“All music emerges from silence, to which sooner or later it must return. At its simplest we may conceive of music as the relationship between sounds and the silence that surrounds them. Yet silence is an imaginary state in which all sounds are absent, akin perhaps to the infinity of time and space that surrounds us. We cannot hear utter silence, nor can we fully imagine such concepts as infinity and eternity. When we create music, we express life. But the source of music is silence, which is the ground of our musical being, the fundamental note of life. How we live depends on our relationship with death; how we make music depends on our relationship with silence.” — Paul Hillier
In the Pagan community, a popular chant goes like this: “We all come from the Goddess, and to her we shall return, like a drop of rain, flowing to the ocean.” Written by Zsuzsanna Budapest, it’s a simple but heartfelt celebration of how reverence for the Divine Feminine is embedded in a celebration of the sacredness of life’s natural and ordinary rhythms.
Compare this to the Christian ritual marking the beginning of Lent: the imposition of ashes, where a priest or other minister uses ashes to draw the sign of the cross on your forehead, declaring, “"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Maybe not quite as uplifting as Z. Budapest’s chant, but it occupies the same liminal space of acknowledging how cycles of emergence and return are found in spiritual teachings all over the world.
English musician Paul Hillier may not have been thinking about spirituality or contemplation in any explicit way when he wrote the luminous introduction to his study of the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, but he certainly taps into a mystical sensibility when he reflects on the relationship between music and silence. Music emerges from silence the way we human beings emerge from the heart of the Divine; and just as we all will someday return to God/the Goddess, so too all music eventually releases itself back into the infinite availability of silence. This is not meant to be depressing or cynical — silence holds music the way a womb holds the new life of a fetus. To return to silence is not a defeat of music, but rather a natural and important part of the cycle of how music and silence inter-relate: music fades away into silence with trust and recognition that from silence more music will emerge.
Hillier challenges us to see the relationship between music and silence as a metaphor for the relationship between life and death; I would add to this that music is not the only aspect of human experience to emerge from silence: all human language, thought, cognition, prayer and awareness likewise is manifest out of the matrix of sacred silence. To trust death is necessary to live well — even though we naturally strive to avoid or delay our eventual appointment with mortality. Likewise, to trust silence is necessary to make music, or to speak or pray or even think: silence is never the enemy of speech, but its most ancient and sacred ally.
Quotation source: Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt: Oxford Studies of Composers, p. 1.