MIRIO COSOTTINI
Interview by Daniel Barbiero, Part 2
(June 2017)
During late winter and early spring of this year, Mirio Cosottini and I conducted a transatlantic email conversation about silence and its implications for music and beyond. The occasion of our conversation was the publication of Mirio’s book Playing with Silence: Introduction to a Philosophy of Silence. What follows is the second part of our two-part discussion; Part One appeared in the previous issue of PSF.
PSF: You're addressing the phenomenology of musical perception gets to what I consider to be the heart of the matter. Silence is phenomenal, which is to say a feature of the world to the extent that the world appears to us as we disclose it through our practical and cognitive activities. And in order to disclose something as silence or in silence, it seems a certain degree of receptivity is called for.
MC: Every perception implies a certain degree of receptivity, which has to do with the question of passive synthesis, and therefore of all those perceptual operations that do not depend on our judgmental activities. Even silence, as it falls within the scope of perception, is passively constituted, meaning it responds to rules of perception in general. But what interests us is to understand the way in which silence emerges and structures musical practice, and also the differences by which we distinguish the various types of silence. For example, how does one characterize the silence that precedes the start of a musical work and how do we distinguish that from the silence that follows the end of a piece of music? Undoubtedly, the work "conditions" the silences that precede and follow it. In addition, time and imagination (as that which does not belong to mere phenomenal data) play an important role in the perception of silence. All these considerations lead us to maintain that the perception of silence implies a certain degree of receptivity, but this does not exhaust the way a musician (or listener) perceives silence.
For example: a group of musicians are improvising. At some point someone plays a sound; everyone senses that the performance is ending. There follows a silence, and the performance is over. So this is a sudden ending that all the musicians take in while they are playing. It’s one of the most exciting endings as it comes unexpectedly and everyone realizes (with some surprise) that the piece is over. The last sound has a particular importance because it marks the transition from musical temporality to the temporality of silence. That sound belongs to one kind of temporality and then gradually begins to abandon it. The silence following maintains the previous temporality but at the same time doesn’t resist it. The weave of time breaks, as that sound announces a silence that is already present. In this silence, the imagination is enriched by the noises of the world that slowly transform it and dissolve musical temporality. Musical time finishes its run; it stops and reveals itself as the silence that we then perceive as a set of sounds--those of the chairs, the audience, and the musicians who are waiting for applause.
The transformation of sound into silence on the part of the musician implies a receptivity but also an act which constitutes and structures its perceptual content.
PSF: You’re mentioning silence in connection with temporality raises an interesting question. It seems to me that when we approach silence in the context of time we uncover something essential about the way we experience time--as a continuum in which we seem to be a stable point, or as something "lumpy" and variable in the way it moves, even to the point of appearing static. All of which would seem to have implications for the way we experience music as listeners or participants.
MC: I agree with you. That lumpy [grumoso] character you speak of depends on the way in which consciousness experiences the contents of consciousness, and that determines different types of temporality. Imagine various kinds of emmitted sounds, different ways in which sound can take form. Guy Reibel, in Jeux Musicaux (Volume 1) lists some of the them: "Held sound," immobile, which has no form, and is open-ended in time;
"percussion-resonant" sound, in which energy is communicated initially and takes the form of "attack-progressive decay-release;"
a "rising-falling" sound that intuitively corresponds to the paired qualities flux/reflux, appearance/disappearance, inhalation/exhalation, etc;
the "backwards sound," like the inverse profile of the "percussive-resonant" sound;
and finally the sound that accelerates and slows,
in which sound rises and diminishes in volume, not with a constant speed but in a wholly unnatural way. Well, each of these sonic profiles determines a silence completely different from the others.
For example, the "held sound" tends to dilate time; the listener isn’t able to predict when such a sound will cease; the development of sound itself seems to be arrested ("held" [tenuto] also means "stopped" [trattenuto]). The flow of sound evidences time as static. When the flow of sound ceases (the sound stops), time rebounds and strongly pushes forward, pulling the contents of consciousness ahead, in the vortex of the present. Here, the silence that follows consumes the future and is characterized by exercising a strong forward tension: that "chunk" of silence inhabits a temporality quite different from a static one.
The silence that follows a "percussion-resonant" sound inhabits a completely different temporality. The sound has a sharp attack and gradual diminution (until it disappears). Shortly after the initial attack, the listener can predict the course the sound will take, in other words, can imagine the sound profile and attribute to it an unfolding in time. The sonic attack impresses time with a certain pacing; with the diminution of sonic intensity, time slows; at the moment in which the sound disappears, time has run its course. The sound consigns the end of its time to silence. Silence now is a lump that absorbs the contents of consciousness in its own static temporality. Silence is static, looks behind, toward the retentive structure of the present.
As can be seen from just these two examples, a chunk of silence can assume various forms and temporalities, which confirms what you said, and from the fact that listening to silence determines the way we perceive music as well as the time it inhabits.
Afterword
In Playing with Silence, Mirio presents silence as a multifaceted, multivalent possibility. Not (necessarily) as a kind of thing, roughly speaking--an event, for example, or an intentional object--or a quality of a thing, but often as a figurative way of describing how one can related to oneself, one’s environment or, in a performance situation, the unfolding performance and one’s fellow performers. For our conversation, though, we tended to focus on silence as a secondary quality or phenomenon. Which is to say as an aspect of the world as it appears to us or—and this is nearly the same thing--as we take it.
Both ways of looking at silence seem to be complementary moments within a larger structure. In order for silence to be present to us we must be present to it in a certain state of attentiveness—a state that, in addition, covers a spectrum of receptivity and correlatively, a spectrum of what is received. Silence turns out to be a complex thing--a matter of degrees that takes on different qualities in different contexts. And we can imagine the "silence" in "playing with silence" as both the object of play and the quality of the playing.
Writer Daniel Barbiero also has an album out with Ken Moore called Lunge on the pan y rosas discos label.
See details here.