The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

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Reylon is a founding member of Tangram, a UK-based music collective of artists who play both Chinese and Western instruments. The influence of Lao Tzu’s Da Yin Xi Sheng (大音希声, meaning Big Sound), referring to the cosmic flow of existence, contributed to what Reylon describes as “untimed, irregular, patternless or free” elements in Chinese music, which often includes inaudible or barely audible sounds. In 2014, the funk band Vulfpeck released 10 tracks of silence on Spotify and encouraged listeners to stream it while they slept. Part of the moment, part of the performance … an audience at London’s Royal Festival Hall in March 2019 listening to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. And the pressure of performing live generates a vulnerability in musicians that audiences are fully aware of.

Many wonderful archive performances have been put online in the last six months, but no one seriously suggests these are sustainable substitutes for the real thing. After Paul Hindemith read this, he suggested a work consisting of nothing but pauses and fermatas in 1916. This, the authors outline in their discussion, explains why the polarity of the signal is reversed in these moments of silence. The EEG recordings from the study showed that, when imagining music, volunteers’ brain activity was slightly delayed and had reversed polarity – peaking and troughing in reverse – when compared to the same activity in response to heard music.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. Predictive signals, according to the predictive coding framework, are supposed to cancel actual sensory signals coming, for instance, from the ear. By the late 1940s, the incessant, directionless tunes were proving to be so annoying that a group of commuters petitioned to ban it from public transport – a case that eventually reached the Supreme Court. Though listening to a piece privately can bring great solace or joy, the original purpose of music is to be connected by sharing something together as a community.

Since then, many artists have “covered” 4’33”, including Frank Zappa, Mike Batt, and even a circus cat (yes, really) performing the piece for The Stephen Colbert Show. Tao Yuanming’s poem alludes to the instrument’s greatest appeal - its relationship to personal and spiritual development.Also known as 0'00"; the performer determines the extent to which the piece is silent, mostly silent, noisy, or raucous.