There are sounds that we cannot listenbut feel. It is said that the old organ builders already knew this and therefore constructed a 64-foot pipe, a so-called humble pipe. Its fundamental tone, the subcontra-C of around 8Hz, lies in the infrasound range - in a frequency range that we perceive physically, if at all - and should inspire proper reverence in pious churchgoers. Infrasound can cause discomfort in the listener because the body can feel the waves but cannot localize them properly. However, you can hear such a whistle because the various overtones resonate in it. Only the fundamental tone is inaudible and somewhat spooky in its effect. Only two organs in the world have a fully developed 64-foot stop (i.e. reaching down to C). But they are no longer used as humble pipes to instill humility in the listener. It is uncertain whether this provoked discomfort in the church service could even evoke the hoped-for portion of devotion.

What is certain, however, is that the frequency range we can hear is limited. All the beeping, hissing, grumbling and rattling that reaches our ears during a train journey, for example, takes place between the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20 kHz. The human ear has specialized in this range and, logically, so has music. However, there are still a few exotic artists who deliberately play with these off-key frequencies. In this inaudible world, there is infrasound and ultrasound. Sound waves with an oscillation frequency below 20 Hz are infrasound, while sound waves with an oscillation frequency higher than 20 kHz are ultrasound waves. Humans can make use of both, but cannot hear them directly. So if you think you can't hear anything, infrasound and ultrasound waves are buzzing around you unnoticed. Animals use these other frequency ranges to communicate. Bats hear vibrations from 15 kHz to 200 kHz, i.e. largely in the ultrasonic range. Elephants hear low frequencies. So they might find musical pleasure in individual tones of the 64-foot register - if they ever found their way into a church equipped with it.

Performance artist Laurie Anderson has chosen a less exotic musical target group: Dogs. In 2010, she performed her Music for dogs in front of the Sydney Opera House for the first time. Numerous dog owners brought their favorite pets to the event. There is a short clip on youtube in which the dogs look expectantly into the camera. It is impossible to say how the four-legged friends perceived this musical declaration of love, but they certainly made an amused impression. The owners also had fun with the conceptual dog humbug; Anderson's music - rhythmic, electronic, with lots of sweep sounds - is not completely out of the human hearing range, after all, master and dog inevitably share some frequencies.

However, the play with the inaudible also exists in pieces of music without animal references: Eduardo Moguillansky's piece construction to the human hearing limit. This decreases with age, so that young people can still perceive high frequencies around 20 kHz, but older people cannot. In Eduardo Moguillansky's work, the electronic feed divides the audience into non-listeners and listeners. Frequencies around 17 kHz sound from the tape; a young person should still be able to hear the sounds. For Moguillansky, this division of the audience is based on a specific year: 1982, the year in which the dictatorship in Argentina came to an end. Anyone born before 1982, who could have lived through the dictatorship, would no longer be able to hear the sounds. These strangely high frequencies carry a delicate political dimension in that they project the year of upheaval, 1982, onto the music through physiology. However, this audibility limit applies so sharply, if at all, only in an idealistic sense; because hearing ability varies from person to person, and because everyone ages, the annual limit that divides listeners also shifts over time. However, the electronically played high-frequency sounds are only a passive component of construction. Moguillansky has also dealt with the Argentine dictatorship in tones audible to all, more precisely with the senseless but system-preserving work processes of this state apparatus, the so-called "proceso de reorganización national". Four musicians interpret bauauf; they rarely play on their traditional instruments, but mostly with small wooden objects on wooden boxes. Sitting like well-behaved bureaucrats, they carry out their instructions, keeping the big machinery running, but are unable to recognize the goal behind the individual actions. An absurd stamping station at an office ...

Moguillansky and his politically connoted play with the inaudible is a special case in inaudible music, because there is a subgroup that can hear the sound. Although, of course, inaudible music is a special case in itself - how can it be performed if, due to its inaudibility, it is performed involuntarily like Cage's 4'33" sounds? The sound artist Jana Winderen and the composer Wolfgang Loos, alias KooKoon, have each chosen their own approach to the inaudible frequencies that solves this dilemma: they make them audible. Infrasound has to be played faster so that the sound waves are shifted into the audible range, while ultrasound has to be slowed down. And suddenly you can hear how ants chat, how elephants communicate, even what an earthquake sounds like. Making the inaudible audible has an eco-social dimension. Animals communicate in what is inaudible to us, that is where the world speaks. - But transforming the inaudible into audible music is not so easy. KooKoon, together with Frank Scherbaum, Professor of Geophysics, has subjected the low-frequency seismic waves to a formant analysis and used the results to create a five-movement seismosonic symphony music that consists solely of the transformed seismic waves. While KooKoon's music does indeed rumble and breathe heavily - as you would expect from an earthquake - Winderen's sound art takes you on a journey of discovery. out of range takes the listener into the acoustic world of a floor crack. It rustles and gurgles in your ears as if you were listening to Brownian molecular motion.

The transformation of inaudible sound waves into sound waves that we can hear is also reversible, which means that a piece of music such as Beethoven's Fifth can easily be transferred to a higher frequency range. And so there is also music for bats.

Scene one: A bare, white-painted waiting room. There is nothing more than a hard chair. It blends in beautifully with the wall, tone on tone. Let's imagine we have to stay here and don't know how long. So let's take a seat. The information that the room offers us is quickly scanned. If our attention keeps slipping away from the white wall, we will start looking for a new fixed point. It is possible that such a situation makes us uncomfortable.

Scene two: We are talking to another person. Our mutual familiarity is superficial. The dialog works according to familiar rules: One person talks, the other listens and remains silent. The ball is passed back and forth properly. But then one partner fails to pass the ball and the conversation pauses. The dialog comes to a standstill. We want to get the ball rolling again in search of a continuation. It is possible that such a situation makes us insecure.

Scene three: We are sitting in the concert hall. The musicians have entered, the instruments are tuned. The audience slowly quietens down and the light gives way to darkness. We await the first note, but it doesn't sound. We maintain our concentration for a while. But when the orchestra falls silent, our attention goes searching. It is possible that such a situation makes us restless.

What do all three scenes have in common? We experience silence in three different situations. A silence, however, that we were not looking for. We indulge in the positive silence with joy, find it in life-styled self-discovery meditations or through alpine nature experiences. The other kind of silence, however, throws us into nothingness. It does not relax us, it does not calm us down. It confronts us mercilessly with emptiness.

In the 20th century, a "less-is-more" fashion spread in art, music and literature. In the experimental field of reduction, monochrome paintings were created that denied the eye a fixed point. Or poems that spoke to the reader through pauses. And finally, a music of silence that revealed this emptiness that was difficult to bear. As a musical pioneer, Erik Satie was already exploring the musical treatment of time at the turn of the century. Vexations was the name of his piano piece, which lasted around twenty hours and for which the pianist had to prepare himself with the utmost silence. Post-war composers paid tribute to Satie's aesthetic and explored slow and quiet music. If the "less" in the music continues to increase, the silence becomes silence. If the pause "resounds" as deliberately composed silence, then we are confronted with the other side of silence. And with emptiness. "Less is more" becomes "even less is empty".

Wolfgang Rihm points out in the score of his music theater The Hamlet machine points out: "Nothing happens for 30 seconds. Despite horror vacui: count through. "
Philosophers called the child by this name: "Horror Vacui" means the fear of emptiness. A 30-second pause is treacherous, which can rarely be said of music that lasts 30 seconds. Whether as a listening audience or performing musician: if the music is silent, our fixed point becomes blurred, time expands. The emptiness that joins us has no direction. When the searching gaze slips off the white wall, a new fixed point must be found. That's why we feel the urge to fill empty spaces, end pauses and break silences. How good that our mind will help us: Whenever situations become unpleasant, it will look for shortcuts, avoid uncertainties or prevent them altogether. It wastes no time in doing so. Let's take the third scene: in the concert hall, we are waiting for the orchestra to start playing. Our mind will reliably become active. It ensures that our gaze, fixed on the stage, slowly feels its way to the edge of the stage. We will realize that our seating position is not the most comfortable and correct it. The person sitting next to us does the same. The emptiness awakens our senses. We bounce our legs, turn our heads and take a deep breath. Our thoughts jump. We will watch people or go through the shopping list. The tactics for refocusing are many and varied. There is a lot to discover in the communal horror vacui. We don't have to fear the void, because it naturally sparks creative potential. Seen in this light, the void does not exist.

Scene four: Let's trust that our minds will fill any empty space as if by magic. Let's simply take a confident seat in the white-painted waiting room. Together with a silent stranger, we wait for the promised piece of music to begin. Our mind will become active and bridge the tense silence. Perhaps relaxation is already setting in. At the latest when the music starts, the burden can fall from our shoulders. It is possible that we will get up with the first note to leave the room and start searching for a new fixed point: a place where we can celebrate the silence and emptiness a little more.

Laptop noise, birdsong, an off-screen jigsaw, the city humming its drone from afar. Doors slamming in the courtyard, children's voices, the rattling of a moped exhaust, airplanes that will land on Tegel airfield in a few moments. The average backdrop of a city in 2014, in the morning, in a quiet Berlin side street. The construction work is omnipresent. The noise produced by the grinding, sawing and drilling machines is part of my environment. Work goes on non-stop here, if not on the street, then in the house. An everyday backdrop, my silence. The quiet stillness that is and has always been described as spiritual in the history of music (especially that of the 20th century) and beyond - it doesn't exist, it probably never has.

I encounter a different listening situation on a February evening at Berghain in Berlin. The club, which techno fans from all over the world flock to every weekend, was playing noise music that evening: Pressure on the ears, assault on the body. Concentrated listening is hardly possible. Instead, my body is "involuntarily" attacked by the sounds, walled up. Gradually, after what felt like 20 minutes, the ear got used to the masses of noise and differences began to quietly emerge on the auricle: shredded MP3 remnants, feedback loops, sounding data garbage.

This noise, the almost unbearable din, is actually the supposed counterpart to the rather romanticized "silence" described at the beginning. The often-used phrase of the Wall Of Soundthat is what for once is appropriately attributed here in terms of sound. Yasunao Tone is the composer, sound artist and performer of this music and probably one of its most important representatives in noise circles. As with other of his Fluxus contemporaries, the Japanese composer's field of activity is diverse; he has worked with Merce Cunningham and John Zorn, among others. In the 1980s, however, Tone devoted himself primarily to the manipulation and preparation of CDs and has since created his music from the maltreatment of digital, binary codes. This aesthetic and sonority of the glitch is exemplified above all in his piece Solo for Wounded CDTone sticks strips of tape on the side of the CD to be read by the laser so that the CD player plays back the binary data "incorrectly".

But what does the music of the noise musician Tone have to do with silence? One might think that silence and noise are two irreconcilable poles, with music situated somewhere in between: as an organized structure consisting of sound and silence. However, these fixed points are no longer considered normative and rigid, as music has proven many times in the 20th century: Noise was emancipated and silence was used for compositions and concepts. However, the fact that even this dualism, as proposed here, does not necessarily work, but is softened as a figure, is demonstrated by the music of Tone and, more broadly, Noise.

In addition, noise as a musical genre should not be labeled exclusively with the attributes of violence and noise. Because - and here there are certainly similarities with what we call silence - noise also always addresses the perception of sounds and music, indeed noise can even be heard contemplatively. This can be seen in pieces by the Polish composer Zbigniew Karkowski. The composition White can be found on a Zeitkratzer CD with the title Noise ... [Noise]; the subtitle: "To Listen To At An Extremely Loud Level". Despite the overwhelming volume and density of the sound events, a piece of music like this leaves the listener a free space and the possibility of orientation in the sound events. Similar to listening to the landscape, one can speak here of listening into the density of sound. In the listening modes of Noise, at least the possibility of a gentle contact between these different poles is revealed. For both phenomena - silence and noise - have an inherent idea of sonic material that can be experienced sensually and physically.

However, the fact that Yasunao Tone is not concerned with similarities to the phenomenon of silence is most explicitly demonstrated by the composition Imperfection Theorem of Silence in which silence is thematized directly. For this, he uses "soundless" pauses from his piece Wounded Soutai Man'yo BOOK III and processes this supposedly silent material into a new composition. The result is a short piece that is rather quiet in comparison, but nevertheless interspersed with noise and interference. Silence is thus reinterpreted as the sounding material of a noise piece. There is nothing to be said against listening to this music contemplatively and thus incorporating modes of perception of silence. More important than this perception, however, is the de-romanticization of silence, which in the history of music over the last hundred years has taken on an almost mythical quality; Nono, Cage and Pärt come to mind. Noise deconstructs the idea of silence as contemplation, of silence as more natural retreat and demythicizes it. Noise as a negation of communication and communicability deliberately produces errors, is intended to be flawed and thus celebrates the disruption of calm and digital smoothness and the disruption of the romanticism of silence, which is always fictitious anyway. The music of Noise thus also reflects our sonic environment.

Nowadays, it seems paradoxical that the winter months, and Advent in particular, are considered the "quiet season" - after all, they are dominated by noisy Christmas carols on a continuous loop, loudspeaker announcements about one-off Christmas bargains and whining children. All in all, not at all pleasant noises. And escaping them turns out to be more of a challenge than you might think. Even when nature resorts to its last resort and tries to "calm" the world with sound-absorbing snow, a pop version of the Christmas classic can still be heard omnipresent and, ironically, quietly from some corner Silent night.

This song, written down in 1818 by the Austrian Franz Xaver Gruber, deals with expressing silence in the form of sounds. The "silent night", in the Christian context the night of the birth of Christ, can be seen as the epitome of the "silent song", a musical state of melodious sounds.

He chooses the form of the siciliana, a type of movement characterized by a striking dotted rhythm, which nonetheless evokes the memory of a pastoral lullaby. This rhythm and the undulating, oscillating melody lend the song an almost static, resting character, which is reinforced by the predetermined piano, which fades away to almost nothing. One can almost imagine that the shoots of "silent night" is like a mother's soothing whisper to her child. The Duden's definition of silence seems to apply perfectly here - the cozy night is disturbed neither by a noisy nor by an unpleasant sound.

The fascination that this song exerts on the world is reflected in its unparalleled reception. Just ten years after its composition, it was performed throughout Europe and the USA, and today it exists in countless languages. It is available in over a hundred versions, from Heintje and Heino to Elvis Presley and the Tiroler Herzensbrechern. It is hardly surprising that such a popular song has also found its way into art music. Its subject matter, silence, the confrontation with "non-sound", has always preoccupied art music. In New Music, it became a theme, especially in the 1950s with John Cage. His staging of silence is regarded as the starting point for a number of compositions that thematize silence. The search was on for sounds that bordered on the audible. This period gave rise to particularly quiet works, interspersed with pauses and dynamic extremes, which morendo come out of nowhere and go into nowhere.

Slightly later than Cage, Krzysztof Penderecki also sets out to create his Dimensions of time and silence (1959/1960) dealt intensively with the phenomenon. But the idea of addressing the topic with the song Silent night, holy night It was not until almost twenty years later that he came up with the idea of linking the two. He alludes to this in his 2nd Symphony and gives it the subtitle Christmas Symphony. In this way, he draws the listener's attention to the song, which almost "rings in" in the work itself. The composition, which was premiered in 1980 under its dedicatee Zubin Mehta, is based on a simple sonata movement. In this structure, three signal-like Silent night, holy night The first two times are also clearly marked "quasi da lontano". However, Penderecki does not quote the Christmas carol in its entirety. Only the first bar, quasi the first "Silent Night", is heard. The quotation is therefore more like a reminiscence which, due to its brevity and sounding from a distance in pianissimo - almost emblematically - evokes Christmas associations. For him, the silence seems to express itself in the fleeting memory that recalls a lost past through the quotation alone.

Alfred Schnittke's treatment of the Christmas carol two years earlier was quite different. His Silent Night for violin and piano, premiered in 1978, is, in contrast to Penderecki's 2nd Symphony, an arrangement, not an allusion. He quotes the song in its entirety, but gradually alienates it. At the beginning, the violin plays soloistically in double stops against a seemingly clear G major melody. But this is soon disturbed by dissonances, by disturbing second sounds and later by tritones from the piano. The contrast to the original becomes ever clearer. In the last verse, the melody gradually dissolves through harmonics and octave displacements in the violin and fades away in a "ritenuto molto", in silence. Schnittke's arrangement therefore does not end in the return of the familiar, it is not a nostalgic reassurance as in Penderecki's work. With him, the supposedly familiar becomes a new present step by step through its alienation, but it is lost in the silence. At the end, Schnittke leads his Christmas carol back to "a [pleasant] state undisturbed by any noisy, unpleasant sound".

Music doesn't always need a stage. Sometimes two book covers are enough for it to emerge. Of course, texts about music that try to make fleeting sounds comprehensible with words are common. But these descriptions usually "only" attempt to capture on paper what someone else has composed and played. What is rarer and more unusual, however, is when the music is created in the literary text in the first place, without annoying interpreters, so to speak, solely and directly in the reader's head. Musicalized language, such as Kurt Schwitters Ursonatathe prime example of sound poetry, is not meant by this. Rather, it is about music that remains silent, i.e. never really sounds - unless someone takes the trouble to convert this "literary music" into sound waves. It only sounds in the head, which does not necessarily mean that the music is less realistic, and certainly not that it has to be silent music. Hermann Burger's novel Schilten is the best example of this. Burger lets his anti-hero Armin Schildknecht play the keys. When the frustrated primary school teacher sits down at his harmonium in the mortar pit below the gym, he conjures up the apocalypse, makes the inventory shake or plunges his listeners into "silent derangement" or a "melancholy trance".

The literarily composed music as well as the entire "school report for the attention of the inspectors' conference" - as Burger subtitles his novel - is delivered to the reader's "inner" ears with powerful language. The main character, Schildknecht, delivers a first-person report on the state of the school in Schilten, which is both a monologuing psycho-self-analysis and a multifaceted testimony to a high-grade psychological pathology: "My voluntary detention is defused by the fact that I am locked up together with my beloved harmonium. The mixed school and cemetery care of Schilten gave me an instrument to say what I was suffering." In Burger's work, music provides access to the deepest abysses of the novel's character and thus - which is obvious - also to the mental abysses of the author himself: What the harmonium plays becomes a morbid soundtrack that accompanies Schildknecht's self-pitying excesses and gives expression to his struggle with the world around him: "For the duration of the interlude, however, they [the mourners] are exposed to my message. In the first fantasy, I work with the simple trick of panic in enclosed spaces. With octave leaps, I take hold of the proportions of the shabby-green unpleasantness, I also let the cool crypt of the mortar chamber arise at my back, so that the mourners move closer together and anxiously peer for the exits."

Although the music in Schilten although it takes up a lot of space, it is not the subject of the book. After all, the novel would be conceivable without "literary music". Music plays a completely different role in the small autobiographical booklet by Marina Tsvetaeva Mother and the music. Although included in the title, it almost never contains music. The author describes her problematic attitude towards it all the more poetically. Her mother wanted to raise her to be a musician, but daily piano practice was a constant source of frustration for the girl Marina: "When I wasn't playing, Assya was playing, when Assya wasn't playing, Valeria was practicing and - drowning us all out and covering us up - her mother, all day and almost all night!" The story revolves around music and the struggle with it, which is actually the struggle with the mother: "But - I loved her. I loved the music. Only I didn't love my music. The child knows no future, it lives in the now (which always means). Now there were only scales, canons and shabby 'little pieces' that offended me with their inconspicuousness."

Working and agonizing over music is also the subject of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. However, the book delves much deeper into historical, musicological and theoretical considerations of music than the works of Burger and Tsvetaeva. Thomas Mann modeled his main character on the composer Arnold Schönberg and at the same time linked him to the archetypal Faust. The composer Adrian Leverkühn has made a pact with the devil and, thanks to him, can work like a man possessed with a guarantee of brilliant ideas. Thomas Mann has thus created a literary monument to twelve-tone music based on great connoisseurship. He thus builds a unique bridge between music and literature that is much stronger than Burger's and Tsvetaeva's, because it goes beyond literary and poetic playfulness. On the other hand, there are hardly any concrete descriptions of sounds. Instead, the book as a whole can be interpreted as a musical form, as suggested by Theodor W. Adorno. He noted about the Doctor Faustus"Fausti's journey to hell as a great ballet score." The ballet to read, it would also be worth a few thoughts.