A couple of days ago my good friend Candice asked to see a piece I had written, so I showed her my piano piece, called 88 (above, in case you want to play it). She asked me to explain what was going on in it (theoretically) and I did, and then she asked why there was so much silence in the middle section. I answered that it felt right, given the rest of the piece, and caught the listener's attention.
I've been thinking about that answer for a couple of days, and now have a far better understanding of why the silence seems "right" there. The piece is written to a set of serial parameters, as far as pitch is concerned. This is nothing new; composers have been trying out different ways of writing music mathematically for about a hundred years now. Something that has always fascinated me is how these composers have managed to put their own voices into predetermined, mathematical structures. The silence in my piece, I realized, is my way of inserting myself into something that is predetermined and cannot be changed. The pitches are going to continue in the method that the formula prescribes, but by pausing that formula, I find a way to break the system while operating within its limits. I could have held the rest indefinitely without breaking any of the rules I had set up, but I think if I had done that the audience probably would have walked out at some point. In the most melodramatic of phrases, the silence is me screaming that I exist.
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