Memorial Silence

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 19^th rather than late 20^th 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.

The Production of Silence

At the beginning of this month I attended the latest UK and Ireland IASPM conference, which took place at the University of Huddersfield. I spoke about silent records, a subject I’ve toyed with since 2012. In that year, the Hayward Gallery put on a show of ‘Invisible Art’ in which they displayed blank canvasses and empty plinths. Invisible art is obviously akin to silent music. The Hayward’s director, Ralph Ruggoff, nevertheless argued that fine art presents a richer field. Publicising his show, he declared that ‘in music you only have one piece of silent music but somehow in art, artists keep coming back to the subject’.

            This made me think, ‘hold on!’ There is clearly a dominant silent composition within art music, John Cage’s 4’33”. However, while this composition has cornered the market in notated muteness, there are many recorded silences. What is more, these recorded silences have diverse stories to tell. Some of them nod towards Cage, but others speak silently about censorship, another tranche offers memorial silence, there are silences that reveal the specificities of recording formats, and there are silences that comment upon the economics of record production.

            My first response to Rugoff was to draw up a top ten of silent recordings for the New Statesman. More recently, I published a chapter detailing ‘Six Types of Silence’ in the collection Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound. My talk at Huddersfield offered an abbreviated version of this work. You can read it here.

Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound

Shhhh . . . you know who!

I have for a long time been interested in silent records. I wrote an article on the subject for the New Statesman in 2012 and more recently completed a chapter for Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates’ collection Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (Bloomsbury, 2018).

            In this book I enumerate six types of musical silence: notated silence (which is dominated by John Cage’s 4’33”); phonographic Cageian silence (which pays homage to Cage’s work but regularly misunderstands his intentions); political silence (where muteness signifies oppression); memorial silence (paying homage to the dead); technical silence (which highlights the ‘silence’ of different types of recording formats); and economic silence (where silent songs illustrate issues of authorship, ownership and recompense).

            I’m sure there are more types of silence, though, and there must be silent records that I have overlooked in the chapter.

            Do let me know.