PASTORAL FOCUS

The Silence of Music

Kathleen Harmon

e are familiar with the term "white noise," non-systematic assertion of the primordial presence of

W the name we give the incessant and unat­

tended background din of modern mechan­
ical life—the surround-sound whirring,
buzzing, clicking, ticking, whooshing of computers, refrig­
erators, furnaces, air conditioners,fluorescentlights, and
silence in every dimension of human existence; the other a
systematic phenomenological study of the relationship of
silence to speech and of its consequent ontological signifi-
cance. The first is Max Picard's seminal The World of
Silence,1 and the second is Bernard Dauenhauer's instruc-
street traffic—sounds that are "there" in our environment tive Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological
but not "here" in our awareness. Oddly, we become con­ Significance? Each study has something to contribute to an
scious of white noise when it ceases. When the periodic understanding of the presence of silence in music and the
trickle of the refrigerator fails to enter the background role of that musical silence in liturgical celebration. My
stream we leave the den to investigate presentation of Picard's work is condensed
affairs in the kitchen. and highly extrapolated (the nature of his
We are, however, less familiar with the Kathleen Harmon, S.N.D. reflections invites this), whereas my dis-
even more pervasive presence out of which cussion of the relevant parts of
white noise and all sound—voice, word, de Κ, ¿s music director for Dauenhauer's study is systematic and
song, cry—emerges and back into which it straightforward (as is his work).
sinks: the primordial pool of silence. For the Institute for Liturgical Let me begin by iterating a fundamental
us postmodern people this is a "white Ministry in Dayton, Ohio point made by both authors: silence is real,
silence": we give it little conscious atten­ and silence is powerful. Silence is not
tion even though it surrounds and under­ and author of the Music merely the absence of speech but is co-
pins existence. partner with speech in humankind's ongo-
The goal of this article is to demonstrate Notes column in Liturgical ing process of self-discovery and
that we must begin paying attention in our Ministry. She holds an
development. Without silence there is no
liturgical music-making to the silence word (Picard); without utterance there is
within the music as much as to the sound. MM, in Sacred Music no silence (Dauenhauer).
This silence is important. It comprises one Both writers also remind us that silence
of two constitutive substances that make from Westminster Choir is multivalent. Dauenhauer notes that
music integral to the doing of liturgy: its silence can be benevolent, comforting,
College and is completing
sound and its silence. We must attend to malign, sorrow-laden, anxious, doubt-
both. doctoral studies in liturgy filled, even odd or strange. The ultimate
I make use here of two works on the meaning of silence underneath these
nature of silence—one a wide-ranging, at Drew University sometimes opposing polyvalences can be

Liturgical Ministry 10 (Spring 2001) 93-100 Page 93

established only by our choice of an overriding ontological
interpretation. 3 Picard points out that silence—and the
word that emerges from it—can be equally salvific or
demonic, creative or destructive. For him the ontological
reality of silence is a given but it carries a dual potentiality.
When language is cut off from the silence that gave it birth,
the silence to which it returns becomes abyss, the place of
darkness, of being lost, of meaninglessness.4 For Picard
much of language in today's world follows this path, and is
not word but noise. His point generates the impetus for
this article, for what can be applied to word can be applied
to music, that other form of meaningfully organized
human sound, born also of silence and just as often made
orphan.
Using Picard and Dauenhauer I begin by examining the
nature of silence. What is silence? What does silence do?
How does silence communicate, and what does it commu-
nicate? What is the relationship between silence and the
sound of utterance? I then apply insights from Picard and
Dauenhauer to the use of silence in the liturgy. Finally, I
look at the silence that is present in music and address the
core question: what does music have to do with liturgical
silence? How does the silence in music contribute to litur-
gy? How can we honor this silence so that the sound of
music and the participation of the assembly achieve their
fullest liturgical potential?
Silence
Picard: Some Philosophical Underpinnings
For Picard silence is a pre-existing, primordial principle of
being.3 Without silence there is no creating word; the reve-
latory paradigm is the silence of Genesis into which God
sends the Word. For Picard silence is not merely a deriva-
tive of sound that has ceased. Rather, silence is the
autonomous pre-existing entity into which God sounds
the word of creation and the Word of salvation. Silence is,
then, the source, ground, and place of return of all word.
The world of silence is the womb of the tangible world, the
larger world of being in which we are immersed from the
beginning of time, the world from which we emerge and to
which we subside. With the pronouncing of the divine
word speech became primary. But silence remained pri-
mordial.6 Silence stands as a constitutive force and onto-
logical principle within every dimension of human
existence.
The world of silence is pervasive and self-contained. But
it is also useless, the one phenomenon that cannot be
exploited for profit or utility.7 And this unexploitability is
the wellspring of its healing power:
Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddenly appears at the
side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very
Page 94
purposelessness. It interferes with the regularflowof the
purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the
damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole
again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation
into the world of wholeness. It gives things something of
its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence is: holy
uselessness.8
This holy uselessness is, however, active power. First,
silence mediates the irreconcilable. In the realm of silence
irreconcilable differences co-exist without tension because
silence acknowledges both without judgment. Silence is
easy with both because it knows itself to be larger than
either. Thus silence is able to absorb both into its buffer.
Then across the plane of the all-absorbing silence the irrec-
oncilable differences travel toward one another with no
need to swallow or disintegrate or demolish each other.
Thus, silence frees us from the impossible expectation that
we can understand and resolve the myriad irreconcilable
elements of existence. In the realm of silence we discover
their capacity for co-existence, and we learn that it is possi-
ble to live with opposites, with the unreconciled, with the
unknown.9
Second, silence heals the isolation of unrealistic self-
importance. We know on the one hand that no word can
measure up to what we intend it to speak. We know fur-
thermore that none of us can ever have the last word, that
our struggling individualized efforts to lay claim through
voice to the explanation of existence, even to the explana-
tion behind today's newspaper headlines or yesterday's
embroilment at the office, are no more than shouts in the
dark. In silence we learn to let these shouts go as the unfin-
ished, in-need-of-the-shouts-of-others cries that they are.
We stand on the fragmentary edge of explanation and
allow the reverberations of others' voices to wash across the
beachhead of our consciousness and soften its rocky pro-
jections of self-delusion.
Third, silence opens the door to forgiveness. Spoken
words determine relationships, for good or for ill, for love
or for hate. But words once spoken also die away, sink back
into the oblivion of the silence from which they came, and
this forgetting opens the way for forgiveness. This is not the
forgetting where a word simply disappears into the general
hubbub to pop up again at some unbidden moment, but a
chosen letting go that allows the suppleness of silence to
reshape a word's hard edges.10 Forgiveness lets go of what
discourse has made determinate. 11 Silence is the deep
expanse in which this letting go takes place, a letting go to
be done, as Jesus taught us, seventy times seven.
Fourth, silence is the agent in all interpersonal commu-
nication. Silence sits in on in every conversation. In every
conversation silence listens and silence speaks. "[T]he
words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that
Liturgical Ministry Spring 2001
third person, and the listener receives more than the speak-
er alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a
conversation."12 When this happens we discover that what
moves back and forth between person and person is not
word but silence, what transpires is the silence within one
into the silence of the other. And we no longer notice any
opposition between ourselves and the community, for
instead of standing against each other we face the silence
together.13
Picard argues that we must choose to allow this pur-
poseful uselessness a place in our lives. We must choose the
forgiveness that comes from letting a word sink into the
forgetfulness of silence. We must choose to forgo self-pre-
occupation to enter the silence of another. We must choose
silence itself rather than the noise of empty wordiness
which constantly tempts us with false promises of satisfac-
tion. For words can arise from silence or simply from the
noise of other words. Nor does simply not talking mean
the same as being silent. Rather, silence is a deep presence
within a person, a presence that shapes not only every
word but also every movement, every gesture. Such abid-
ing silence points a person "beyond the life that is in the
word to a life beyond the word, and it points him beyond
himself."14
Dauenhauer: Some Phenomenological Underpinnings
Dauenhauer demonstrates that wherever utterance takes
place (be it word, text, song, drama, gesture, any of the
multiple ways we humans attempt to articulate message
and meaning), silence is present.15 Silence is, in fact, an
active and necessary participant in discourse. Dauenhauer
describes three forms of the activity of silence in relation to
utterance: intervening silences, fore- and after-silence, and
deep silence.16 Intervening silences punctuate utterance as
part of itsflowof meaning. These silences appear within
discourse as the dividing points that distinguish individual
words and phrases. A word/phrase stops so that another
word/phrase may begin, and each stopping is an instance
of silence. These silences set up the timing that gives the
utteranceflow,intelligibility, and nuance. Without them
the utterance would become unintelligible jumble. Picard,
too, discusses this interrelationship between word and
silence: "The word that arises from silence...moves from
the silence into the word and then back again into the
silence, out of the silence to the new word and back again
into the silence and so on, so that the word always comes
from the centre of silence. Theflowof the sentence is con-
tinually broken by a silence. The vertical barriers of silence
are constantly interrupting the horizontalflowof the sen-
tence."17
Fore- and after-silence make up the frame of silence
that surrounds the totality of a discourse. Fore-silence cre-
Harmon: The Silence of Music
We must begin
paying attention in
our liturgical music-making
to the silence within
the music as much as
to the sound.
ates the opening for a discourse; after-silence terminates it.
We are generally aware of the presence of after-silence, of
that moment when an utterance has completed itself (even
more so when the utterance has run on beyond its accept-
able time limit, as, for example, when someone's tale of
arthritic woes goes on simply too long). But after-silence
can be more than the period that terminates an utterance.
It can also be the savoring awareness that on the one hand
synthesizes the entire discourse as a unity and on the other
connects it through remembrance and imagination with
all other discourse.
Unlike after-silence we do not generally attend to fore-
silence. Often we become aware of it when we are jarred by
utterance that crowds into space before its appropriate
time. We are not ready for the utterance because the silence
from which it needed to emerge had been precluded
(Picard would call such utterance noise rather than word).
There are, on the other hand, fore-silences that are deliber-
ately attended to, what Dauenhauer calls "occurrences of
anticipatory alertness."18 In anticipatory alertness we ready
ourselves to say or hear. What we ready ourselves to say or
hear is "somehow detected as novel or different, as not sim-
plyflowingin a fully predelineated wayfromwhat was said
or heard before .... [we] recognize that a new saying or
hearing is being readied in the anticipatory silence."19
Fore- and after-silence constitute a unity, two ends of a
Page 95
single phenomenon that delineates the cohesiveness of a
given discourse. Dauenhauer cites Merleau-Ponty speak-
ing of the end of a speech or text as the "lifting of a spell,"
and goes on to say "If after-silence lifts a spell, then fore-
silence casts a spell. The casting and the lifting belong
together."20
Deep silence, the third form Dauenhauer identifies, is
identical to the primordial silence Picard describes, the
silence that pervades all utterance, runs through it, abides
in it. This is the silence that permeates all being. As with the
other forms of silence, deep silence does not exist outside
of a relationship to utterance, but here the utterance is not
always either immediate or specific. Deep silence occurs in
three modes: the silence of intimates, liturgical silence, and
the silence of the to-be-said.
The silence of intimates, which may be the intimacy of
hate as well as of love or simply the intimacy of a long bear-
ing with one another in resignation, is an abiding silence
that is both punctuated by utterances and maintained by
them. Be they rapid-fire and intense, frequent and pro-
longed, or merely desultory the utterances are the strings
that keep the intimates tied to one another. What is preem-
inent, however, is the tighter binding of the silence itself:
"The utterance engaged in among intimates is oriented to
and finds its place in the silence in which the intimates
abide."21
Dauenhauer finds his exemplification of liturgical
silence in the worship of Roman Catholics and Quakers.
The one legislates moments of silence within the flow of the
rite. For the other, worship itself "is fundamentally hush or
silence."22 Common to both traditions is "the expectation
that God will work within the space of silence the wor-
shipers hold open."23 The space is not opened so that the
worshipers will act, but that God may act. Nor is the expect-
ed action of God predetermined by the worshipers. The
silent space is opened so that God may do whatever the
divine will wishes, even if this is "to do nothing which the
worshipers can recognize as a doing."24 The silence of inti-
mates, of the back and forth of stillness and utterance that
mark abiding relationship, is also present here.
The silence of the to-be-said is the "silence beyond all
saying, the silence of the what-ought-to-be-said in which
what-is-said is embedded."23 Dauenhauer suggests that
beneath all utterance lies an appeal that the utterance be
validated. But it cannot be validated by another utterance;
the "authentication must be awaited in silence. Whatever is
uttered is either validated or invalidated by the silent to-be-
said which the encountered world presents to man for his
originary response."26 In the silence of intimates and in
liturgical silence there is someone for whom silence opens
space for utterance. In the silence of the to-be-said there is
no evident someone or something from whom response is
Page 96
expected. Yet there is appeal. When this appeal is interpret-
ed theologically as appeal to God, the silence of intimates
and liturgical silence flow into the silence of the to-be-said.
Furthermore, liturgical silence can be understood not only
as appeal but also as response to prior call. The very gather-
ing for worship, the liturgical utterances, and the liturgical
silence are response to the silent call, the to-be-said, of the
divine.
Beyond these three forms of silence Dauenhauer
describes a further and final kind, which he calls terminal
silence.27 While the stretch of discourse is inexhaustible, it
nonetheless remains insufficient to express all our dealings
with self and world. Not only are experience and discourse
themselves incommensurate, both remain profoundly elu-
sive of our grasp. Terminal silence is that which acknowl-
edges the inadequacy of the totality of our discourse. It
does this not by eliminating further discourse, but by
changing its meaning. One possible interpretation is the
graceful acceptance of the final unachievability of our
hopes and dreams, a grace that comes only through silence,
which, along with the forgetting and forgiving that silence
grants (here Dauenhauer learns from Picard), makes death
a positive achievement.28 This is because there is an
"absolute word" that exists beyond the discourse of
humankind, dwells in the realm of silence, and is entered
only through prayer. Dauenhauer again turns to Picard:
In prayer the word comes again of itself into silence.... It is
taken up by God, taken away from man.... Prayer can be
never-ending, but the word of prayer always disappears
into silence. Prayer is a pouring of the word into silence....
Elsewhere, outside prayer, the silence of man is fulfilled
and receives its meaning in speech. But in prayer it receives
its meaning and fulfillment in the meeting with the silence
of God.29
From his analysis Dauenhauer draws together a number
of characteristics of silence.30 The following are of relevance
to these remarks. First silence, even when habitual or rou-
tine, is itself an active performance, and not just the cessa-
tion of another active performance. Silence is not an empty
impotency waiting to be replaced by the potency of speech.
Rather, silence is itself significant intentional performance,
a purposeful partner with discourse in humankind's
engagement with Being. Second, while Picard points out
that silence as pre-existing and primordial is autonomous,
Dauenhauer demonstrates that silence phenomenological-
ly—silence as we sensately experience it—is never
autonomous but always linked to the relationships inherent
in discourse. Silence is always bound up with utterance and
is always an act done in concert with someone or something
other than the actor. Third, silence involves a yielding that
flows from an awareness of finitude and awe:
Liturgical Ministry Spring 2001
 In performing silence one acknowledges some center of
significance of which he is not the source, a center to be
wondered at, to be in awe of. The very doing of silence is
the acknowledgment of the agent'sfinitudeand of the
awesomeness of that of which he is not the source. But
correlatively, the agent is aware that the doing of silence
opens him to meet that which lies beyond his control. This
other reaches the agent only through the agent's yielding.
Thus there is the awe-filled realization that he who engages
in active performances has a responsibility for letting this
other appear. The silence of the agent acknowledges this
awesome responsibility.31
Thus silence is neither rare nor narrow, but is constitu-
tive of human engagement with the world. Silence is not a
manner of absenting ourselves from the surrounding
swirl, but is, along with discourse, part of the multileveled
process by which we become present to this swirl. It is the
necessary dark soil out of which the appeal and response of
all existence grows. Being calls, we respond, and the foun-
dation of this dialogue is silence.
Silence in the Liturgy
Dauenhauer's analysis here is descriptive not prescriptive.
He identifies the silence we in fact encounter within the
phenomenology of discourse. But we can make prescrip-
tive applications for our way of celebrating liturgy. What
happens, for example, to the assembly's experience of the
opening collect when it is not preceded by the fore-silence
called for in the rubrics? What happens to the assembly's
experience of the Liturgy of the Word when the proclama-
tion of readings and homily is not marked by the fore- and
after-silences proper to each? What happens in any text of
the liturgy—be it proclamation, prayer, movement, or
song—when the intervening silences that set up its rhythm
of intelligibility and nuance are glossed over? The spell is
not cast, and we are inundated instead by noise rather than
word, jumble rather than sense, rush rather than mean-
ing—ultimately by clanging symbol rather than love.
Silence is what allows the sounds of liturgy to be more
than literal word-sense, for silence allows us to let go of the
determinateness of utterance. We must proclaim; we must
speak in response to the God who calls. But silence
reminds us that all our speaking is only approximation,
only beginning, only the next back-and-forth of our end-
less dialogue with the consciousness of Christ. Silence
allows the sound of our utterance/proclamation to contin-
ue its reverberation in a space bigger than our privatized
consciousnesses and reminds our individualized themati-
zations that they are limited, provisory, even suspect.
Silence allows us to run the risk of being surprised, of being
met on its all-encompassing plane by the new, the undis-
Harmon: The Silence of Music
The very gathering for worship.
the liturgical utterances.
and the liturgical silence
are response to the silent call
the to-be-said, of the divine.
covered, the as-yet-unheard. As Picard says, it is not we
who put silence to the test, but silence who tests us.32
We can say that the silence of the to-be-said is the fun-
damental fore- and after-silence of all utterance, Picard's
primordial generative pool. Whether or not we give it
space in our liturgical celebrations, it underwrites all that
we say and do. The issue is not the existence of this silence
but our willingness to encounter it. Such encounter takes
courage for, as Dauenhauer points out, the appeal we make
has no predetermined answer. In the pool of silence the
new and unknown, the as-yet-unheard, swims toward us,
and we can do nothing but wait.
But we are not the only ones who wait. If liturgical
silence is response to the prior call of God, then in a sense
God's call is divine utterance waiting for validation from
the to-be-said of the worshiping community. In his reflec-
tions on the nature of liturgical silence Jean-Yves Quellec
makes the poignant observation that "in the silence of the
liturgy is revealed the mystery of a divine poverty brought
to fulfillment."33 In the liturgy God waits upon our silence,
and does so with humility and with hope.
Silence in Music
We do not generally think of music as having a silent com-
ponent. But music finds its origin in the same primordial
pool of silence that generates all word and sound. Music
emerges from silence and returns to silence as does all
utterance. Unless there first be silence, music cannot
sound. The relationship of music to silence, however, is not
Page 97
that of opposites, that is, of a negation or non-being sud-
denly replaced by an existence. Rather, music and silence
are commensurate beings; music arises out of the silence
and music continues in the silence:
Music is born, develops, and realizes itself within silence:
upon silence it traces out its moving arabesques, which
give a form to silence, and yet do not abolish it. A musical
work, like all sonority, unfolds between two silences; the
silence of its birth and the silence of its completion. In this
temporal life where music perpetually is born, dies and is
born again, silence is ever its faithful companion.34
Dauenhauer specifies what the above states. His
description of the types of silence and their connection
with discourse applies as equally to music as it does to
speech. The intervening silences in music differentiate one
tone from its succeeding tone, one musical phrase from the
phrase that follows, one movement in a symphony from
the next, the first stanza of a hymn from the second stanza,
and so forth. Without the intervening silences in music
there would be no melodic or rhythmic intelligibility, just
babel. It is the intervening silences that enable music's
capacity to communicate.
The fore- and after-silence of music allows it to
emerge, to come into being. One is the silence of alertness
and expectation, of the readiness for birth. A performer
who listens to the silence before she or he begins to play
performs the piece with a different level of understand-
ing, and the listeners hear that difference and enter the
piece in a new way.35 The after-silence of music can be the
silence of satisfaction when a piece emerges at its ending
as a rounded whole. Or it can be the silence of restless-
ness, of incompletion, when the dying out of the musical
tones teeters on the brink of non-tonic resolution. In
either case the after-silence enters the realm of the
music's deep silence, where on the one hand we acknowl-
edge the unity of its form, and on the other we recognize
it as expression of the unfulfilled to-be-said of existence.
But a judicious issue faces us here. Music abides in the
deep silence of the sonority of all existence and also in the
deep silence of its own potentiality, its own to-be-said.
With every intervening silence and every fore- and after-
silence comes the question of whether any next sound
will emerge and, if it does, what it will be. Nothing is pre-
determined. Even in the case of already composed music
there is no guarantee that in performance its form will
unfold along the lines intended by the composer. We can
fulfill or not fulfill the expectation set forth by the fore-
silence. We can savor or not savor the after-silence. We
can even imprudently prolong the silence itself into the
death of potentiality. The silence in music is the source of
possibility both for the music itself and for us. And by
Page 98
that very token the silence is also the wellspring of free-
dom.36
And we do experience the difference (although we can-
not always articulate it) when a performer chooses to listen
to the silence while she or he performs.
The accomplished performer "takes his time," for he under-
stands that music lives not only by sounds, but also by
silences which cause the very soul of the performer or the
listener to be steeped in music. The mediocre performer,
however, hustles the notes instead of linking them together
flexibly and freely: for he fears the breathing spaces and
silences which break the continuity of the form when one
does not know how to give them their spiritual content.37
Music and Liturgical Silence
In The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the
Silence ofAuschwitz,38 André Neher examines the kinds of
silence presented in the Hebrew Scriptures and suggests
that biblical silence arises from the prophetic tension
between call and response, and is the prerequisite of dia-
logue and the deep womb of freedom.39 For Neher there is
a difference between the kind of silence that arises from the
inanimation or lifelessness of a rock and the silence that
characterizes a bud on the edge of blooming. The first is
the silence of inertia, of the never to be, but the latter is the
silence of potentiality, of the about to be.40 For us this is the
kind of silence that we hold and that holds us after, for
example, the "Let us pray" and before the praying of the
collect. And this is the silence that characterizes all rests in
music and all the timeless spaces between the soundings of
its successive tones. Music can school us not only in the
appropriate sounding of liturgy but also in its silence.
Whether we hear it or not the silence is there in a consti-
tutive way calling us to attend to it. When we give the
silence its proper place, when we allow it to "sound," the
music becomes richer because its integral elements
become more differentiated.41 We are drawn then to the
innate form of the music and not only to whatever subjec-
tive impositions we also place upon it. By contrast when we
ignore the silence we fill the music with noise, with, for
example, higher decibels, undisciplined and intrusive
improvisations, upbeat tempi never counterbalanced with
a more meditative pace. The irony is that this approach to
music-making in the liturgy is often what most satisfies
our assemblies. But this is a false satisfaction. The only way
to lead our assemblies forward liturgically is to help them
enter the death that liturgy and its silence intimate. Music
is meant to lead the way.
Music is not meant to replace silence but to take us
more deeply into silence. When we use music to fill silent
spaces in the liturgy, to avoid the silence, we are conceiving
Liturgical Ministry Spring 2001
of silence as an absence, a nothingness, an emptiness, and
music as something tofillthe void. Music itself teaches us,
however, that the silences are active and necessary. Without
them no sound comes into presence, nothing new is born.
Without them we do not truly hear what is sounded. Victor When we put
Zuckerkandl makes the comment that "one of music's
functions is to lay bare the positive meaning of silence, to
transform a silence when we hear nothing into an audible
nothing [M]any persons use music to mask a silence
our agitation to rest
which they cannot bear because they feel only its negative
aspect, the void. They would be cured of this error, this
sickness, precisely by listening to music."42 and allow liturgical silence
Do we listen to the silence in the music, or do we mask
it? Do we use music in collaboration with liturgical silence
or in opposition to it? Do wefillall the silences with sound?
Do we choose the silences the liturgy offers us or do we to enter our souls
merely wait passively for music to intervene again and
entertain us? For example, when we use the opening hymn
to call the assembly to silence and attention we ignore the
fore-silence necessary for the emergence itself of the hymn we discover all
and its ritual meaning. The fore-silence that precedes litur-
gy is a tuning of our minds and hearts in preparation for
the mystery of Christ that we are about to enter. We tune
our musical instruments but often we neglect to tune our- that silence holds for us.
selves. What kind of fore-silence do we need to establish
before the liturgy begins and how can we go about doing it?
The Liturgy of the Word calls for fore- and after-
silences to surround the readings and homily. These
silences need not be lengthy (they should in fact be vari-
able andflexible).But they need to be an intentional and time will arise. And this time must be given lest we enter the
expected part of every celebration. I know one parish psalm in a headlong rush.
where the lectors have been trained to approach the sanc- The liturgy also contains moments of already attuned
tuary, bow to the altar, and walk to the ambo during the discourse that include their own attuned silence. This
praying of the opening collect. This not only shatters the marks theflow,for example, of the eucharistie prayer. We
assembly's attentiveness to the prayer but also precludes do not need silent pauses (and interjecting them would
the fore-silence needed before the Liturgy of the Word destroy the discourse) between the proclaimed texts of the
begins. Another parish, by contrast, has taught its lectors présider and the sung acclamations of the assembly. We do
to listen to the assembly seat itself and become quiet need, however, the appropriately attended to intervening
before proceeding to the ambo. In the ensuing silence the silences of the prayer's phrases and content breaks so that
lector's quiet movement and bow pull the assembly into the assembly's participation through listening, silence, and
that anticipatory alertness that is the necessary prepara- acclamation stays attuned.
tion for the proclamation. Among the numerous ways that no. 30 of Sacrosanctum
Musically this same fore- and after-silence needs to sur- Concilium mandated the active participation of the people
round the responsorial psalm. The fore-silence begins as in the liturgy (i.e., through acclamations, responses,
the after-silence savoring of thefirstreading and slips in its psalmody, singing, gesture, and actions), perhaps the least
own time into preparation for the psalm. Here the move- attended to has been the form of participation identified in
ment of the cantor to the place where she or he will sing the itsfinalsentence: "And at the proper time a reverent silence
psalm becomes a participatory moment for the assembly. should be observed."43 The General Instruction of the
This movement should be accompanied only by the Roman Missal reiterates and specifies this norm of partici-
preparatory silence and not by the instrumental introduc- pation: "Silence should be observed at the designated times
tion of the psalm refrain. The cantor's movement is part of as part of the celebration. Its function depends on the time
the silence out of which the musical introduction in its it occurs in each part of the celebration. Thus at the peni-

Harmon: The Silence of Music Page 99

tential rite and again after the invitation to pray, all recol-
lect themselves; at the conclusion of a reading or the homi-
ly, all meditate briefly on what has been heard; after
communion, all praise God in silent prayer."44 Finally the
forward to the American edition of the Sacramentary states
"The proper use of periods of silent prayer and reflection
will help render the celebration less mechanical and imper-
sonal and lend a more prayerful spirit to the liturgical rite.
Just as there should be no celebration without song, so too
there should be no celebration without periods for silent
prayer and reflection."45
Clearly the norm of silence within the liturgy is central.
But how easily we are seduced into ignoring this mandate
by the sounded elements of the liturgy. We must learn to
attend to the silence as well as to the sound. This is not easy,
for to keep silent is to sit in the presence of thefinalsilence,
death.46 And so it is not surprising that wefidget.But when
we put our agitation to rest and allow liturgical silence to
enter our souls we discover all that silence holds for us: the
reconciliation of opposites, the letting go of self-delusion
and isolation, the granting of forgiveness, and the coming
together of genuine communion. We discover that death
yields life.
We will be able to do this only if we allow the deep
silence of living the paschal mystery on a daily basis to
become the ontological interpretation we place upon the
to-be-said of existence. Then all the polyvalences of
silence—its restlessness as well as its peace, its tenderness as
well as its treachery, its attractiveness as well as its fear-
someness, itsfragilityas well as its strength—will become
reconciled in the deep silence of our identity in Christ, and
all the possibilities in silence—birth of new being out of
nothingness, breadth of new hearing beyond the already
said, depth of new presence to the other/Other—will
become the actualities of ourfreedom.And we will then
hunger for this silence in our liturgy and in our music.
1. Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman, 2nd printing
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952).
2. Bernard Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological
Significance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980).
3. Dauenhauer, Silence, 23.
4. Picard, The World of Silence, 36.
5. Picard, The World of Silence, 13, "...silence on its own, the world of silence
without speech, is the world before creation."
6. Picard, The World ofSilence, 5-7; 66.
7. Picard, The World of Silence, 2.
8. Picard, The World of Silence, 3.
9. Picard, The World of Silence, 54.
10. Picard, The World ofSilence, 28.
11. Dauenhauer, Silence, 135.
12. Picard, The World of Silence, 9.
13. Picard, The World of Silence, 52.
14. Picard, The World ofSilence, 121.
15. Dauenhauer, Silence, 3-5.
16. Dauenhauer, Silence, 3-25.
Page 100
17. Picard, The World of Silence, 169. Writing from another perspective and
for another purpose, Ivan Illich makes the same point when he says that it
is through the medium of our pauses rather than our sounds that we
make ourselves understood (cited in Dorothy Ling, The Original Art of
Music [Lanham, MD: The Aspen Institute and University Press of
America, 1989] 119).
18. Dauenhauer, Silence, 11.
19. Dauenhauer, Silence, 11.
20. Dauenhauer, Silence, 13; the Merleau-Ponty citation is from
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962) 180.
21. Dauenhauer, Silence, 17.
22. Dauenhauer, Silence, 18.
23. Dauenhauer, Silence, 19.
24. Dauenhauer, Silence, 19.
25. Dauenhauer, Silence, 19.
26. Dauenhauer, Silence, 20.
27. Dauenhauer, Silence, 75-77.
28. Dauenhauer, Silence, 135.
29. Picard, The World ofSilence, 231-32; cited in Dauenhauer, Silence, 137.
30. Dauenhauer, Silence, 24-25.
31. Dauenhauer, Silence, 25.
32. Picard, The World of Silence, 1.
33. Jean-Yves Quellec, "Silence in the Liturgy" in Symbol: the Language of
Liturgy, ed. Anthony Sherman, et al. (Brooklyn and Rockville Centre, NY:
Joint Committee of Liturgical Commissions, 1982) 68.
34. Gisèle Brelet, "Music and Silence," in Reflections on Art: A Source Book of
Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, ed. Susanne Κ. Langer
(London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) 103.
35. Brelet, "Music and Silence," 104-05.
36. Brelet, "Music and Silence," 105, "Silence is thus the symbol of possibili­
ty—and of freedom..."
37. Brelet, "Music and Silence," 116.
38. André Neher, The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the
Silence of Auschwitz, trans. David Maisel (Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society of America, 5741/1981).
39. Neher, The Exile of the Word. Biblical prophets live in two dimensions, the
one of being called and the other of giving response and "in the dialectic
tension of this word extended between a call and a response, silence aris-
es" (15). "Silencc.alone guarantees to the encounter of God and man its
absolute liberty" (50).
40. Neher, The Exile of the Word. Neher defines three different dimensions of
the silence present in Jewish biblical and rabbinic writings. He groups
these under three pairs of Hebrew roots. Damo and shatak refer to the
silence of the cosmos, of sleep, of death, of physical paralysis. This is the
silence of the inert, of nothingness. Hasho and harash refer to the silence
that is potentiality, "the gathering of one's strength before leaping for-
ward" (39). This is the silence of being, of energy on the edge of birth.
Alam and haster panim connote the silence inherent in dialogue, the
silence involved in the hide-and-seek game humans and God play with
each another. This silence dwells in the dialectic between nothingness
and being. It is the silence of challenge and of choice. Neher identifies
these biblical dimensions on silence in pp. 34-54. He devotes the remain-
der of this exceptional and insightful work to an in-depth examination of
these three forms of silence.
41. Brelet, "Music and Silence," 106-07.
42. Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician, trans. Norbert Guterman
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) 279.
43. Sacrosanctum Concilium in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post
Conciliar Documents, rev. ed., ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Northport, NY:
Costello Publishing Company, 1992) no. 30.
44. General Instruction of the Roman Missal in The Liturgy Documents: A
Parish Resource, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1991) no.
23.
45. Forward to the Sacramentary, trans. International Commission on
English in the Liturgy (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Company,
1985) 14.
46. Picard, The World of Silence, 25.
Liturgical Ministry Spring 2001
 ^ s
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