Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction; The texture of silence, Jenny Doctor; Faith, silence, and darkness entwined in Messiaen's 'Regard du silence', Matthew Hill; Sounding silence, moving stillness: Olivier Messiaen's Le banquet céleste, Jan Christiaens; Going gently: contemplating silences and cinematic death, Stan Link; Film sound, music and the art of silence, Ed Hughes; Pragmatics of silence, William Brooks; Some noisy ruminations on Susan Sontag's 'Aesthetics of Silence', Darla M. Crispin; Preliminary thoughts about silence in early western chant, Emma Hornby; The communicative rest, John Potter; The air between two hands: silence, music and communication, Julie P. Sutton; 'Meditation is the musick of souls': the silent music of Peter Sterry (1613-72), Tom Dixon; Silent music and the eternal silence, Nicky Losseff; Selected bibliography; Index.

About the Author

Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor are both Senior Lecturers in the Department of Music, University of York, UK. Jenny Doctor, Matthew Hill, Jan Christiaens, Stan Link, Ed Hughes, William Brooks, Darla M. Crispin, Emma Hornby, John Potter, Julie P. Sutton, Tom Dixon, Nicky Losseff.

Reviews

'A fortuitous power outage muffled my living room the night I finished Silence, Music, Silent Music; plunged into a deep quiet that seemed alternately comforting and unnerving, I realized how much not just my perceptions but my awareness of those perceptions had been altered by having read this collection of essays. As one might expect, the material includes discussions of silence in the works of such familiar composers as Ives, Cage, Messiaen, and Takemitsu. But it also touches on silence in Japanese, Sufi, and Indian musical traditions, and - perhaps more intriguing - on the meanings of silence in meditation, therapy, and mystic philosophy. As a group, the contributors easily make the point that silence is no mere absence; on the contrary, it is a very real ‘something that can be approached in richly different ways.' James Wierzbicki University of Michigan, USA ... a long-awaited and most welcome addition to the literature... rich variety of the contributions...The diversity of chapters is impressive... The editors are to be congratulated on the care and attention that provides space to the voices of individual authors whilsst exploring underlying and potentially linking themes. The rich diversity is explored very successully... British Journal of Music Therapy