Gesture Music
Sofia Gubaidulina
Silence in music happens when the music stops during a performance. It is sometimes replaced by gesture music. In his Sofia Gubaidulina biography, Michael Kurtz mentions the silent solo performance by the conductor included in ...Stimmenn... verstummen..., an orchestral work from 1986.
| “ | The symphony is notable for its careful and innovative use of silence. Though the eighth movement has the largest proportions of the work, the climax actually takes place in the ninth movement when the conductor motions before a silent orchestra. The motions the conductor makes are meant to make his hands move increasingly farther apart from each other according to the Fibonacci sequence. This "conductor solo" is repeated at the end of the work, when after the last note is sounded the conductor continues to motion for several minutes. From Wikipedia ...Stimmenn... verstummen... article |
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Milan Knizak
From 1960, the International Fluxus Movement created a number of Events or Verbal Pieces, whose temporal structures were typically vague so as to be sometimes without beginning nor end, with or without sound, with or without music. A remarkable example is that of Czech artist Milan Knizak's 1965 Snowstorm N°1 whose score states: Paper gliders are distributed to an idle and waiting audience.
| “ | Another Event, by Czech Fluxus artist Milan Knizak, is called Snowstorm N°1 (1965) and simply instructs that ‘Paper gliders are distributed to an idle and waiting audience’. What results is a snowstorm of quietly gliding paper airplanes as the audience returns them back and forth and so on. The exchange of sheets is experimentaly beautiful, like the caring gesture toward the instrument as tended by Brecht. . |
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Helmut Lachenmann
Lachenmann composed Salut Für Caldwell for 2 guitars in 1977. The piece includes silent moments when « the players silent motions and gestures created a space of unheard music » ]
Takehisa Kosugi
In 1963 Takehisa Kosugi composed for Fluxus 1 a musical piece called Theatre Music in the form of a rectangle of cardstock that bore the trace of a spiral of moving feet. This was paired with the instructions: "Keep walking intently".
Read more about this topic: Music Without Sound
Famous quotes containing the words gesture and/or music:
“Her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought.
That space of Evil One abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.”
—Thomas Beecham (1879–1961)