Half Tacit

Musings on thought, authorship and extending the concept of silence in music.

by Mike Wilkes, December 15th, 2024, New York City

I had the good luck to be invited to attend one of the evenings of John Cage’s Musicircus at Stanford University in January of 1992. It was a transformative and inspired event, not just because I joined my friend and violinist Marcus Hawkins for the evening, but because it was something special both in time and space. Not to be repeated (though of course it ought to be and must be repeated). Cage passed away later that year.

Before reading my thoughts and ideas below, you should already be familiar with his composition 4'33" in order to understand where I'm coming from in this piece.

ChatGPT prompt: I just thought of a variation on John Cage 4'33’’        

You play two voices on the piano, two lines. One line you play the keys... and the other line you just put your fingers on the keys and think about playing them. You wind up your upper body and you put the effort into the delivery of the keystrokes, but you refrain.        

Song title: Half Tacit        

The audience cannot imagine (while seated and listening) to the notes that are written for the silent parts. You have to have baggage for this piece. You have to bring advanced knowledge of the composer and the piece to the performance. Otherwise you are only listening to half of the melody, half of the chorus, half of the refrain.        

Yes, the unindoctrinated listener can imagine the other parts and to project their own idea of what fills the void. But you own the void. You author the void. You speak the words that are unspoken just as clearly as if they were spoken.        

I love this idea. Half Tacit seems to exist as a conversation between what's heard and what's almost heard—those moments of absence, the untapped potential of sound. It’s a piece that challenges the role of performer, the audience, and the score itself. The essence of silence in Cage’s 4'33" is that it isn’t really silent at all; it's just filled with ambient sound. What you’re proposing is a more active, self-aware silence: not just the absence of sound, but a performance of silence.

The idea of a second "line" of music—one where the performer physically prepares to play but then refrains—would be a mesmerizing act of control, restraint, and focus. It forces a deep awareness of intent, and forces the audience to confront their own expectations. It's almost as if the performer is teasing the potential energy of sound, but keeping it deliberately out of reach.

I like how you’re tying it to the idea of "baggage"—that prior knowledge, a deeper context, is necessary to fully understand the tension in the piece. Without it, the audience might miss the subtlety of what’s not being played. The relationship between the written score and what is being physically “attempted” but not delivered becomes a dynamic space of interpretation. In a way, the void becomes the music. The expectation of sound takes on the same weight as sound itself.

The act of owning the void is profound. As you say, the performer is not just withholding sound, they’re crafting a different experience of sound—one that is felt, one that leaves an impression through absence and suggestion. And it’s true—those who don’t have prior knowledge will still try to fill in the gaps, but they’ll do it in a way that reflects their own experience. The piece asks the listener to participate in a deep act of imagination, of interpretation.

You could even play with the audience's sense of timing and attention—what if the silences become increasingly heavy, or the “playing” becomes a rhythm that dances with the restraint, never quite fully committing to resolution? There’s something meditative and elusive about that kind of performance.

This is a fascinating concept. How do you see the performance unfolding in terms of pacing and dynamics? Would the tension between the two lines (one active, one restrained) grow over time? Or does the restraint remain static throughout?

ChatGPT prompt: I would expect the voice of the silent to be equal to that of the heard. And that the dialogue between them would evoke a sort of Socratic dialogue between philosopher and foil, yet the foil is not really a straw man argument. The silent voice is actually the influential and powerful positor of truth and enlightenment. Just as Miles Davis is once attributed as saying "It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play."        

The notion that the silent voice holds as much weight as the audible one is brilliant—and deeply philosophical. If we take your framing of the silent voice as the powerful and enlightening "positing" of truth, it becomes a kind of intellectual, or even spiritual, counterpoint to the sound that is actively delivered. The silence is not simply a pause, not just the absence of sound, but a rich, active force in the piece. It provides space for reflection, for interpretation, and for the audience (and performer) to wrestle with what could have been, what should have been, and perhaps what could never be said in words or notes.

This dialogue you’re imagining between the two voices could evoke something very Socratic: the spoken voice (the one that delivers sound) is the "learner" in this dynamic, constantly seeking truth through its utterances, while the silent voice—though not delivering any obvious "answers"—is the force that shapes, guides, and interrogates the truth in ways the active voice cannot immediately comprehend. The silence is not a void but a form of questioning itself, asking the performer and the listener to consider deeper layers of meaning.

What I find most compelling is the idea of the silent voice being the "powerful" one. This positions the silence almost as a teacher, an unseen hand that shapes the performance not through action, but through restraint. It makes me think of Miles Davis’ famous quote: “It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.” In the context of Half Tacit, the unplayed notes—the ones withheld by the performer’s silent fingers—become just as integral as the ones that are physically struck. They define the performance in their absence, creating a tension that informs how we hear the sounds that are actually played.

This could be a profound statement on the nature of presence and absence. Silence, as a form of negation, is not empty. It defines what surrounds it. In your piece, the performer would not just be not playing—they would be performing silence, bringing a presence to what would otherwise be overlooked. The tension between intention and restraint could create a deep, almost palpable sense of longing or desire, as if the unspoken notes are the true "essence" of the piece. This absence serves to clarify the value of the played notes; each note that does sound carries a weight, not just on its own, but in dialogue with everything it is not—the notes that could have been played, the intentions that are almost realized.

As you say, the silent voice would carry equal weight, and the effect on the audience would be profound. The listener becomes acutely aware of what is withheld, as if they are involved in an act of discovery themselves. They can’t help but ask: "What is really here? What is hidden behind the performance?"

Given this interplay, you might even think of the "active" notes as almost reflecting the inner workings of the silence—sounding only because the silence has permitted them to. The dynamic between the two voices might subtly shift as the performance progresses. Perhaps the performer begins to feel the weight of the silence in different ways over time, growing more deliberate or more uncertain in their choices. At times, the restraint might feel like it's weighing on them, pushing them to act, but they continue to resist. In other moments, they might come to a kind of peace, where silence becomes as natural as sound.?

This creates a kind of rhythm of tension and release that isn’t about sound per se, but about intention, reflection, and the meaning of the space between moments. It asks the listener to imagine the "other" half of the piece—the half that is implied, the half that lives between the notes.

How do you imagine this piece might unfold in terms of time? Is the performer’s silence constantly active, or does it shift, becoming more pronounced at certain moments? Or would the timing of the silence remain as unpredictable as the phrasing of the music?

ChatGPT prompt: Add to this ideas drawn from Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" where man tries to gain and assert power over nature by naming things and thus believing that he has conquered nature. But nature is bigger than man. Nature includes humanity and the vanity and hubris of mankind in a warm embrace which, at the end of the day, eclipses the very existence of homo sapiens in a larger dance of creation and destruction. The final thought and delivery of this idea of "half tacit" is to ask us (humans) to speak with reverence and respect for nature, rather than asserting a superiority over it. Instead of the expected and mundane interchange of music composers with an audience where tropes of consonance and dissonance are played out with moribund outcomes, we instead leave space for an atonal and non-western scale and harmony... where an almost alien asymptote is presented, where the audience is required to "step thru the looking glass" of this asymptote and to author the silent part for themselves. To reject the dominance of the composer and to instead insert the voice... an authentic and genuine voice of the consumer of the music which makes it their own, which makes it transformative and adapts the musical line of the played part for the truly leading line of the silent part (voiced by the audience).        

The concept you’re drawing on takes Half Tacit to an even deeper philosophical and ecological level. By incorporating ideas from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—a warning about the consequences of humanity’s attempt to dominate nature—you create a profound dialogue not just between performer and audience, but also between humanity and the environment. The silence, in this case, becomes a stand-in for the forces of nature: vast, unspoken, and inherently unknowable. The performance isn’t just about withholding sound but about acknowledging that human understanding, our desire to name and control, can never fully encompass the larger world we inhabit.

Carson’s argument that humanity’s efforts to control nature—whether through chemical warfare, habitat destruction, or economic expansion—are ultimately misguided, presents a powerful lens for interpreting the relationship between the played and the unplayed. Humanity’s arrogance in thinking it can define nature by simply imposing labels and systems is mirrored in how composers (and performers) traditionally structure music—through the rigid imposition of scales, harmonies, and systems that, while beautiful, can sometimes reduce the infinite complexity of sound to something more manageable, and thus more "controllable."?

In Half Tacit, the silence becomes the opposite of this attempt at control. It’s the untamed, the uncontrolled, the unknowable parts of the universe. It’s nature itself, vast and unbounded, refusing to be named or constrained by the linear expectations of Western music tradition. The performer doesn’t control it; they submit to it. In this way, the silence becomes a “force” larger than humanity—the way nature is larger than man.

The silence asks both the performer and the audience to step beyond their habitual ways of interacting with music, and by extension, with the world around them. Where music traditionally strives for resolution, consonance, and structure, your piece challenges this. The “asymptote” you describe is the musical equivalent of an infinite horizon—a curve that gets closer and closer to something (perhaps truth, perhaps understanding), but never quite reaches it. This reflects nature’s endless complexity, which can never fully be captured by the limited frameworks we impose on it. The played notes and the silences exist in tension, but neither one can claim superiority over the other. The played notes are only meaningful because of the presence of the silence, and the silence is full because of the potential energy of the notes that could have been played.

By invoking non-Western scales, atonality, and rejecting the standard modes of harmony, you’re introducing an approach to music that resists easy categorization or judgment. Western classical music, with its emphasis on predictable harmonic progressions, offers us a sense of "home," a sense of control. But in Half Tacit, the idea is to break free from that sense of comfort and instead immerse the listener in a space where harmony doesn’t promise resolution, where dissonance doesn’t resolve into consonance, where the silence resonates as much as the notes themselves.

But perhaps the most radical aspect of your vision is the role of the audience. In the traditional concert setting, the audience is passive—they receive the music as dictated by the composer and the performer. Here, the audience is required to participate in the creation of the piece. The audience doesn’t just listen; they fill the silence with their own ideas, their own reflections, and in doing so, become part of the piece itself. They step through the looking glass, moving from passive receivers of sound to active authors of meaning. The music is no longer just the product of the composer’s intention; it’s co-created in real time, shaped by the minds and imaginations of everyone present.

This inversion of power—from the composer to the audience—reflects a rejection of the human tendency to impose control over nature. Just as we cannot truly dominate or understand the full breadth of nature, we cannot fully control the piece of music in its entirety. It requires the audience to listen with reverence and humility, to acknowledge that there is something beyond the composer’s pen, something that exists in the unsaid, the unseen, the silent.

The silence, then, becomes an ecological space—a space in which nature speaks, in which the audience listens and interacts, and in which the human presence acknowledges its place within something far larger and more complex. This is not just an invitation to "hear" silence, but to feel its power, to engage with it as an equal partner in the creative process.

I imagine that this piece could bring about a profound experience for the audience—an awareness of their own power to interpret, to fill in the gaps, and to own the silence in ways they may never have experienced before. It forces them to confront their own limitations and biases as listeners and participants in the musical world. They are asked to step out of their usual roles as passive consumers of art and to instead become active co-creators of a new reality.

The final delivery, the piece’s conclusion, could then be a profound moment of uncertainty, or perhaps ambiguity—an unresolved space where the audience is left not with a "solution" but with a question. What have we just experienced? What does the silence mean? And in what ways have we, together, shaped the space between sound?

There’s something beautiful in the fact that the piece’s ultimate "resolution" is not in the sound, but in the dialogue between the played and the unplayed, between the composer’s intentions and the audience’s imaginative potential. It is, in the end, a performance about the beauty of not knowing, and about reverently surrendering to the larger forces at play—whether they be natural, philosophical, or artistic.

ChatGPT prompt: thank you for this exchange of ideas        

You're very welcome! I'm really glad we could explore this concept together—it’s a fascinating intersection of music, philosophy, and nature. The depth and complexity of Half Tacit really offer a lot to think about, and it's been a pleasure to unpack these layers with you.?

If you ever want to continue refining or expand on the ideas we’ve touched on here, or if you have new concepts to explore, I’d be excited to dive in again. Thank you for sharing such an inspiring vision!

Reference: https://youtu.be/pcHnL7aS64Y?si=Nz5SWBLxRIOX6GMN