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Good evening.
It's difficult for a musician to speak about silence,
but it is a subject that has recently
been intriguing me more and more,
partly because I think of silence
like an amniotic fluid into which one pours music.
I am convinced that silence is vital,
because it is that kind of silence that probably
fills the composer's mind
when inspiration or knowledge
suggests the first note
or the first musical phrase.
So, music and silence.
Two elements.
I'm here to make music,
you are here to be silent
and receive this music.
But today I wanted to take
a slightly different approach,
and try to travel, together, to a point where
I listen to the music,
you listen to the music,
I listen to the silence
and you listen to the silence.
In these experiments -
going to play in the middle of the desert,
on mountaintops -
I found that the pursuit of silence has the opposite result.
That is, it lets the sounds come forward,
enhances them in some way,
and it made €‹me realize that perhaps silence
is an element that one never takes into consideration
when making "three-dimensional" music.
Now we are in the age of 3D.
Music is always with us, like a backdrop:
there is time, there is sound,
but we probably miss that one element
that gives depth to these two fundamental elements,
sound and time, and that is silence.
I would therefore like to get
to a three-dimensional kind of listening.
So onto the music, starting with a piece from the past,
given that connecting the past and the future is today's topic.
It's a prelude to a suite by Bach,
which is a piece of music that fills the acoustic space,
and this was what all composers were looking to do.
They were trying to talk all the time.
But in this prelude, at a certain point
there's a "hole", a sudden pause.
I hope that pause will let you "go beyond",
will allow you to "see" the first silence, the first blank space.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thank you. The grandfather of all cellists,
Pablo Casals, who also discovered the suites,
and brought Bach's suites to life,
used to tell his students, I read recently,
not to hold onto the sounds, but to let them get
to pianissimo, to near-silence,
so that the next sound
became more interesting, came to life.
The silence therefore ensures that every sound
is considered and valued.
That's what he used to say.
So now let's hear
this other sarabande by Bach, from the fifth suite,
where between one note and the next
you can always make out this silence
which makes the sound three-dimensional.
(Music)
(Applause)
Then in the '70s there was a composer,
Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who used a very interesting system:
the distance of the notes,
in pitch from lowest to highest,
and from brightest to deepest,
this distance determines the value of the note itself.
So this is a way to create
a three-dimensional space around the sound.
This piece which he wrote,
shortly before committing suicide
by shooting himself,
is part of four pieces about the four elements.
This one is about air.
(Music)
(Applause)
And then in 1952 there was John Cage.
John Cage composed this piece,
"4 minutes and 33 seconds",
which created a rift
between the music that came before and after it.
John Cage said that silence does not exist,
silence is just an acceptance of existing sounds.
While in an anechoic chamber,
where there should be no noise at all,
he could still make out two sounds, one high and one low.
They explained that one was his nervous system
and the other was the circulation of his blood.
Therefore, he concluded that silence does not exist.
He wrote this piece, which goes for 4 minutes and 33 seconds,
in three movements, and I'd like to perform it for you.
[Performing John Cage's 4'33"]
(Applause)
