Psychologists, with a name for everything, call it sedatephobia. Fear of silence. The compulsion to talk when the room falls quiet, to switch on the radio in an empty room, to rush from country quiet back to the reassuring roar of town. In part, this is about noise pollution. In part, it’s about hearing rather than listening, passivity rather than action. By calling his solo recital at the Barbican’s Milton Court The Music of Silence, the pianist Steven Osborne confronted the matter head on, with music by Morton Feldman (1926-87) and George Crumb (b1929). Although the works of these American avant garde composers had outbursts of noisy eruption, the primary issue was stillness. Even the tiny clicks of expanding and contracting overhead lights sounded fortissimo against the quietness of Osborne’s playing. No one clapped between pieces. There was barely a fidget or a cough. Nothing disturbed the concentration. The whole experience was a kind of enchantment.
It’s a truism to say music starts with silence and returns to it (the Oxford University music faculty runs a module called “Before ‘Silence’ and After”. It’s a big subject to unpack. I won’t try). Some of the most dramatic moments in music are when it stops: that big pause at the close of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus or the hazardous last six chords of Sibelius’s fifth symphony. Feldman and Crumb are from another world, dissimilar one from the other but both preoccupied with the infinitesimal gradations of sound, often hushed to a point of near inaudibility. Much of Feldman’s music is slow, soft and with long rests in which tolling chords can reverberate in their decay. Osborne played the early Intermission 5 (1952) and the late, expansive Palais de Mari (1986). The Crumb pieces – Processional and A Little Suite for Christmas – use thicker textures, drones and various extended piano techniques, with a louder presence but still retreating to hushed and fragmentary extremes. Osborne has recorded the same repertoire for Hyperion. Best listened to in a sound-proofed room with headphones, though I liked the alert quietude of Milton Court.
