silence (2024)

for solo tenor saxophone

Rodney Hall’s 2011 short story collection Silence, has a covert premise: as the author says in an afterword, “a contributing factor to the silences being explored is that most of these pieces engage with a ‘silent’ partner, being written as if by others”. The list of Hall’s ‘others’ ranges from Henry Green to Herman Broch, Malcolm Lowry to Gertrude Stein, and includes many of my own favourite writers.

By invoking Hall’s collection, I have ‘bought-in’ to that notion of the music channeling some pre-existing writing, being superimposed on a palimpsest-like ghost text. Unlike Hall, my relationship with the history of my artform is somewhat fraught. I regard a lot of musical mutation over time as devolution, a loss of articulacy; Dunstaple’s taming of the late 14th century avantgarde, Josquin’s Ars Perfecta winnowing-out the gnarliness of the idioms of Ockeghem and Busnoys, Sigismondo d’India’s extraction of bald declamatory single lines from the residue of the Ars Perfecta, J S Bach’s syncretic homogenisation of his musical heritage, the gradual abandonment of the subtlety of counterpoint and harmony that led to the Classical Style, Minimalism’s rejection of ...well, almost everything that I consider to constitute musicality. I simplify, of course, but as a result I am hardly going to attempt any such stylistic emulation in my own piece.

Instead I have adopted Hall’s cellular, stylistically-segregated structure. Each single short arch in my work is a self-contained utterance that engages autonomously with silence, ultimately creating a music that coheres, not through logic, but a web of resemblances. Silence, or at least quietness, is not an attribute one immediately associates with the tenor saxophone. Back in my youth, the tenor was the sax that (as I saw it) the big players adopted: Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, John Gilmore, Clifford Jordan, Dave Liebman, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Wayne Shorter, Alan Skidmore, John Tchicai, Barbara Thompson, Stanley Turrentine, and so on. My preference was always for the Free Jazz players, and the wild hedonistic frenzies that they instigated, like Coltrane’s Om or Ayler’s Truth is Marching In or Shepp’s Magic of Ju-ju or Sun Ra’s Space is the Place. Those sounds have ever since been in my ears, particularly while writing such pieces as énoncé, or my Third Symphony: Afterimages, let alone burns. Many of these players turned to soprano saxophone for their more intimate work, and I’ve addressed that idiom in my 〈ʀ〉emote.

But now, confronted with the prospect of writing a piece for tenor sax as requested by Daniel Sclafani, I find that I don’t want to write a barnstorming, ear-splitting, John Gilmore-y Howl of a piece. What I intend is to try and return a timbral liminality to the instrument, to reposition it far from all that hectic blowing. Not that the big, percussive, tenor sax can ever be truly quiet; its mechanics offer a sonic substrate to the blown sounds, and that composite homophony is really what this piece is about.

 

Program note

Of course, there is no such thing as silence. In the world there are always sound waves and air movement, and, in our ears, the changes of pressure give our audial fundament a colour; I think of this as the subtexture of our soundworld, its grain. As my own hearing decays and my range compresses, I have become increasingly aware of these liminal flutterings in the medium. Unsurprisingly, this quasi-silence is very busy. Most tenor saxophone music is loud and insistent—think John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Rollins. In this piece I have imagined the texture that might sit behind such vigorous music. What I have tried to write is how such a piece might end up if a ‘loudness’ filter were applied, converting all the shouting into whispers, perhaps as if a second personality took those solos and intensity-shifted them—translated them wholesale down the expressive dial, as it were. The effect would likely be one of changing the emotional focus from the active to the sustained sounds. I took the title from Rodney Hall’s short story collection Silence, a book in which Hall’s own writings are superimposed on, or interwoven with, a range of stylistic palimpsests, just as I have imagined my music as the phantasm sitting behind some extemporised foreground saxophone statement. After hearing saxophonist Daniel Sclafani’s lovely performance of my 1995 piece, ‘e/meth, I wrote silence for him between August and September of 2024.

 

Daniel Sclafani has exclusivity on this work for two years from 28 March 2025.