晚年唯好靜
Late in years, I only love quietness
(Wang Wei)
When we hear the silences in music as emptiness, we are just sitting (shikantaza 只管打坐). In just sitting, the mind rests naturally, in a state of nonduality. Rather than actively selecting or rejecting specific sounds, ambient sounds are allowed to exist as an undifferentiated mass of phenomena, perceived with equanimity. Nothing is singled out as the object of perception, and nothing is excluded from the perceptual field. The undifferentiated mass is not transformed into discrete objects by discriminating consciousness; it is fully present as lived experience. It is neither ignored nor bracketed away as 'silence' or 'noise.' Things appear as they are, in a mode of “without-thinking,” or, as Sū Shì expresses it, “Although my mind does not rise [to meet phenomena], there is nothing it does not connect with” (Grant 1994, 88).
The sounds we produce when performing music can facilitate such an experience of silence by intimating it—by taking on some of its qualities and minimizing the gap between musical sound and silence-as-emptiness. Perhaps the most literal way of doing this is through quietness: a low dynamic level brings the music closer to the ordinary sounds of everyday life, closer to the sounding forms that are present without-thinking in silence-as-emptiness.
Many commentators on quiet music have noted how it brings into aesthetic awareness the non-musical, peripheral phenomena that frame it. David Grubbs (2014) described such an experience when listening to a performance of a late Feldman piano piece by Steffen Schleiermacher:
"I was seated in the second row, and yet I had the sensation that the individual tones from the piano were doing their damnedest to travel all that way and arriving in a state of collapse from the nearly insurmountable distance from the back of the stage. The previous works in the concert had me leaning back in my seat. The Feldman piano piece had me pitched forward, straining to listen, suddenly aware of the exact physical distance between performer and listener…" (Grubbs 2014, xv)
In this retelling, listening is no longer a matter of passively receiving sounds projected from the stage. Instead, Grubbs describes how quiet music affords a more active, even constructivist, mode of listening—one in which the listener 'reaches out' toward the music’s fragile sounds, sounds that seem to occur in a physical reality out there. In this way, the space of the concert hall itself becomes unusually present in the listening experience.
Grubbs’ account resonates with a remark by pianist Philip Thomas on Feldman’s quiet music. Feldman’s music, Thomas insists, is not quiet just for the sake of being quiet. Its quietness arises instead from Feldman's wish to cultivate a mode of listening that acutely incorporates the physicality of the instruments and the space in which the piece unfolds:
"Feldman’s music is not about 'quiet-ness'… I think that the quietness of most of Feldman's music is a by-product of his concern for sound, space and time, and the quasi-physicality of those elements, and people who simply characterise it as being soft are missing the point.” (2012)
We can readily grasp the aspect of musical attunement that Thomas and Grubbs gesture toward, yet their realist-materialist perspectives fail to capture how musical sounds are not heard as “physical stuff.” Roger Scruton has aptly called sounds pure events, emphasizing their non-physical mode of presencing. Such events are neither 'out there' (in the physical world) nor 'in here' (in the mind), but are perceived nondually, beyond both materialist and idealist categories. Scruton explains:
"[t]he physical events that cause [...] auditory perceptions are not represented within my auditory field, so a description of the intentional object is not a description of the physical events. The auditory field, unlike the visual field, does not depict its cause" (Scruton 2009, 26).
Scruton’s phenomenology of sound as pure events existing in a non-physical (which Scruton calls 'virtual') world remains accurate even when listening to Feldman’s quiet piano music. Musical attunement is, by its nature, a state in which sounds are perceived as non-dual and 'mind-only.' This nonduality is one of music’s most powerful aspects: it temporarily frees us from the subject–object framework that locates sound in an external, material world. A realist-materialist outlook may prevent Thomas and Grubbs from articulating this nonduality, yet the experiences they describe are not difficult to recognize. We simply need other words: quiet music has a remarkable way of intimating—and even including in our aesthetic relishing—the expanded field of indeterminate, non-musical aspects of our experience, including space and ambient sound. Of course, Grubbs and Thomas are correct to only emphasize the former and not the latter. Listening to Feldman’s late music, I rarely get the sense that it is open to its surrounding sounds. The music is too continuous and intricate. In the radio conversations with Cage, Feldman is also obviously reluctant to the idea of opening his music to outside sounds (Cage & Feldman 1966)
For music that is open to ambient sound, we must instead turn to another account on quiet music, from Toshimaru Nakamura. In the liner notes to Meeting at Off Site, he writes:
"The sound in these performances is often so feeble that it welcomes into the music noises from outside, such as the whistle of a tofu vendor and the wooden clappers of people calling 'beware of fire' as they walk through the neighborhood" (in Novak 2010, 36-60).
Here, too, we can readily grasp the mode of musical attunement Nakamura evokes. Yet the implied causal connection—between the feebleness of the sounds and the welcoming of outside noises—deserves scrutiny. Quiet music does not necessarily guarantee that the whistle of a tofu vendor will be welcomed into the experience, nor that we will find pleasure in something as uncomfortable as Grubbs’ image of "straining to listen" or being acutely "aware of the exact physical distance between performer and listener." Quietness also does not automatically heighten our awareness of space. On the contrary, music that is too quiet may simply prompt us to shut out external sounds and demand a higher volume to hear what is happening.
It is therefore not quietness alone that enables such welcoming. Rather, its use points to the fact that the musicians are working with other parameters as well to establish a mode of listening that can afford quietness. As Thomas rightly observed of Feldman, quietness is a "by-product."
In the onkyo of Nakamura, quietness arises through many interrelated parameters: an air of simplicity, placidity, a slow, natural breath, the absence of narrative structures, and (often) the avoidance of dramatic gestures. Feldman's late piano music also embodies many interrelated qualities, especially slowly developing forms, a calm patience, and the feeling of the music reaching a standstill or being static. Adrien Tien, in his excellent book The Semantics of Chinese Music, draws upon a passage from the Great Learning chapter of the Lǐ Jì (禮記) to elucidate the meaning of 靜 (jing, quietness). In this passage, the connection between quietness and other qualities is made explicit. Quietness is said to originate from calm composure (定 ding), which in turn arises from stillness (止 zhi). The phrase Tien highlights reads:
"there can be calmness when there is stillness, and quietness may follow thereafter" (Tien 2015, 71) (知止而 後有定, 定而後能靜).
Quietness is thus not only a precondition for the modes of listening described by Grubbs, Thomas, and Nakamura, but is better understood as an effect. When quiet music seems to make room for peripheral, non-musical phenomena within aesthetic consciousness, it is not the mere fact of quietness that brings this about. That may be our first assumption, since a low dynamic level literally allows surrounding sounds to be heard without being overpowered. Yet this explanation alone does not account for the full causal chain. As composers and musicians, we must attend to the musical conditions that make quietness possible in the first place if we wish to employ it effectively.
At the same time, it would be mistaken to regard quietness as only an effect and not also a cause. Once it has arisen under the right conditions, quietness itself helps generate further qualities—among them the very calmness that the Great Learning identifies as its prerequisite. When music is played quietly, it can calm the listener by refusing to overwhelm the senses with forceful sound. The 'causal chain' is therefore less a linear sequence than a pattern of dialectical interpenetration.
When calmness and stillness are in place, the volume of the music can be lowered to deepen a mode of listening that intimates emptiness, welcoming the otherness of indeterminate peripheral phenomena into the aesthetic experience. And once present, it reinforces the very calmness that made it possible, creating a reciprocal cycle between sound, silence, and perception.
