Quietness

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 on its own accord in nonduality. Instead of actively selecting and rejecting specific sounds, ambient sounds are allowed to exist as an undifferentiated mass of phenomena perceived with equanimity. This means that nothing is chosen as the object of perception, and nothing is rejected from the perceptual experience. The undifferentiated mass is not turned into objects by discriminating consciousness, but it is fully present as lived experience. It is not ignored or bracketed away as 'silence' or 'noise'. Things appear as they are, in a mode of "without-thinking", or as expressed by Sū Shì, "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 music and silence-as-emptiness. One of the perhaps most literal ways of doing this is through quietness since a low dynamic level brings the music closer to the ordinary sounds of the everyday—closer to the sounding forms that are present without-thinking in silence-as-emptiness.

Many commentators on quiet music have already described how quiet music often manages to bring into the aesthetic consciousness the non-musical peripheral phenomena that surround the music–what we usually call silence. One such commentator is David Grubbs (2014), who described this kind of phenomenon in relation to listening to a performance of a late Feldman solo piano piece performed 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, rather than just passively receiving sounds projected out from a concert stage, Grubbs describes how quiet music affords the listeners a free and constructivist approach that allows them to actively 'reach out' to the music's feeble sounds—sounds that happen in a physical reality 'out there'. By doing so, the space of the concert hall becomes unusually present in the listening experience.  

Grubb's retelling has commonalities with a comment on Feldman's quiet music made by the pianist Philip Thomas; Feldman's music is not quiet just for the sake of being quiet. Its quietness is rather an aspect of Feldman's music that arises due to a wish to create a mode of listening that acutely incorporates the physicality of the instruments and the space in which the piece is performed:

"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 understand well the aspect of musical attunement that Thomas and Grubbs are gesticulating towards with these statements, but their unusual realist-materialist perspectives fail to capture how musical sounds are not heard as 'physical' stuff'. Scruton has aptly called sounds 'pure events' to capture their non-physical way of presencing. These events are neither 'out there' (in the physical world) nor 'in here' (in the mind) but are perceived nondually beyond materialist and idealist categorization. Scruton explains, I believe accurately, that

"[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).

This statement captures what Scruton means with sounds as 'pure events' existing in a 'virtual world'. Scruton's phenomenology is accurate even when listening to, for example, Feldman's piano music. Musical attunement is by its nature non-dual and perceived as 'mind-only'. This nonduality is one of the most powerful aspects of music; we are temporarily freed from the subject-object realist perspective that locates sound in a material world outside of us. While a realist-materialist worldview hinders Thomas and Grubbs from writing accounts that stay true to this nonduality, we also understand what aspect of the listening experience Grubbs and Thomas gesticulate towards. We only have to find other words to describe it. Quiet music can have a remarkable way of intimating and including in our aesthetic relishing the expanded field of indeterminate non-musical aspects of our experience (which includes both space and ambient sounds). 

Another perspective on quiet music is provided by Toshimaru Nakamura. When reading the liner notes to the record "Meeting at Off Site", we find Nakamura describing the music presented on these discs in the following way: "[t]he 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, as well, we understand perfectly well the musical attunement that Nakamura gesticulates towards with these words, but I would like to question the implied causal connection between feeble sounds on the one hand and the welcoming of noises from the outside on the other. That music is quiet does not by any means guarantee that the whistle of a tofu vendor is welcomed into the experience, nor that we take any pleasure in something as uncomfortable as Grubb's idea of 'straining to listen' or being 'aware of the exact physical distance between performer and listener'. Nor does quietness automatically result in a heightened sense of the space. On the contrary, certain music played too quietly simply makes us want to shut external sounds out and demand a louder volume so that we can hear what is going on in the music. It is thus not only the quietness that affords a welcoming of the whistle; its usage rather reveals that the musicians have worked with other parameters as well to achieve a certain mode of listening that affords quietness. As Thomas rightly comments with regard to the quietness of Feldman, it is a "by-product". 

In both the onkyo of Nakamura as well as in the piano music of Feldman, there are many other parameters at work that makes quietness possible—an air of simplicity, placidity, a slow, natural breath, a lack of narrative structures, and the lack of dramatic gestures. Adrien Tien, in his excellent book The Semantics of Chinese Music, drew upon a particular passage from the "The Great Learning" chapter of the Lǐ Jì (禮記), when elucidating the meaning of 靜 (jing, quietness). In this passage of the "The Great Learning", the connection between quietness and other parameters is clearly demonstrated. Quietness is said to originate from the calm and composed (ding 定) quality, which in turn comes from the "restful or still" (zhi 止). The phrase Tien singles out 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 necessary cause for the modes of listening described by Grubbs, Thomas, and Nakamura, but better described an effect. Regarding the experiences of how quiet music seem to allow non-musical peripheral phenomena to be welcomed into the aesthetic consciousness, we cannot say that it is the quietness in itself that makes this happen. That might be our first guess, as a low dynamic level literally brings the music closer to the peripheral sounds: by not overpowering them, the music welcomes them. But this does not capture the entire causal chain. As composers and musicians, we must be in command of the entire causal chain in order for our music to be effective. We, therefore, have to study the prior musical conditions that make quietness possible. 

On the other hand, it is also incorrect to say that quietness only is an effect and not a cause: when it has arisen under the right circumstances, it itself will be what determines other qualities, including the very same calmness that the Great Learning writes as a condition for quietness. When music is played quietly, it will have a calming effect by not overpowering the senses with powerful sounds. The 'causal chain' is therefore not so much a linear one as it is one of dialectical interpenetration.

When calmness and stillness are in place, the volume of the music can be taken down to deepen a mode of listening that intimates emptiness by welcoming the otherness of indeterminate peripheral phenomena into the aesthetic experience. And when quietness is in place, it itself will help establish the calmness that made this possible.