Vibrating, and Silent
This chapter examines silence in Pärt’s music from the perspectives of psychoacoustics and the material acoustics of the piano. I listen to Pärt’s music not only for its meanings (what it figures, symbolically represents, or enables through performance), its qualities (the values and identities it mediates), or its referential capacities (structure, tuning systems, genre), but also for the phenomena of its vibration. As vibrating material, music is “silent” in the sense that it offers no message or code. Listening subjects “silence” music through the perception of sound as energy and medium, haptic and resonant perception. I show how, in Pärt’s work, silence attunes listeners to acoustic phenomena—the resonant frequencies of spaces, the timbral shimmer of voices, or the inharmonicity of a piano. By attending to psychoacoustics and specific practices of listening, this approach extends Pärt scholarship further into the fields of sound and embodiment.