Of course silence matters quite a bit. You can make a political point of that – democracy only functions when people decide sitting back and accepting whatever is done in their name, and with their tax dollars, just won’t do. Things have to change – we have to amend the constitution and make this a purely Christian nation, or we have to stop it from becoming some sort of oppressive theocracy headquartered somewhere in South Carolina. Choose your issue – who gets to say what and who should be muzzled, who should get a tax break and who should pay a bit more, the current wars should be rethought and our efforts to deal with terrorism changed too, or not, and so on. People talk about such things.
Those who have achieved power, by dint of years of talk and deals and tricks – this administration or any other – really do long for simple silence. Hey, people get to vote every four years do decide who runs the joint, and they should all shut the hell up in the interim. But democracies are not, if they work, full of comfortable silence. You set up a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and “the people” may think that is just what you meant to do – so they have more than a few things to say about “their” government.
You’ll never get silence, although you often get acquiescence. Most everyone feels that corporate lobbyists force the big policy decisions, and even before it became clear that modern voting machines could make hundreds of thousands of votes mysteriously change, or just disappear, most felt their vote didn’t ever really matter. This is a huge nation and what does one more vote, one way or the other, matter? You figure that if you want to change things the best way is to somehow get fabulously wealthy – that way you get a say in things. You have to bring something to the table. You have to have a chip in the big game. Otherwise you are invisible and powerless, and you might as well just go to work, do your job, come home and play with the kids, hit the hay and do the same tomorrow. The rich guys and the power-crazed, who need their money to get the power-fix that keeps them alive, run things. That is what they do, and it’s not your game. You have your own life to lead.
Still, having been told something about “democracy” in eighth grade Civics class, and vaguely remembering it, people just will not be silent. They know that they really do have a say in things, even if they have no real power at all. It’s a bit quaint. But for certain demographics in targeted areas in particular elections in selected districts in certain states, those currently in office can safely ignore the noise. Political activism – marching in the streets and all that – is seldom more than self-righteous feel-good silliness. Reverend King was the last person in America to change anything with that sort of thing, and it wasn’t easy at all – and he got shot, dead. You want to change things? Work on the levers of power – subvert the rich dudes, in the shadows, and work on “targeted messaging” for certain demographics in targeted areas in particular elections in selected districts in certain states, at precisely the right time. Such things are done is silence. Change does happen. The rest is noise.
This should all be obvious, and not be taken as cynicism. It’s realism. You want change? Drop the idealism and do some real work – statistical analysis and careful planning, the stuff that is done in silence. You don’t have to be a mean and nasty political infighter. In the end, Karl Rove ruined the Republican Party and turned the nation against the conservatives, and the conservatives against whatever the hell these guys in the Bush administration claimed they were. It’s almost as if they planned it. And it is also kind of pointless to march in the streets. Those you want to convince, the timid and wavering middle, are put off – the more fervent and outraged you become, they more they pull back.
Here’s an idea. Figure out how things work. Find the pressure points. Apply pressure. If that doesn’t work, do more research. Complex systems have vulnerabilities – back at the place where they built top-secret satellites the engineers were always worried about “single point failure” spots in their systems. Maybe you have to have had worked in aerospace to appreciate that. Yep, there are points where if one key component fails, nothing works as planned, or at all. Find those. Shut up and find those.
But enough of that. There is another kind of silence that matters too, and it’s not political at all.
We, as a people, not only talk a lot about what we want, we are generally uncomfortable with silence itself. That trait underlies all the misconceptions about political change. We just don’t like silence. When everyone by chance falls silent at a dinner table someone will say something, anything, just to fill the awful void. You have to be incredibly comfortable with the others at the table, and with yourself, to just let the silence continue. And nonsense will often do fine – “How about those Dodgers?” Everyone is relieved and the talk starts up again, but probably not about the Dodgers. The group body just needed a jolt from any verbal defibrillator at all. Death was avoided. There is a reason for that peculiar verb in the usual formulation – “The conversation died.”
And there is more than dinner conversation involved in our unease with silence itself. This is explored in The Colonization of Silence, an interesting recent essay from Andrew Waggoner.
Okay, okay – no one reads NewMusicBox, the web-based advocacy magazine and portal “dedicated to the music of American composers and improvisers and their champions.” But you can find interesting things there. Yes, it is a publication of the American Music Center, an organization “dedicated to building a national community for new American music” – founded in 1939 by six composers, including Aaron Copland. Some have strong opinions about Copland. Our friend the high-powered Wall Street attorney played under Copland once. Copland was an odd fellow.
But this is where you will find Andrew Waggoner saying some interesting things on silence. And that would be this Andrew Waggoner – born in 1960 in New Orleans, growing up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studying at the Eastman School of Music and Cornell. He’s now “Composer in Residence” at the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse. Visit the site – he’s not Bruce Springsteen or Madonna, but famous in his world.
As for the colonization of silence, he has some interesting things to say –
The colonization of silence is complete. Its progress was so gradual that even those who watched it with alarm have only now begun to take stock of the losses. Reflection, discernment, a sustainable sense of tranquility, of knowing where and how to find oneself - these are only the most obvious casualties of marauding noise’s march to the sea. Much more insidious has been the loss of music itself.
But wait, this can’t be: Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt’s Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.
But that is not the problem –
Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.
What follows that is a quite specific discussion of how “sonic space” – silence – is used by this composer or that, and may be of limited interest to those outside that world. But he widens the argument –
It is probable that in two hundred years - if we are still in a position have this discussion - the level and din of information exchange, aural, digital, and (who knows) psychic, may make our current age seem a veritable Walden. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem.
For us to be able to enter the world that music creates for us, we need a silence within which to listen. It will be said in response that in many cultures music is not presented as an object of veneration within a temple of adoring quietude, but rather as part of the rush and tumult of everyday life; thus we should not need the expectant hush of the concert hall ourselves in order to go into our music. These are valid points that do challenge the clear subject/object separation that classical music traditions have tended to enforce.
In many world societies, however, there are still spaces - if only interior, or metaphorical, or temporal - set aside for contemplation, for noiseless recalibration of the soul, and in contemporary American culture there are almost none. Our social rituals are constrained by the incessant soundtrack imposed in our public spaces, and our places of worship, by and large, have given themselves over to a muzak-based sense of liturgy that tells us at every step of the way what to feel and with what intensity. Many of us, turning away from both mainline- and mega-church, have sought peace in new-age bookstores, but these, even with their palmists and meditation rooms, surround their patrons with a noxious haze of synthesizers, pennywhistles, and Inuit drums. But beyond shopping, what primary experience are we having here? Are we listeners seeking an archetype of beauty or seekers listening for the godhead? It turns out we are neither - though we may have been duped into one or the other conviction. We are simply consumers. The hope is that, like dairy cattle, we will become more productive if encouraged in our purchases by this kind of marginal musical discourse.
The broader point is, of course, that silence matters.
And its opposite is manipulation –
If we frequent any number of the hipper clothing chains we will find ourselves buoyed by emo or hip-hop beats that serve to wash away the sense of complicity we feel in supporting a sweatshop economy; the music is telling us that we belong here, that we’re different, we’re aware, we’re not the problem. We’re down with all the world’s peoples, with the losers and dreamers, with the left and the right. We’re down with EVERYONE; we don’t want any trouble, we just want to buy a pair of cargo pants. Once again, the absence of silence makes it impossible for us to decode the onslaught before we’ve succumbed to it. And this is not just a function of capitalism. It’s worse.
We find ourselves as a culture unable to assuage our loneliness except through the ceaseless accompaniment of our everyday actions. In such a world buying a book or a shirt is not merely to acquire a thing, to fill a need; it is, rather, to participate in the forced scripting of our lives according to commercial archetypes that tell us, through the imaginary film score by which we buy, eat, make love, crap, worship, and, eventually, die, not who we are but who we wish we were, who the music tells us we want to be. Even our sense of time becomes hopelessly distorted, as we float through our lives according to the dreamlike spans of musical phrases rather than the waking rhythms of clock-time. Thus our capacity to be present for our lives, for our work especially, is compromised by a time-sense that is artificially constructed along unconscious models in order to give perspective on the conscious experience of time’s passing, not to replace that experience entirely. In losing silence, and the corresponding potential for musical discernment that silence engenders, we lose ourselves, our native sense of our motion through life.
In losing silence we lose ourselves. You see the political implications. We hate silence, or have been taught to hate it. That’s trouble. If “the absence of silence makes it impossible for us to decode the onslaught before we’ve succumbed to it” maybe it’s time to quietly work on change, in the shadows.
Andrew Waggoner is a composer angry about the colonization of “sonic space” – but the issue is larger. Be quiet, be still. And figure out what really matters, and then what actually works to change things. You want to change the world? Silence matters.
