The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters

Product Information

In 1960, in the only documented performance of the symphony during Klein’s lifetime, ten musicians participated in performing the piece.

But Marion and DiLiberto wanted to study the structured silences that naturally crop up in musical structures. The aim, argued Scott, was to produce “silent music”, though Time magazine’s reviewer reported that his message had “fallen on deaf ears”. His later musings on music itself—our relationship with it and how we listen—go way beyond the book’s premise of ‘Why Conducting Matters,’ and you feel all the more enlightened for it. For example, “It is a privilege to be on a journey that never ends, that constantly asks unanswerable questions, and musicians are lucky to always have a reason to make the next performance better.Cage, she says, had a “preference for the mind and sublime over the body to connect it to his Protestant-informed religiosity”, despite a lifelong engagement with Zen Buddhism. Why do so many people give credit to Cage for coming up with this idea of “being still and listening” without acknowledging the East Asian philosophical influences at play?

He composed a dig at Nixon’s vice president titled “The Ballad of Spiro Agnew,” of which the lyrics consist entirely of the words: I’ll sing you a song of Spiro Agnew and all the things he’s done. These similarities allowed the team to produce a unifying theory on how we predict music: the brain produces a signal prior to hearing a note that is then subtracted from the activity produced when the note is actually heard. The result is not literally a musical experience but more closely aligned with healing and personal transformation. It may be a favourite joke among the musicians in an orchestra, but Wigglesworth wants to find a more thoughtful answer.The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan was not a song but a completely silent album released by Stiff Records.

This has its analogies in the Western art world, where long-established patriarchal norms are still being unpicked.Tracy McMullen describes Oliveros and Cage’s differing engagements with Eastern spirituality in her essay Subject, Object, Improv: John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Eastern (Western) Philosophy in Music.