Silence Please!

Bits and Pieces: The Penguin Book of Rock and Pop Facts and Trivia (Steve Smith 1988) has a useful section on silence in music. Naturally it starts with John Cage's piece entitled 4′33". I have seen the sheet music for this which, as I recall, has instructions about opening a piano and closing it at the end, after 4 minutes 33 seconds of obligatory silence. Smith notes that the performer, 'usually a pianist,' is expected to use his fingers to show the audience which of the song's three parts they are listening to… In Wikipedia's piece they mention that Frank Zappa recorded it as part of A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute on the Koch label in  1993. It was also recorded by Swedish electronic rockers Covenant in 2000 (the piece was entitled You Can Make Your Own Music.)

4'33" was first publicly performed in 1952. In 1953 CBS issued a blank record entitled 3 Minutes of Silence - it was intended for juke boxes, enabling those tired of the music to purchase a few minutes of peace and quiet. Steve Smith notes 'Hush records released a similar disc in 1959.'

The last note of She's Leaving Home on The Beatle's Sergeant Pepper album lasts 43 seconds - the last part of which appears to be silence but is at a high frequency only audible to dogs.

Allison Crowe on her 2010  album Spiral has a track Silence (82 seconds of) which can be 'heard' here.

John Lennon played around with silence several times. There is his three second silent Nutopian National Anthem from his 1973 Mind Games album and Two Minutes Silence on his 1969 Unfinished Music No.2: Life With The Lions. This silent tribute was for John Ono Lennon II, the child that John and Yoko lost to a miscarriage in 1968. Silent tributes probably form a whole subsection…

On the 2005 album  World Play by Soul SirkUS  tracks 16 and 17 both called Soulspace are silent.

Smith notes that the title track of Afrika Bambaataa's 1986 LP Beware (The Funk is Everywhere) 'is a band of silence.'

Magic Records (actually Stiff records 'in disguise') released an album in the 1980 called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan. It consisted of two 20 minute blank/ silent sides.Apparently John Denver has a similar silent track The Ballad of Richard Nixon. Another blank track is The Ten Coolest Things about New Jersey by The Bloodhound Gang. Similar blank gag books abound…The Wisdom of Sarah Palin, The Banker's Book of Ethics etc.,

Smith also records attempts to sell the silent space

Stacey Bishop, mystery writer & 'Bad Boy of Music'

Stacey Bishop. Death in the Dark (Faber, London 1930)

A thriller by the New Jersey born composer George Antheil (1900-1959) under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. Self proclaimed 'Bad Boy of Music', championed by Ezra Pound, composer of over 30 Hollywood film scores, including the much rated Dementia (1955) and practicing “endocrine criminologist” he also wrote this scarce detective novel published by Faber (under the auspices of T.S. Eliot) in 1930.

The story behind the writing of the book goes something like this: from 1927 to 1933 Antheil lived variously in Vienna, Tunis, and Cagnes-sur-Mer, writing opera and stage works for productions in Vienna and Frankfurt; in 1929 he was summering in Rapallo, Italy something of an ex-pat artists colony. That year T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats came through and also the German writers Gerhart Hauptmann and Franz Werfel. All of these writers are said to have had a hand in the work, with some final editing done by Eliot for the London Faber edition. Antheil had been surprised to see that off-duty these highbrow writers tended to read detective writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers. Antheil had an interest in criminology through theories he had developed about the thymus gland and endocrinology in crime detection. So serious was Antheil’s belief in endocrinology that it is said the Parisian police made him an honorary lifetime member.

Antheil assured the assembled authors that he could write a detective story as good as anything they were reading and Death in the Dark was the result. Theoretically it should be a C item in the bibliographies of Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Hauptmann and Werfel as they are all said to have helped with its writing. The book's hero Stephen Bayard was based on Pound. The plot and style of the book is said to be derived very obviously from S.S. Van Dine who created the languid detective Philo Vance. Despite the involvement of 2 Nobel Prize winners and il miglior fabbro himself the book is generally considered almost unreadable. Rapallo will always be associated with Max Beerbohm and it would good to think he also dropped by to add a whimsical chapter.