I want you to think for a minute about a favourite piece of music.
Let it roll around inside your head. Does it have a driving rhythm? Does it hook you so firmly that the beat stays embossed in your brain for the rest of the day? Does it wash over you like a swell, all warm and tingly and refreshing? Does it energise or console you?
This music that you are giving yourself permission to silently enjoy, is made up of sound and what I like to call potential sound.
It’s not quite silence, because to me, silence is about letting go of intention. The need to fill it with anything other than itself.
Potential sound is like silence but it is full of intention. Stuffed to the edges with it.
Go back to that song you were listening to.
Notice how the singer or the instrument takes a breath. The sound isn’t there any more, but the music doesn’t stop, does it?
The flow of the music is still there. And you listen just as intently during the silence as you do when there is sound.
You see, we cannot separate the notes in a piece of music from the pauses between them. Without the rests the notes are just noise – and the quality of the silence is as important as the tone of the music we are playing.
The pauses contain the desire to sing again, to play another note, to pound another beat.
This is the intention in the silence.
You only have to watch a world-class insanely-talented conductor like Gustavo Dudamel to see that a pause is not a pause. It’s a bridge we cross raucously from one awesome moment to the next.
So as a speaker or as an actor, you can deliver your lines with all the emotion in the world. But if the way you breathe doesn’t power through with meaning and intention then your performance is dead. Disconnected. Disjointed.
Example. Notice, when you speak about something that thrills you, how you take a breath. Short, perhaps. Sharp. High. Snatched.
And then, the long, deep kind of breath that comes before you talk of something that moves you deeply.
You are saying so much more with your breath – with the pauses – than you realize.
When you start to pay attention to the quality of your breath, you start to see its color and its magic…how it literally has a life of its own. (Did you know you can tell how a person is feeling just by listening intently to the way they are breathing? It’s that powerful. It is life.)
So use this. Play with the intentions you stuff your silence with. Notice that your pauses are full of rest and yet packed with meaning.
Allow these spaces between the good work and the busy work and even the work that only feels busy but doesn’t move you forward (and we’re all good at that) to be a part of the whole song.
So today, remember that the time you take to pause is brimming with the intention to create once again. And enjoy this…play with it, experiment, and make peace with it.
Comments? Scroll down to tell me your thoughts…
13 Comments
I’ve had the pleasure of serving as the sound engineer for the great jazz trumpeter Clark Terry many times over the last 10 years or so. The thing that always struck me about Clark’s playing ( particularly working with him through his 80s ) is how brilliantly he “plays the rests.”. There is so much music in every moment of his playing, even when the horn is not making a sound – he’s still playing. To me, that’s one of the marks of a truly great musician.
Andy
Yes yes yes…when you own the rests, you own the music.
What’s truly amazing, to me at least, is that when you become aware of the breath, you gain an instrument for change… just as you can tell how someone is feeling by listening to their breath, you can actually change how you are feeling by altering your breathing.
I tend to get incredibly anxious when I have a lot going on, and it’s hard for me to slow down. If I take the time to intentionally slow my breathing, letting it fill deep into the depths of my lungs, pause, and then slowwwwly ease out… this process slows all of me down, and I’m able to more clearly focus, to be calm and quiet, instead of anxious and rushing
Yes Heidi – I love how you say the breath is an *instrument for change*. It is an instrument, and we can play it in such a way that serves us or makes life just bloody difficult. And this is the process of filling it with an intention to slow down….
Oh Natalie, I love this! Such a fantastic reminder of the importance of the pause. I tend to so undervalue it, so thank you for reminding me of its value. And for helping me take the time to go down memory lane and revisit Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.
Lovely choice of tune, Lisa!
I absolutely loved playing that piece – fell in love with it the first time I heard it and even though it was way over my head, I had to have the sheet music for it and start cutting my teeth on it.
This reminds me of how I was recently admiring a wall of art at the Jazz Heritage Center in San Francisco, which was filled with portraits of great jazz artists. The one that stopped me in my tracks was a fabulous black and white photograph of a saxophone player who wasn’t playing – he was clearly, intently, listening.
Thanks Natalie!
This is great Susan – you even use the word ‘intently’ – which is exactly right! This is how we should always listen to the pauses in our life.
I talk about this very thing with my singing students…so often I see singers whose focus seems to “die” whenever they’re not singing. As if their brain switches off between phrases. But when you see a performer really listening – both to their colleagues onstage or to themselves as they sing their thoughts out loud as in opera – then you get a performance that is dynamic and thrilling.
Brilliant post, Natalie! I never really thought of the silence between the notes being the music, but it does make sense. Thanks, also, for the reminder to pay attention to my own breathing. I seem to forget it a lot lately.
Thank you Renee. I always appreciate your thoughtful comments…
Reminds me of pieces of music where a note is just slightly, but purposely, out of place, a beat off or something. Always memorable.
Yes, I love that – when a musician owns the music enough to play with it, shape it.