Silence and Absence in Literature and Music ed. by Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (review)

Silence and absence—two different but overlapping categories—rank among the most intriguing concepts in cultural studies, challenging the human imagination no less than the representational possibilities of traditional arts and modern media technologies. In fact, the more we seek to understand presence—for instance, the aesthetic beauty of music or the overwhelming noise of (post-)industrial modernity—the more we yearn to encounter their seeming others, absence and silence, only to discover that they are hidden in the very midst of the linguistic, visual, or acoustic appearances that we associate with presence. This dialectic is staged, in particular, by literary discourse and music—the written score as well as its performance. Both art forms seem predestined to critique the metaphysical, material, and affective modalities of absence/silence in ways that allow these elusive and rather enigmatic categories to be experienced in their full experiential complexity without being reduced to mere lack, deficiency, or meaninglessness.

The present volume, the proceedings of a 2013 conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), offers a wide range of insightful and carefully researched articles on a variety of instances of absence/silence in literary texts, musical scores, classical opera, and avant-garde performance. As Werner Wolf observes, absence/silence can appear on the level of the signifier as well as the signified (or even the referent; viii). However, it seems wise to focus, as most contributions do, on the material, media-specific, and aesthetic surface significations rather than on the subject matter that they seek to represent (8). It is always crucial to explicate the different communicative situations and cognitive frames, including various “significance triggers” (Wolf, 8), through which absences and silences are produced and (mis-)understood in their meanings within a given art work, aesthetic genre, or cultural context. As the contributors show, absence and silence are frequently phenomena that cross intermedial and interdisciplinary boundaries. For instance, Lawrence Kramer proposes that musical scores convey sounds (as well as their silencing) analogous to media that resemble pictographs (and even hieroglyphs) rather than alphabetic writing (24). Sounds and their absences carry meaning in themselves but also work as mediators of interpretive acts. As Naomi Matsumoto argues, the metaphysical dialectic of presence and absence offers a “hermeneutic window” (Kramer’s original term) “on causes and motivations in […] literary, musical and dramatic works” (66). Such hermeneutic windows disclose significance not only within the materiality of a musical score or a literary text, but, as Laura Wahlfors shows, even in the rehearsals and actual performances of particular compositions (88). This is especially important for a work like John Cage’s famous piece 4’33”, which, as Karl Katschthaler observes, “foreground[s] the corporeality of the musical performance by silencing the performer” and, one may add, the instrument itself (172).

Several contributions address the fundamental question—haunting musical hermeneutics, literary criticism, and sound studies alike, without ever receiving a definitive answer—of whether and how literary discourse can authentically represent the acoustic properties and aesthetic or spiritual depth-meanings of sound. This question is especially challenging for textual descriptions of musical compositions and performances, which, at least since the Romantic metaphysics of music, often regard themselves as transcending the confines of verbal discourse, whose arbitrary signifier/signified relation is held to be inferior to the presumable coincidence of sound and meaning in music. Beate Schirrmacher traces a variation of this topos of musical ineffability in Eyvind Johnson’s Romantisk berättelse (Romantic Tale), which abstains from describing the sounds of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, focusing instead on the audience’s visual experience of the performing pianist. Peter Dayan shows that many Dadaist performances featured percussive and noise-music as well as tonal compositions but stubbornly refuse to address music at all: “Only music that is not spoken of, music that remains surrounded by silence, can be worthy of its unuttered name” (159). Referring to Luigi Nono’s Al Gran Sole Carico...