A spiral staircase leads to the basement of the State Institute for Music Research in the heart of Berlin. Here, behind the inconspicuous white-painted iron door, is probably the quietest place in the city, an anechoic chamber. It was built in the early 1980s and is now used for voice and instrumental recordings. When I open the heavy double doors, I am met by a blast of stale air. The walls are completely upholstered with skin-colored insulating wedges. The floor consists of a floating grid, which absorbs 99 percent of the noise. Not a single sound from outside gets in. No sound is transmitted through the house-in-house construction. And even if I were to scream, nobody outside would hear it.

In this "Camera silens" I want to start my self-experiment. I want to find out how pleasant or agonizing silence can be. How long will I be able to stand it here? What will I perceive? Will I have an experience that I will remember for a long time and with pleasure?

Studies in soundproof booths were carried out as early as the end of the 19th century. In the psychology laboratory at Yale University, there was a "room in a room" in which test subjects were subjected to experiments behind thick walls and double doors, shielded from the outside world. This had the advantage that they were not influenced or distracted by the test supervisors and equipment.(1) In the 1950s, experiments were carried out in the USA and Canada with sensory deprivation, the deprivation of sensory impressions. The aim was to research mental illnesses and find new treatment methods. The Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb placed his test subjects in closed rooms. Their perceptions were additionally blocked by blindfolds, soundproof headphones and gloves. The result was anxiety attacks and hallucinations. Similar experiments were carried out in Prague and Hamburg in the 1960s.(2)

The social researcher Albert Biderman wrote in the late 1950s that isolation, disorientation and stress could break people's will. His writings were used to train interrogation specialists in Guantánamo.(3)

Silence is a method of torture that is used in many countries. In its latest torture report, the human rights organization Amnesty International names isolation as one of many methods of torture practiced worldwide. Victims are held in solitary confinement for months or even years. Solitary cells are also known from prisons, for example those of the GDR State Security in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. No daylight penetrated the cellar wing. The time of day and season were therefore indeterminable. There was also no contact with fellow prisoners. It was only possible to communicate with each other by knocking. Former inmates reported hallucinations, mental and depressive disorders, emotional dullness and extreme sensitization to sounds and visual stimuli.(4)

Back to the underground of the State Institute for Music Research. Fortunately, it is not completely dark in the anechoic chamber; a basement lamp dangles in the corner. The pressure on my ears is unpleasant, as if they were stuffed with absorbent cotton. There is also a tinnitus-like whistling. I can clearly hear the sounds of my body. Nevertheless, I also feel safe between all the foam rubber.

I have a watch with me, otherwise I would find it difficult to estimate the time. Shielded from daylight and air, it passes faster than usual. By now, 25 minutes have passed. Although it's actually impossible, I imagine I can hear noises from outside, like from a playground. Are these hallucinations already? The scratching of my pencil on the paper calms me down. A member of the institute staff peeks in briefly for security reasons. After he closes the doors again, the noise in my ears intensifies. Ten minutes later, a slight headache spreads. I can feel my heart beating. My left eyelid starts to twitch.

If no sounds can be heard, as here in the anechoic chamber, the perception of time is disturbed. There is also a rational explanation for the hallucinations. As the brain is dependent on permanent stimulation, the nerve cells discharge themselves again and again. This is how the "artificial" images are created.(5)  This was also reported by test subjects who took part in the BBC trial. Total isolation took part. They spent 48 hours shielded in complete darkness in a bunker. During this time, they saw cars, snakes and even zebras. More than 60 years after the initial research, the consequences of isolation have apparently not yet been fully investigated.

We city dwellers actually long for silence. As often as possible, we try to take a break from the noise and stress. Here - in the middle of the city center - it is finally completely quiet. And it's almost unbearable.

An hour has now passed. The constant pressure on my ears, which won't go away even when I yawn, and the tinnitus beeping won't let up. I have to get out again, into reality. I heave the foam rubber upholstery and the heavy door aside, walk up the spiral staircase, past the doorman, and can finally breathe fresh air again. The sun is blinding. I squint my eyes and think: how much more daylight must mean to prisoners after days, months or years than it does to me now!

Notes
1 Cf. Schmidgen, Henning, Camera Silenta. Time Experiments, Media Networks, and the Experience of Organlessness, in: Osiris, Vol. 28, No. 1, Music, Sound and Laboratory from 1750-1980, University of Chicago Press 2013, p. 171 ff.
2 Cf. on this paragraph: Koenen, Gerd, Camera Silens. The phantasm of "extermination detention", http://www.gerd-koenen.de/pdf/Camera_Silens.pdf, p. 8 ff., accessed on 19.05.2014.
3 Cf. Mausfeld, Rainer, Psychology, "white torture" and the responsibility of scientists, in: Psychological Review, 60 (4), Göttingen 2009, p. 233.
4 Cf. Lazai, Christina; Spohr, Julia; Voss, Edgar, The central remand prison of the communist state security service in Germany as reflected in victims' reports, http://www.stiftung-hsh.de/downloads/CAT_212/ZZ-InterviewauswertungMGB-MfSONLINE.pdf, accessed on 18.05.2014.
5 Cf. Kasten, Erich, Psychological Phenomenon: When the brain goes on a trip, http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/psychologisches-phaenomen-wenn-das-hirn-sich-auf-einen-trip-macht- a-795483.html, accessed on 19.05.2014.
 

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.
 

If you look up the word "silence" in the Duden dictionary, you will be surprised: "A state that is not disturbed by any noisy, unpleasant sound", it says. Contrary to all assumptions, silence includes "sounds", but only pleasant, non-noisy sounds.

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

A concert grand piano. It is on stage for the upcoming solo recital. I, the pianist of the evening, step up, walk to the instrument, sit down, place my hands on the keys without pressing them down and play a work that consists of silence.

I imagine this scenario as I sit at the piano in my study and ask myself the question: What does silence mean at the piano?

Silence is an extreme form of musical expression. What is decisive in silence is what precedes it and what comes after it, like a pause, in an enlarged form. But what if the framework of silence lies outside the composition, because the whole piece consists only of silence?

Is such a work an expression of musical speechlessness? Does it lead the listener to their own inner sounds? Does such a composition purify the ears? Does it uncover a deeper musical layer?

I'll start with the instrumentation. If, as a composer, I opt for silence on the piano, then this instrument plays a central role without a single note being played. Silence can direct the audience's focus to the visual appearance of the grand piano. Silence can stimulate the memory of the sound of the piano, can awaken a longing for piano music. Silence at the piano can be like music.

The performance instructions are essential for the message of such a composition. If they specify that the pianist should place his hands on the keys without pressing a key, a different silence is created than if the pianist is sitting in front of his instrument with his hands folded in his lap. It is important whether the pianist has his gaze directed towards the piano or lowered, whether he is looking outwards or inwards.

The position of the hands on the keys plays an important role. If the pianist places the left hand in an extremely low bass position and the right hand in an extremely high treble position, the appearance of the silence will be different than if the pianist places the hands around the C of the key.

The desired basic message of the composition is central to these decisions: is it about the non-resounding of a piano piece in which the hand positions show what is not sounding? Is it about a silence that blocks the pianist and prevents him from playing? Is it about showing that there is no silence after all, but that every little rustle is also part of the music, or is it about reaching a kind of meditative silence that can be a door to inner auditory impressions? Since the acoustic identity of the instrument is lost in the composition of silence, the visuals play an even greater role. There is a shift in emphasis.

The structure that the composer has chosen for the silence is also interesting. The composed silence can, for example, consist of a single pause. The composed silence can be made up of lots of small rests. If the pause values become smaller and smaller over the course of the piece, is this an accelerando of silence?

From a compositional point of view, the beginning of the piece points the way. If I, as the composer, clearly show the listener when the silent work begins, the effect is different than if I let the listener gradually discover that the piece has already begun. As a rule, the grand piano is already silent on the stage during the entrance. Is this already the performance of a composition of silence without a pianist? Is there even a need for an interpreter for such a work?

The beginning and end of the silence form a necessary framework that defines the silence and shapes its identity. The pianist plays a central role in this. Silence overrides the expectation that something will sound on the instrument. The pianist is also needed for this. The pianist's performance and the beginning of the defined silence create a concentrated silence, a guided silence. Since silence is always in relation to something, the dynamic range of the grand piano is also an important reference. The grand piano is a large, powerful instrument and the silence on the piano is oriented towards it. Silence at the piano can take away what the pianist is most familiar with on stage: playing the piano. Silence at the piano requires new skills from the pianist that have their origins in choreography or the performing arts.

Silence as a musical manifestation is not a marginal phenomenon, but an elementary component of music. Dealing with this topic leads composers, performers and listeners directly to fundamental musical, compositional, interpretational and philosophical questions.

I can only recommend the mental journey to silence on a selected instrument. Silence acts like a magnifying glass and immediately brings the central themes of the respective instrument into play.

I have been sitting quietly in front of my grand piano in my study for quite a while now. After this journey of thought, I feel a great need to make the instrument sound. I am curious to hear how I perceive its sound now.
 

While browsing in the souvenir store, my eyes fall on a postcard: a line of music that runs across the entire width of the card. There is a treble clef at the beginning, otherwise it is blank. "Enjoy the peace", reads the caption. It reminds me of a series of black and white prints, the sheet music by Johannes Kreidler, which follow exactly the same pattern: a graphic of music symbols with a title, the principle of minimalism, as in the sheet Sunsetwhich consists of only one stave and a single note.

Although the postcard motif is nice and somehow sophisticated, it still looks pale against the background of Kreidler's works. The sheets obviously have something that the postcard does not, but which remains hidden at first glance. But what?

The key to this lies in its origins: its creator is not a graphic designer with a particular flair for originality, but an artist, performer and, above all, a composer. In recent years, Kreidler has repeatedly attracted attention for his innovative and provocative works and actions, which he always places in a theoretical context. New conceptualism is the catchphrase under which the 34-year-old understands his current work and on whose soil the sheets are also planted. What counts is the idea, for the realization of which all means and media of art are permitted. How and whether it sounds is secondary. With the sheet musicwhich Kreidler has been creating since 2013, he completely turns away from the audible: He composes graphics from sheet music, "eye music" - and that too with a concept.

As far as the material is concerned, this concept is very simple: white background, black font, type: Times New Roman, a triad with title 1+2=3without frills. The postcard contradicts this with its red, italicized slogan, which reveals that it wants to be pretty. The sheet music doesn't want that, at least not only. Above all, it wants to communicate something, and the viewer generates this communication himself by relating the two layers of signs to each other. 1+2=3 does not actually show a triad, but notation symbols that we call a triad because of their arrangement and the title. The title sets limits to the scope for association, a principle that Kreidler already applied in a similar way in his action External work tested. There, he influenced auditory perception by always playing the same music with different introductions. He called this "prepared hearing", and here he provides the counterpart: "prepared seeing".
 

Johannes Kreidler

"Sunrise for Bejiing" (2014)

The postcard works in the same way: the image and title make a statement that is relatively easy to grasp and unambiguous. Once we have understood it, we look away. The sheets, on the other hand, hold our attention through their individuality, openness and mysteriousness. Their interpretation is not only a cognitive but also a creative achievement. Each sheet provides food for thought that can lead in very different directions. Only irony forms a continuum, as in the sheet Sunrise for Beijing. A few graphic elements, in combination with the commentary that accompanies the sheet on Kreidler's blog Cultural techno adds, as a cocktail of gallows humor and social criticism: "Because of the extreme smog, the image of a sunrise is shown on a large LED screen in Beijing."

However, most of the sheets lead thematically back to the origin of the small forms. "I want everyone to think about music now!" What Kreidler demanded in one of his performances also applies to the sheets. They take up topoi from music history, process them in a playful way and expand them with subtle punchlines, such as Tristan Motive, altogethera cluster that unites all the notes of the Tristan motif - Kreidler's contribution to a never-ending debate in music theory.

Ultimately, the prints as a whole can also be understood as reflections on the digital tools of today's composer. The mass accumulations of notation symbols in the sheet series Deposits stand for the limitless availability of the material, which nowadays seems to be better stored in graphics than in scores. The sheets introduce us to the software both as a tool that facilitates notation and makes it easier to communicate, and as a medium that creates a distance between author and notation. The seemingly arbitrary composition of musical notation, e.g. in Beach Gamehas symbolic status: the composer is no longer the master of what he enters into the computer.

But Kreidler has his notes under control: he deliberately moves signs to create awareness. He composes, just not sounds. Is sheet music music at all? An almost philosophical question, to which Kreidler takes a clear stance: "Music also has to get out of the time-base. Music is not only acoustic, it also has its [sic!] visual contexts. It is then still music." In fact, only a few of the images suggest an acoustic moment. Kreidler's answer belies the complexity of the matter, just as many a sheet belies the serious thoughts of its relatives: a line of music that stretches across the entire width of a canvas. There is a circular note in the fourth space, otherwise it is empty. "Asshole", reads the caption. Provoke - the postcard cannot do that either.

Someone has dropped a bucket of paint. Traces of bicycle tires, footprints, lines, arcs and rhythms in white on the large square. This accident of color shows the image of many past movements. As I look at these white traces and trace them with my eyes and in my thoughts, a quote comes to mind: "All perception of noise in art has the form of a dance, however motionless we may perform it."(1)

I like this sentence and I think something about it feels true. However, something about it has always bothered me. At this moment, I'm particularly fascinated by the contrast: motionless - dance / silent - music. Also because I've been wondering for a long time how it actually works to hear music inside your head, even though there's silence outside your ears.

During a soundwalk with Hildegard Westerkamp, I realized for the first time that there is such a thing as an inner world of sound. The Canadian composer used the term when she prepared us for the fact that we would not be able to turn off our thoughts during the tour. They would always be audible inside us, no matter how much we concentrated on the sounds outside. So I was prepared for this and didn't let it bother me as we walked silently through Darmstadt's pedestrian zone. Together we listened to the metal gully rattling under our feet, the midday bells from the church tower mingling with the sound of engines and the fuzzy, indistinct sound of the bicycle bell in the echo of the underpass. But then the noise of the advertising messages caught me off guard. STOP! SUPER CHEAP! ONLY €3.99!", I rumbled, even though nobody said a word. Images and slogans, signs and fonts were all jamming into me. Where there is writing, I realized, there can be no silence for those who can read it.

Then I began to observe the hustle and bustle and play in my inner world of sound and to wonder about it. Does everyone actually hear their own voice in their inner ear when they read, I asked myself? Or are there other voices too? And if so, where do they come from? Can they be shaped? Can you hear what I hear inside, even if there is silence outside?

One composer who works with the sound of inner voices is the Lithuanian Ignas Krunglevicius. In his performance Deviance (2011), a conversation between three parties is projected in written form onto three screens: an interrogation, a therapy session, a clarifying conversation between a judge or therapist, a pair of parents and a psychopath who has committed brutal murders. The appearance of the words is accompanied by percussive signals from eight musicians. The characters emerge on their own in the silence in between: three voices. Capital letters provide more volume inside, an exchange of blows ensues. And there, a gender twist! The whole time I thought the brutal, perverse killer was a man. But no, it must be a girl! And the voice I had imagined changes, briefly remaining in a strange slanting position, half man, half woman, before tilting in one direction: There! The girl!

It is not really surprising that letters have an effect on the inner world of sound. After all, they were invented to symbolize sounds. What is more puzzling is that the deciphering of these symbols has sunk into us so quietly. As Alberto Manguel explains in his book A history of reading describes, reading was originally a noisy activity: "Since the first Sumerian clay tablets, written words were intended to be spoken aloud: Each written character carried within it a certain sound - like a soul. [...] Confronted with a written word, the reader must recognize the silent letter, the scriptaand give them a voice [...] in verbainto spoken words."(2) The mumbling and chatter that used to be heard everywhere when someone was reading is now mostly carried around inside.

The Irish composer Jennifer Walshe demonstrates a great sensitivity for the inner world of sound in her works. However, she evokes the inner sounds not with the help of letters, but through the use of video. In Violetta Mahon's Dream Diaries 1988-2008 four video images are shown next to and on top of each other. They show the melting of a chocolate bunny. How pastel-colored sweets with love motifs are put down and taken away again. How a battery-operated stuffed bunny drums. Sometimes there are only two pictures. Sometimes one on top of the other, sometimes crossed. The parallel movements create something like polyphony, but without a single voice being heard. Walshe sees video as an essential component of her compositions: "The video is never a seperate element that somebody else composes, its something that I compose."(3)

But what happens in the inner world when you watch these videos? Can I really call it sound? Is it not rather a feeling for rhythm, for motifs, for lines and arcs ... Is it music - or is it rather - a dance?

I look at the white tracks on the road, and suddenly I know what bothers me about the quote. What's with the noise anyway? "All perception of art has the form of a dance, however motionless we may perform it." An inner, motionless dance, when reading texts, listening to music, looking at pictures and videos.

White footprints, bicycle tires. Lines and arcs. A dance in my inner world.

Notes
1 Martin Seel: Aesthetics of appearance, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2003
2 Alberto Manguel: A history of reading, Berlin Verlag Volk und Welt, 1998, p. 60
3 Jennifer Walshe in an interview with the author at the Darmstadt Summer Course, August 2012