The practice of marking two minutes of silence
is a relatively modern phenomenon and one that is indebted to noise.
The increased
mechanistic volume of everyday life prompted the Italian futurist artist Luigo Russolo
to publish Art of Noises in 1913. The
following year witnessed the outbreak of the First World War. Russolo had
thrilled at the musicality of combat, quoting the poet Filippo Marinetti in his
text: ‘ZANG-TOUMB-TOUMB war noises orchestra blown beneath a note of silence
hanging in full sky captive golden balloon controlling the fire’. The Great War
amplified these noises and, for the first time, recording technology was able
to preserve them. The Gramophone Company recorded a bombardment in 1918 and
issued it for sale to the public. It was advertised as a ‘marvellous record’ offering
an ‘actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of gas shells’. The
recording was made by William Gaisberg, who with his older brother Fred had
pioneered record production in Britain. Tragically, he was gassed in the
expedition and fell victim to a flu pandemic. William Gaisberg died in
November 1918
It
was because life and death had become so noisy that silence offered the best
means of contemplation and withdrawal. The first two-minute silence occurred in
Cape Town, South Africa, towards the end of the War. This practice was adopted
in London for the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919; George V wrote to
The Times expressing ‘desire
and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force . . . there may
be, for the brief space of two minutes, a complete suspension of all our normal
activities’. At the 1920 Armistice, Columbia Graphophone
recorded the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the first electric recording to be
commercially released. Recordings of the two-minute silence were also made, but
for broadcast purposes only.
They
were first gathered together on record in 2001, when Jonty Semper issued Kenotaphion.
This compilation features 81 two-minute silences, recorded either on Armistice
Day or Remembrance Sunday. The first dates from 1929; the last from the
millennium. One interest of these documentary ‘silences’ lies in the fact that
they are not silent. We can hear the sounds of nature and the sounds of recording
processes. David Toop notes that:
In 1986, two
pigeons flapped their wings. In 1988 a baby was crying, a child coughed, voices
were raised and tape deterioration overlaid a patina of decay that suggests 19th
rather than late 20th century. In 2000, seagulls flew overhead and a
strange absence of lower frequencies emphasised the vibrato in Big Ben’s
tolling strokes.
The other interest of these silences lies
in the fact that they still work. We have had one hundred years of remembrance,
but silence is still the best means to think upon the glorious dead.
