THE SOUND OF SILENCE:  the music and aesthetics of the Wandelweiser Group

Dan Warburton wrote in the music magazin “SIGNAL to NOISE” 2001

            Composers on both sides of the Atlantic are usually independent, even solitary, characters and rarely meet, let alone discuss with, other composers outside of board meetings at university faculties and research facilities like Paris' IRCAM or Amsterdam's STEIM. The famous "school" that formed at the Darmstadt summer courses in the years immediately following the trauma of World War II fell apart at the end of the 50s as its principal figures – Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna et al.– went their separate ways, often refusing to speak to each other for years on end. The so-called New York School that formed around John Cage at about the same time (including Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and David Tudor) was more successful from a personal relations point of view (there were no bust ups and ego trips), but was more a loose coalition of like-minded spirits than a structured organisation committed to the publication and performance of its members' work. Back then, of course, putting out albums was no easy business – only a maverick like Sun Ra went the whole distance and threw himself into the creation of a truly independent record label with its attendant problems of logistics and distribution – half a century on, with the advent of desktop publishing, powerful and effective digital recording technology and distribution systems geared to internet and email, composers are no longer at the mercy of the traditional publishing houses and profit-driven major labels.

            In 1992, Dutch-born composer/flutist Antoine Beuger and German Burkhard Schlothauer (composer/violinist) created the Wandelweiser Group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance, recording and publication of their own music. In 1993 Swiss clarinettist and composer Jürg Frey was invited to join, followed by Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti the following year, then American guitarist Michael Pisaro, Swiss pianist Manfred Werder, and more recently American trombonist Craig Shepard (Korean-born Kunsu Shim was an early member but later left the group; other Wandelweisers include Germans Carlo Inderhees (piano), Markus Kaiser (cello) and Thomas Stiegler (violin), Brazilian guitarist Chico Mello and Japanese pianist Makiko Nishikaze). The group runs its own publishing operation, Wandelweiser Edition, and its own record label Timescraper.

            If you haven't heard of the Wandelweiser Group, don't be surprised: even if, without realising it, you had the good fortune to be in a room with one of the group's albums playing in the background, you might not even notice it – for, to quote Radu Malfatti, Wandelweiser music is about "the evaluation and integration of silence[s] rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds. Even though each individual approaches the problem from a different angle, we seem to have an overall consensus of how "real avant-garde music" should or could sound." It's quiet. Very.

            What is silence, anyway? Opinions can differ on the subject (even within the Wandelweiser Group). For Burkhard Schlothauer, "it's necessary to hear the beginning, the being and the end of a sound. It's necessary to have time to forget the sound and create a space in the mind for a new one with its coming, being and going. It's a way of showing them respect."

           Jürg Frey speaks of "many different silences: silence between sounds, before you hear a sound and after you've heard a sound. Silence which never comes into contact with the sounds, but which is omnipresent and exists only because sound exits. Silence is a material.  And material is useful to make pieces with."

            Michael Pisaro turns the traditional notions of sound and silence around: "We become aware that each moment is completely filled with sensations and thoughts. Silence is (for me anyway) far more packed with experience, far more complex than anything we can produce with sound. Paradoxically, it is sound which is (or at least can be) empty. For example, a sustained sound, just barely audible, can be forgotten. It hangs around so long that we get used to it and stop paying attention. At the same time there is just enough to cover much of what would be revealed by a silence. So the sound is there acoustically, but not always mentally. Its presence is finally noticed again only when it disappears. And it leaves a trace – not really a specific memory, just an awareness that something was once there." 

           For Antoine Beuger, silence "has nothing to do with calmness or quietness. It cannot be found in nature. It occurs as an event, as a rupture into the situation one is in. It's not necessarily nice or beautiful, it may well be quite horrifying. In any case it evokes a strong awareness of what is taking place at all, a direct – not symbolic or imaginative – encounter with reality, which means with contingency, singularity, emptiness. Silence in my music always is encounter with reality, enforced by the event of a situation being disrupted without any reason."

            John Cage is still a figure of central importance to the Wandelweiser composers. Beuger traces the roots of his music to Cage: "his decision to consider silence in a non-functional way, implying a radically different way of dealing with intention, structure, time and (musical) experience. Contrary to most current thinking, I consider 4'33" as the beginning – not an end – of a serious involvement with silence as an autonomous musical phenomenon." Cage's notational innovations also remain influential. Michael Pisaro notes that "the heritage of Cage (and the other American experimentalists) is that each idea (each piece) requires an independent notational solution. I think this comes from a sense that notation is not a form of communication, but an incitement to action (or at times, non-action). The character of that action comes in response to the score. There are many beginnings in Cage, many unfinished ideas, many ideas with implications far beyond what he had time to explore." Burkhard Schlothauer puts it more bluntly: "The only composer I'm really interested in is Cage."

            We all know now, half a century on from Cage's infamous 4'33", that real silence doesn't exist. Or so the oft-repeated tale goes of JC sitting in Harvard's anechoic chamber and being able to hear his nervous system ringing and his blood circulating, thereby coming to the conclusion that he was involuntarily making music all the time without hitherto realising it. If by "silence" one means "a total absence of sound", then Cage's observations are (undoubtedly, one assumes) acoustically correct. Most people visiting, say, the Grand Canyon or Death Valley for the first time come away with a very clear idea of what "silence" sounds like: it is the sound of the acoustical space we find ourselves in once all other sounds – man-made or otherwise – have ceased, or become inaudible to the human perceptual apparatus (a clear night out in the desert may seem pretty silent to us ordinary mortals, but it could be mighty noisy for the local bat population).

            In 1960, LaMonte Young wrote a piece entitled "Poem for Tables, Chairs, Benches, etc." which required these heavy objects to be dragged across the floor according to timings determined by his piece "Vision", which "described with insistent precision" (Cardew) eleven sounds to be made over a duration of thirteen minutes. How is silence perceived in these works? Given that Young's sounds are so harsh, so noisy, they impress themselves into the aural memory in a manner analogous to the retinal afterburn experienced after looking at an intensely bright light for a brief moment – they may not be physically audible anymore but they continue to exist in memory. They colour the silence that follows them – Young's silence then is not the same as Cage's. In Radu Malfatti's string quartet, "Das Profil des Schweigens" ("the profile of silence", Timescraper EWR 9801), the sounds, when they appear, are rich in noise – the timbres of bowed wood – but devoid of pitch and rhythmic identity. They do not impose upon the silence that surrounds them – if anything, like tiny pencil lines on a large sheet of white paper, they serve to articulate the perception of silence as an integral element of the work's form.

            "I don't need the silent piece anymore," Cage wrote later in life, presumably meaning that both he himself and attentive listeners to his (and other composers') work had assumed the desired listening practice, a kind of actively contemplative openness-of-ear to all sounding events, be they written in the score or occurring simultaneously within (or outside) the performance space. Before studying Cage, the scratches, hisses and plonks that peppered my old vinyls of his music were extremely annoying – now I can enjoy my battered CRI copy of Maro Ajemian playing the "Sonatas and Interludes" just as much as a pristine new CD version. Curiously though, I've systematically replaced my lp copies of Stockhausen, Ligeti, Boulez and Nono with compact discs, presumably assuming that they wouldn't consider surface noise and static crackles as being as "important" as the music they've written.

            Listening to the music of the Wandelweiser group, I'm led to wonder if any of the members of the collective would agree to bring out their music on vinyl, especially since each release on their own Timescraper label also includes some text (sometimes longer than that accompanying the music itself) describing in detail the technical difficulties encountered during the recording (choice of acoustic, microphones and their placing, and so forth). "In the first concerts we did, I was very dissatisfied that there was no "silence" in the places where we played," recalls Burkhard Schlothauer. If the music places extreme demands on your concentration, it also calls into question traditional conventions of performance space and duration. The ensemble Daswirdas chose to record John Cage's "Branches" (EWR 9901), a rarely-heard 1976 piece calling for Mexican poinciana seed pods and amplified cacti, inside an enormous concrete dam in Switzerland. For a Timescraper album it's quite action-packed, filled with myriad rustlings and crackles (perhaps the performers had to keep themselves busy to combat hypothermia: the temperature inside the dam was a constant 6°!). In contrast, Antoine Beuger's "calme étendue (spinoza)" begins with no less than nine minutes of silence (be aware, before you run back to the store to exchange it). For this work, the most monumental spoken-text composition since Cage's "Empty Words", Antoine Beuger extracted all the single-syllable words from Spinoza's "Ethics" and read them slowly one by one, interspersed, of course, with silence. A complete performance of the piece – yes, there has been one – lasts 180 hours (the CD version lasts a mere 70 minutes..). At the opposite extreme, Kunsu Shim's "Chamber Piece No. 1" (EWR 0104) is all over in four seconds! Manfred Werder's 1998 "stück" ("piece") lasts anything from twelve seconds to four hundred hours; his "bassflöte bassklarinette viola violoncello" is more modest, its maximum duration being a mere 72 minutes (the version just released, also on EWR 0104, clocks in at under nineteen minutes).

            The necessarily contemplative listening that this music demands has led to the group being branded as quasi-mystics, to which Beuger responds: "We do our thing with utmost integrity and seriousness, with confidence and trust. We take it totally seriously, even if we can joke about it. There is this German word "Heiterkeit" (in English something like: cheerfulness, serenity) which implies: clarity, calmness, joy, brightness, ease, fulfilment. This is exactly the word, which comes to my mind all the time, thinking about what we are doing."

             Burkhard Schlothauer adds: "For me it's fantastic to be a composer, but also a father, friend, man, not a stupid specialist. I enjoy the freedom of singing kitsch melodies and playing electric violin in pop music." Such an attitude is close to the down-to-earth common sense notions of Zen that Cage so admired. Nevertheless, attentive listening to this music instills in the listener a state of concentration not dissimilar to what is normally associated with the practice of meditation: the body is still, but the mind is fantastically alive and alert. Hence the title of Michael Pisaro's guitar piece "Mind is Moving" (EWR 0106), a performance of which changed Craig Shepard's life and ultimately led him to join the Wandelweiser group: "At the time I was reading about the way the native American Hopi Indians approached time in their language. I was excited about how I percieved time while listening to Michael's performance. It warped and stretched. It was like waking up after a good sleep and being unable to tell what time it is. That's disorienting and refreshing."

            The mind is alert not only to the music, but to the myriad sounds that surround us in everyday life, sounds that would otherwise be filtered out by the brain as either uninteresting or irrelevant. As I write this, with Antoine Beuger's "Die Geschichte des Sandkorns" ("the sand grain's story", EWR 9602) in my headphones at 11.30pm, the low hum of a restaurant kitchen ventilator is present as an aural backdrop to the sustained tones and delicate rustlings of Edwin Buchholz's accordion. A car goes by, a dog barks somewhere. Cars, dogs and fans have no doubt been at it all evening, but my perceptual apparatus didn't consider them as worthy of attention until I put the Beuger CD on.

            If the listening experience is utterly engrossing – it is – what of the after-listening experience? You know the old cliché, the public spilling out onto the Broadway sidewalks humming the last show-stopping tune (not only Broadway either: remember Anton Webern once confidently asserted that the milkmen of the future would one day be whistling his music!).. Because the sound material of Wandelweiser music is so modest, so self-effacing, what remains after the piece has finished is not a precise musical memory (sound, pitch, melody..), but rather a feeling of intense satisfaction, a sense of having spent an hour or so of your life fully engaged in something, the pleasure of having experienced the world afresh.