When reading a poem or listening to a piece of classical music, what do you immediately notice? Perhaps, the first things that come to mind are words, phrases, notes, or the melody – probably not silence. Silence’s importance is easily overlooked by virtue of its nature of being the absence of sound. We are much more inclined, in general, to notice the presence of something (sound in this case) rather than the lack of that something, but silence plays an important, if somewhat easily disregarded, role in the way we perceive and interpret some forms of art.
Consider, for example, the punctuation in a poem. Apart from just detailing grammatical information, punctuation tells a reader when to pause and give a little moment of silence in the reading of a poem. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is famous for this. Often, rather than using traditional punctuation, Dickinson used dashes, which could be described as protracted visual instants of silence, to indicate pauses in her poetry. These pauses allow the reader time to stop and consider what has been said. For example, in Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –,†the last stanza reads:
Though I than He – may longer live
He longer must – than I –
For I have but the power to kill,
Without – the power to die –
If you place an intentional pause at each dash, the poem takes on a different feel than if you just read it straight through. The dashes and pauses create a sense of hesitation and mystery, allowing a meaningful interpretation of the poem to truly begin to unravel for the reader
Artist, Jen Bervin, shows the importance of Dickinson’s dashes and consequently the importance of silence in Dickinson’s poems in a very unique way. Bervin has takes images of Dickinson’s fascicles and quilted them onto large sheets of muslin and silk. In several of these creations, she has sewn the words in black, but highlighted Dickinson’s unique punctuation in red, reinforcing the importance of that punctuation and the way in which it is read. To see images of Bervin’s work, go to http://www.jenbervin.com/html/dickinson.html.
In music, silence is the stable realm around which sound is constructed. In a concert hall, before a piece begins, the audience is expected to quiet down. In between pieces, once again, a hush will fall, and at the end of a piece, before the applause begins, there is another moment of silence. These pauses and silences take the audience through moments of anticipation, enjoyment, and resolution, allowing the listeners to build up excitement for the concert to come and then calmly let the experiences of the music come to a full and satisfactory resolution.
Ultimately, the role of silence is to uphold, reinforce, and allow time to digest the content that one has just enjoyed. It gives the listener or reader a chance to fully appreciate what they have just seen.
So, don’t forget to relish the silences. They may be small and unobtrusive, but they too are important.
