“The rest, is silence”

Life is full of contrasts. We can be happy or sad, excited or bored, awake or asleep. We have summer and winter, hot and cold, and so on. We cannot fully experience one without the other. Together they balance the experience. This is also the case in music. We have tension in the music and moments of tranquility. They are both very important. In this blog I would like to talk about rests.

We all know that a rest in music means we don’t have to play. Sometimes we forget how important rests can be. When we practice our pieces alone, we often skip rests because we don’t want to lose valuable playing time. Sometimes we don’t even finish a bar because it ends with a rest. It may be a good idea to at least finish the bar. If you have 20 bars of rest, you are obviously not going to count those bars. But if you don’t finish the bar, it can disrupt our sense of pulse.

The importance of rests becomes even clearer in solo pieces. If we have a rest in orchestral pieces or pieces with piano, it is possible and very likely that the other instruments will take over. In solo pieces the rests become even more equal partners. They provide an important contrast to the sound and rests can be even more exciting than the notes in a piece. Personally, I like to play with silence in a piece. By asking myself ‘what kind of silence am I dealing with?’. Silence has the ability to add a lot of tension to the music, even more so than sound. It is a very strong tool. Two things I find very helpful in really “playing” rest are: not moving during the rest and not using the rest to breathe. Enjoy the silence and only breathe at the very end of the rest.

A very well-known example of what silence can do to the audience is the piece ‘4:33’ by John Cage. In this piece, players do not have to play at all. Sometimes the score indicates when to turn pages. The piece is divided into three parts:

– ‘0:33
– ‘2:40
– ‘1:20

Cage said of this piece: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it”

As you can imagine, people clearly responded to the first performance. First there was silence, then people got uncomfortable, then people got angry and sometimes even left the room.

This piece is an extreme example of what rest (silence) can do. We shouldn’t take it for granted.

As Shakespeare said, “The rest, is silence.”

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