The Question as posed:
Of course I can't just play it as it lies, gotta fancy it up a bit, make references to off-the-wall aspects that occur to me to hunt up or find serendiptously ...while looking for something else... It's practically a Method.
The first thought that crossed my mind (no, really,) was The Last Words in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Quoting myself from an earlier Convivium posting:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann
Darüber muss man schweigenWhereof one cannot speak
thereof one must remain silent
Not very helpful though, right? So I thought well what do I think about silence? And here's what appeared on the yellow pad:
Silence is within. My inner voice informs, but doesn't speak aloud itself (mostly). Silence isn't an absence of thought, but it IS the space between utterances. Looks like I'm especially interested in micro-silences. Betsy was doing work in those realms 50 years ago......and that brought to mind (wait for it...) Thelonious Monk, who is remembered as saying
and
...what you don't play can be more important than what you do...
and with that priming, watch:
and
and
And so I came to ruminating about my own engagements with silence. My barn time generally has music coming from the Earthworks speakers on the west wall, mostly streaming via Spotify these days; generally I don't choose unaccompanied silence. But music is suffused with small silences between notes, and the patterns of silences define the character of the music: what it feels like. I've given a lot of thought to that over the years, and could offer copious examples.
If a continuous tone that varies in pitch is played, does the hearer experience it as 'music'? And mostly the answer is NO (theremin might be one exception, maybe hurdy-gurdy, and I imagine others...). It's the character of the empty spaces between "notes" that creates "music", and regular, repeated patterns of note and silence are incitement to dance... Or imagine a text read aloud as a continuous stream of words one after the other ... without emphasis or rhythm or subtle timing in articulation of words. How uninteresting, how hard to follow. It's the way SILENCE is injected that makes a voice persuasive and interesting. The hearer hangs on every word, and listens for the message that the words seek to convey ...which is substantially affected by the skill of the speaker. Here we teeter on the edge of thoughts about malfeasance with words...
Some audiobook readers CONVEY the deep character of the text they're performing, and some seem just to read the words, uninflected. Makes a big difference, doesn't it?
That led to thoughts about how a person's person-ality is conveyed by how they speak, and notably by how their speech is varied in pitch and timing. Timing is very substantially the MANAGEMENT of silence.
And then I was thinking about Harpo Marx: look what he did with silence.
And then pass on to thinking about Mime, which inevitably leads to Marcel Marceau, but first watch this:
...a lot of communication can happen in silence, but you have to listen...
and
and then
and
And a favorite text of considerable relevance:
New Englanders respect
privacy and practicality;
they cultivate their social conscience in their own ways and are
suspicious of experts;
tend to distrust public displays of emotion but
savor the private indulgences of the senses;
honor wit over
rhetoric;
prefer understatement to pleasantries;
encourage
character over opportunism;
are suspicious of dogma;
discuss
their consciences and vote their prejudices;
prefer the yarn to
the sermon and the abrasive to the sonorous;
often mistake
education for morality;
tend to confuse art with
decoration;
pretend to understand the difference between luxury
and comfort;
feign to fathom the eloquence of silence; find
significance in boundaries;
negotiate neighbors with reason and
relatives with tolerance;
are eager to plunder a practical idea
but remain standoffish near an emotion.(from Donald Junkins
"New England as Region and Idea: looking over the tafferel of our craft"
Massachusetts Review XXVI 2&3 pp 202-203)