tion in itself, recalling a more conventional type of lyricism. Dpke, Rflexions fragmen-taires, 108.

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The idea of a voice is reinforced by another score direction, sottovoce. The pairing of this inscription with mit innigster Empfindungmay come across as a contradiction. Deepest feelings, it would seem,

are never to be so muted. In fact, Beethoven accompanies the phrase inthe sonata with the word Gesangvoll. Even the end of the convales-cents song, the moment at which the direction appears in Beethovensquartet, suggests robust health and voice.68According to Nono there isno contradictionquite the opposite, as the combination of the twotakes expression to a new level.69 Nono places intense, heartfelt emo-tion on the cusp of silence, the quiet fragment quickly giving way tonothingness. At this point, the scope of expressionvery soft dynamics,the shortest of durations, and understated deliveryhas been con-

strained, but those constraints make the depth of expression all themore intense. Nonos work seems to suggest that after the emotionalextravagances of Romanticism, the borderline may be the last place leftto voice innigster Empfindung.

Or it may be the next to last. What happens to the utterances ofpassionate feelings? Do they, as dictated by the al niente marking,fade into nothingness, their intensity so quickly dissipated? Anotherscore markingBeethovens, not Nonosmay hold answers to thesequestions. The direction should be interpreted literallythe most in-

ner feelings. With this in mind, we can hear the utterances as headingtoward an interior realm: a silent realm, a space where the subject shel-ters emotions and keeps them from the outside sounding world. Nonohas already evoked this realm through the silent songs, which are tobe sung inwardly, a delivery that may or may not leave some reso-nance in the sounding world. If the Hlderlin lines are any indication,this interiority is a vast and rich expressive space in which a range ofemotions can be conveyed with a vigorous, yet silent, voice. The innig-ste Empfindungen we hear in the Quartet (those in the above pas-

sages) appear to be heading back to the inner realm. Shorn into frag-ments and thinned to sotto voce, they come across as having grownweary of the sounding world and the travails of expression. The rich, in-ner song offers refuge as well as fulfillment. All they have to do is followthe final decrescendo and cross the border. Silence is the ideal spacefor them.

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68 The song (the opening statement of the double-variation form) begins with thedirection sotto voce. Nono could be seen as telescoping the dynamic, emotional end-points of the convalescents song by combining the directions. In the sketch materials forthe work, he does write out all the markings from the Beethoven movement in the order

which they appear. Archivio Luigi Nono, folio 44.04.03/02v.69 Quoted in Kropfinger, . . . keine Anfangkein Ende . . . , 16768.

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Nonos appeal to innigster Empfindung revises a premise of ex-pression in 19th-century Romanticism. As Hegel emphasized, the trueprinciple of Romantic art is inwardness (Innerlichkeit), or the emo-

tions gathered in the shrine of the soul.70 Beethovens score directionalso upholds interiority as the locus of expression. For the composer,deep-seated feelings were to be released and given external form, anoutpouring as spontaneous and direct as a song of thanksgiving.Hegel describes how musical works could absorb or provide a homefor such feelings.71 Although it adopts the rhetoric of inwardness,Nonos Quartet complicates the ideal of interior emotion released inexternal artistic form. What distinguishes Nonos expressive path fromthe one taken during the Romantic period is the association between

interiority and silence, a connection made by neither Hegel norBeethoven. With the two closely linked, the projection of the expressiveutterance is either occluded or reversed. The silent songs do nottransport feelings all the way beyond the threshold of interiority, whereas the sounded innigste Empfindungen fade away and headback across the line. In either case, the expressive utterance knows theother side of the borderland, the side we cannot know. By placing theinterior at such a remove, Nono significantly changes Romantic con-ceptions of the realm. It is no longer a wellspring set to release expres-

sive ideas; rather, it and the emotions sheltered there remain mysteri-ous and inscrutable.72

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70 G. W. F Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Belland Sons, 1916), 2: 283; 3: 358.

71 Ibid., 3: 358; 2: 295.72 In his discussion of interiority and silence in the Quartet, Hermann Danuser de-

scribes how the subject emerges from an absolute silence and how the work draws atten-tion to realms of interiority in both performers and listeners. Danuser, Innerlichkeit and

uerlichkeit in der Musiksthetik der Gegenwart, inDie Musik der achtziger Jahre, ed.Ekkehard Jost (Mainz: Schott, 1990), 2527. For another discussion of interiority, seeLuigi Pestalozza, Ausgangspunkt Nono (nach dem Quartet), Musik-Konzepte20 (1981):34. One aspect of expression not discussed here is the political significance of the work.The absence of the direct political engagement heard in the composers previous piecesstruck many critics, who accused him of retreating into the bourgeois realm of chambermusic or a secluded individuality. See Gerhard Mller, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotimaper quartetto darchi von Luigi Nono, Musik und Gesellschaft 40 (1990): 35260, andHerbert Stuppner, Luigi Nono, oder: die Manifestation des Absoluten als Reaktion einesgesellschaftlich betroffenen Ichs, Musik-Konzepte20 (1981): 8392. Holding on to politi-cal ideals, some writers have placed the Quartet in an ongoing leftist interest (Adorno,Bertaux) in Hlderlin. See Linden, Luigi Nonos Weg zum Streichquartett, 1324, andNielinger-Vakil, Quiet Revolutions, 24549. For a discussion of the political importof silence in the work, see Matteo Nanni, Luigi Nono-Le silence de lcoute, Atopia7 (April 2005). http://www.atopia.tk (6 September 2005).

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Sciarrino

Salvatore Sciarrino may be the only composer to have invoked a

god of silence. His Unimmagine di Arpocrate(1979) offers a picture insound of the Egyptian deity Harpocrates. The surviving pictures ofHarpocrates show a cherub pressing his index finger against pursed lipsso as to issue a cosmic ssshh. His hush extends throughoutUnimmagineand other of the composers mature pieces that stretch tissues of slight,ephemeral tones.73With these works, Sciarrino emerges as arguably thecontemporary composer most devoted to silence, a living follower ofHarpocrates. Not all of his pieces, though, would please the god. Thereare no hushing cherubs in some compositions; rather, passionate char-

acters fracture silence with cries and outbursts. Far from belonging toan ancient sect of quiet, the characters participate in a modernist fasci-nation with silence. In particular, they point to different ways of shap-ing the relationship between silence and expression, ones in which thefigures achieve expression not so much through embracing silence asby reacting against it.

The silent worlds occupied, and disturbed, by these characters havemany things in common with those cultivated by Webern and Nono.Sciarrino too relies on fragmentary phrases and the stillness of sustained

high-pitched sonorities in creating quiet. And yet he skims a sonic layeruntouched by the other two composers: The residue of performancebreaths, the patter of keys, tongue noises, knocks, the raw scrape of bowagainst stringis no longer covered up but appears in the open.74

Whole passages can be exclusively built upon these sounds, as in sec-tions consisting of nothing more than tongue stops and key clicks. Withthem, a realm that is supposed to be made as quiet as possible in instru-mental performance now represents the possibilities of quiet. Thenoises capture, in the composers words, the infinite rumbling of mi-

croscopic sonorities which taint the silence around us.75

Sciarrinos silent worlds harbor another noise unheard in mostworks that explore the border realmthe voice. It is not surprising thatthe voice has been unwelcome there, for it can easily overwhelm an en-semble of muffled instruments and the quiet they depict. Sciarrino,though, is a composer who thinks dramatically, often operatically, and

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73 The literature on Sciarrino is quickly growing. Some notable studies include MartinKaltenecker, LExploration du blanc, Entretemps9 (1991): 10716; Gavin Thomas, ThePoetics of Extremity, Musical Times 89 (April 1993): 19396; and Nicolas Hodges, A volcano viewed from afar: The Music of Salvtore Sciarrino, Tempo194 (1995): 2224.

74 These gestures have been used by other composers to a wide variety of effects. Asmentioned below, Sciarrinos works are set apart by the almost exclusive use of the ges-tures and the association with quiet.

75 Sciarrino, Entretien,139.

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such thinking has led him to perceive the expressive potential of plac-ing the voice in these still arenas. The potential arises from the contrastbetween the voice and the quiet rumblings of the instruments, one

facet of the broader contrast between expression, emotions poured outby the voice, and silence.

The voice used by Sciarrino is not the standard operatic instru-ment, the volume and tone of which would obliterate his delicaterealms. He has instead cultivated a style of vocal writing more suited tothose spaces. The singer spits out short, almost spasmodic, phrases. Thelines possess a dynamic quality, as they forcefully emerge, push to a cer-tain point, and then wither or stop. Sciarrino often has them arise fromnothing (indicated by the notational device of an altered crescendo

sign) and then swerve back and forth betweenpppandpiano. The mostextreme phrase is a two-note sigh figure consisting of a microtonalglissando over the range of a whole or half step (Ex. 8). While slidingdownward, the voice rushes through syllables and words. Unlike a typi-cal sigh, the gesture does not tragically faint away. Instead it begins withan intensity that increases as the voice drives through the glissando andtext. Several sigh figures and smaller phrases built around narrowmelodic orbits typically join to form longer phrases. The flow betweenthe short phrases escalates the textual and melodic momentum. The

energy quickly dissipates into silence as the phrases, short or long,come to abrupt ends. The overall effect, however, is that of breaking si-lence, not sinking into it. The voice leaps into the realm of sound andby doing so momentarily dispels the surrounding quiet.

Sciarrinos voices may not sound traditionally operatic, but theemotions and psychological states conveyed by them surely are. Rage,jealousy, madness, and desire, ever resounding in opera houses, do notloom in Weberns and Nonos quiet worlds. Emotions can be experi-enced there, but they are often understated, as with loss in Weberns

music, or diffuse, like Nonos innigster Empfindung. The feelingsand sensations in Sciarrinos works, on the other hand, not only ringout but are declared. Characters wear their hearts on their sleeves,telling us passionately and pointedly about the envy that overwhelmsthem, the entanglements of lust, or the delirium in which they wander.

They do all these things by singing against silence. Sciarrinosworks configure the bond between expression and silence in ways strik-ingly different from those pursued by Webern and Nono. In pieces bythe latter two composers, expression can be fulfilled in silence. It ap-

proaches quiet, is drawn to it. Each soft step to the border in Webernsmusic underscores the evocation of loss, until music itself is lost. NonosQuartet secures the cusp of silence as the place to release intense per-sonal feeling and points beyond to the harbor of a silent interior realm.

365

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Sciarrinos compositions, on the other hand, poise expression againstsilence. Put differently, pieces by Webern and Nono turn to silence forexpression, whereas Sciarrinos encounter silence in seeking to express.

The encounter is one way of presenting the relationship betweenspeech and silence. The pair has long demanded attention, as it bringstogether the most human of sounds, one central to the act of expres-sion, and its supposed opposite, the blankness of quiet. Philosophers,scholars, and artists have configured the relationship in various ways. Itis worth taking the time to present three different vantage points in or-der to show both the contrasting forms the relationship can assumeand where Sciarrinos music fits into a larger discourse. Depictions ofthe pair typically differ in two key respects: how much the two overlap,

if at all, and how the one side acts with or against the other. For Hei-degger, language speaks as the peal of stillness. It mingles with silence(stillness), like the resonance of a bell hanging in the air. Languagegives silence a sound, as both the emergence from quiet and the even-tual return to it point to stillness, a remote state that exists beyondmere soundlessness. Heideggers formulation stands out in the degreeto which the two exist simultaneously and bestow form on each other,speech as a sound of silence and silence offering material to speech.76

Philosopher and theologian Max Picard approaches silence as an au-

tonomous realm. It may stand apart from speech, but at the same timeit is necessary for the creation of speech. Silence is the pregnantmother giving birth to language, as each word is preceded by silenceand comes from it. 77 Whereas Picard claims that speech arises unob-trusively from quiet, others portray the emergence of speech as a vio-lent rending of silence. The Romantic writer Comte de Lautramontpresents a character trapped in the silence sustained by deafness andmuteness. The torment experienced by him finally wells up into a cry,which with the force of a volcanic eruption blasts the surrounding si-

lence and releases him into the world of sound.78 In his Infinito nero

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76 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:Harper & Row, 1971), 2079. Hofstadter translates the word Stille as stillness, a prac-tice used by many Heidegger scholars. Aware of the breadth of the word Stille, I haveused silence to be consistent with terminology adapted for the essay. For a discussion ofthe give and take between speech and silence in Heideggers thoughts, see Ute Guzzoni,Thoughts on the Sound of Silence, Atopia7 (April 2005). http://www.atopia.tk (6 Sep-tember 2005).

77 In a big-bang type of scenario, Picard does mention that the arrival of the Divine

Word did tear open silence. Max Picard, The World of Silence(Chicago: Henry Regnery,1964), 1, 8, 15.78 Comte de Lautramont, Les Chants de Maldoror, trans. Guy Wernham (New York:

New Directions, 1965), 7778.

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(1998), Sciarrino espouses a similar view of speech and silence, placingan act of violence at the center of the relationship.

Infinito nero, An Ecstasy in One Act for mezzo soprano and cham-

ber ensemble, takes us into the cell of Sister Maria Maddalena dePazzi

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