The relationship between music and silence is so rich and complex that books could be written about it, or nothing at all. Like other relationships, it is difficult to get right, but there’s an ease to it too. It is like a pact: you find the rules for the particular music, the particular silence, and you hold to them. Only the rules change as you go along, and the pact gets renewed again and again.
First of all, the shaping of sound inevitably involves some silence. Any melody has its breaks and pauses, if only for breath; any melody comes to an end. Add harmonies and counterpoints, and you have many different silences coming in and out.
Rhythm itself requires a kind of silence, because for there to be a beat or pulse at all, its absence also has to be there. Even punk music has a kind of silence, lots of it.
Then textures: how thick or thin the sound will be, which instruments will play and when, all of this implies its counterpart, silence.
Repetition is a kind of silence, because it refrains from doing something completely new. What is known sinks into you, like an evening.
The very language of music is the language of silence, because music doesn’t say things directly. Even songs are only partly verbal; the words ride the music.
Music also requires silence in the room, maybe. When you’re recording or performing, you usually don’t want background noises that will interfere (like the thump-thump-thump of a drum machine). But this depends, also, on the type of music and the situation. Jazz and blues want the audience to make sounds too. Some musicians (of any kind, except classical, probably) feel less intimidated if there is some chatter in the room. Also, some background noises, like the sound of the Duna flowing under and around the TRIP Hajó, bring something to the music that will never be there in that same way again. So there are no absolute rules regarding background noise, but it’s something to think about.
Music also needs the times when it is not there. The time when the concert or recording is over but it’s still in the head, the time when it is longed for. Or even the time when it is gone. Also, new songs can come out of silence.
This is just the beginning, but it illustrates, at least briefly, how important silence is to any kind of music. More than important: intertwined with it. That is why many musicians need to spend some time alone.
I think of this when I listen to or remember the gorgeous new single by Platon Karataev, “Partért kiáltó” (“Crying for the Coast,” also the title of their forthcoming album). It has most of these kinds of silences, and to be heard well, it needs the other kinds too. The vocal melody repeats and repeats, until the end, when there’s a variation, which itself is a kind of silence, because the phrase does not complete but instead leaves off. So many subtle things are going on in throughout the song that you can get happily lost in it, listening to it again and again. There’s a wonderful silence at the words “nem eső ez, csak a tenger dadog” (“this isn’t rain, it’s just the sea stuttering/stammering/faltering”). The instruments pause, but the sound carries through. This happens once earlier in the song, too, but it was here that I first noticed it. There are also silences in the rhythm of the lyrics, the way the syllables are sung. And more and more things to discover.
I think “Partért kiáltó” requires silence from the listener too, a willingness to come a distance for it, to be with it, to stay with it, like the one being addressed in the lyrics. It is beautiful right away. But so much happens when you listen many times, which means taking time without talking, without writing. And so this piece ends here.
Update: Here are some more thoughts on the song; this, too, is just a beginning.
Take Away the Takeaway 
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