“My research and this book are about silence – the many faces and meanings of silence, the communicative power of silence as it fills the pauses and cracks and crannies of our discourse, of our relationships and of our lives. And I suppose too, though I dislike the word, the pathology of silence. It rests on a pragmaticist’s approach to silence which obliges meaning to be drawn from context. Just as words do not carry their meanings around them but are infused by their context, so too the meaning of silence is infused by its context and draws its meaning from there.”
Once a year in the MMus class at the Royal Academy of Music, we ask both teachers and students in the class to bring a piece of writing that they love. It can be on anything, not necessarily music; the only stipulations are that it must be non-fiction, and you must bring it because you love the use of language, the way the author uses words and syntax and grammar to weave the linguistic tapestry on the page.
It is always wonderful to see the extraordinary range that comes to class. We’ve had writings on computer games, Shakespeare, history, sociology, and even, occasionally, music itself (!). I have discovered many a new author through the enthusiasm and love shown by students for the things they read. I too have brought many examples throughout the years - Pina Bausch is one recollection - but recently I have alighted on one particular book that ticks so many boxes, including the one of pure love for the written word, that I can’t bring myself to choose something different. It’s Ruth Wajnryb’s deep exploration of “how tragedy shapes talk”, simpy titled The Silence.
I discovered Wajnryb’s book fifteen years ago, when I was in that stage of my PhD of searching for the right language to describe my findings. I had been looking at songs by three mid nineteenth-century German women, and what struck me was not so much the phrasing, but the way in which that phrasing encapsulated silences that felt deliberate. I knew what I was seeing in the music before me, but I could not find the way to demonstrate verbally how fundamental I believed it to be in constructing a performance practice.
I can’t remember now how I found Wajnryb. I don’t think it was even as part of my research, but simply a book I picked up elsewhere. And within a page, I was gripped, in part by the writing, but also in part by a sense of recognition on a personal level. Wajnryb is a linguist, and the book is ostensibly a linguistic textbook. But it is far more than that, and Wajnryb writes for a far wider audience than her fellow academics. She starts from her own painful and poignant story of growing up in a family scarred by the Holocaust, of being a descendant of those who witnessed the atrocity firsthand. Her emphasis is on the second generation – she tells the story of Susan, whose only link to her ancestors is a photo of her grandmother knitting: “Susan’s statement, ‘I know that she liked knitting’, in fact speaks volumes, but not about her grandmother and not about knitting. It speaks about what is not known by one generation and what has not been said by another[…]” Wajnryb’s search for meaning is in the gaps in the stories handed down to her, for handed down they are, despite not being verbal. Wajnryb talks of “fragments and echoes”, of learning “to probe the gap between what is said and what is meant”. The history with which she is working is, as she says, indeed unspeakable, too large and too terrible to find adequate words. The shutters on the cover of the book say it all. We know there is a room within, one that has a description that we can fashion, but the barriers are there, though perhaps so much part of our lives that we barely see them. Wajnryb finds correspondences in other types of trauma, drawing large lessons in communication within all relationships. While there are differences in “nature and function”, she writes, the silences contain a “regrouping and reconstructing” of a story, and carry their own messages. Wajnryb’s willingness to confront silence in this way, and to allow it to be itself, rather than to try and replace it with verbalized language, was what struck me as so powerful, and gave me the tools I needed for the equally non-verbal silences in the music I was trying to understand.
One of Wajnryb’s points is that silence isn’t necessarily solely external suppression, although it often is, but often has a self-imposed element in the face of a seemingly insurmountable task. Such silence often tells a different story to the one offered by people who are comfortable with being verbally explicit. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s definition of a man’s sentence, as one where “‘Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.’ That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use.” This seems to me to be not about the literal structure of the sentence, or even surface content, but rather to be a conscious rejection of Bloom’s concepts of influence, of the idea that women carry the same anxieties and experience as men do, not just in the everyday world, but also creatively. Success and habit, at least habit unbroken by other demands on the creator, are often not indigenous to women in the same way as they are to men, and thus the inflection within the language, and the context from which meaning is drawn, is very different.
The concentration on a second generation was also a drawing point here. Many of the women composers we tend to put under the spotlight are not pioneers, despite our attempt to make them so. Our constant reinvention of the woman-composer wheel may seem superficially to celebrate women, but we run the risk of negating the struggle for everydayness. Sometimes it’s harder to allow someone to be seen as one of the crowd, to accept that someone is part of us, then to crown them with superlatives, such as “transcending barriers”, or “unique”, or “stand-out”, all words I’ve read recently on historical women.
Wajnryb’s language itself is beautiful and lyrical. I am captivated anew with every reading. Her description of what research is and why it matters is woven in with the personal and the statistical; I find fresh insight with every reading. I close with one of her personal anecdotes, one of the many that knit her narrative together in the courageously personal way that lends such authenticity to her book, and is a model to us all. Her three-year-old daughter has found a photo of her grandmother, Wajnryb’s mother, and has asked where she is. Wajnryb explains that she died two-and-a-half years previously, but Laura refuses to accept this explanation:
“Later in the same day, as I passed the shelf where the picture frame stood, I moved it up to adult height, thinking Laura wouldn’t notice, and that would be the end of the matter. A cowardly, evasive act, I conceded, and one that backfired. The next time Laura passed by the shelf, she noticed the photo had been moved to a higher shelf. With a slick, imperative tone in her voice, she said, ‘Bring it down here!’
Compliantly, silently, I did as I was bid and she added, ‘And now, leave it there!’ She ran off, tossing over her shoulder as if it were an afterthought or a Greek chorus, ‘That my mum’s mum. She not dead.’
[…]
A few days later she passed the same shelf where the photo was, as ordered, at her eye level. She was smugly pleased about this. She picked up the frame again, possessively. As if aware of her mysterious power to ‘work’ this conversation to her own ends, she caught my eye and said, ‘She your mum, look. She not dead, Mum.’ I fought the impulse to remain silent. I looked about for an answer that would in the circumstances, some sort of compromise between her three-year-old reality and mine. ‘Yes, Laura, that’s my mum. She’s not dead. Not in the photo.’”