the most pregnant silence in all music

There are other moments of silence in this music, but it’s that pause at the end of the first phrase of the first trumpet solo (2’01) that has always captivated me. It seems to me to be full of unspoken meaning, expectancy and a glorious openness to whatever may come next.

The quotes I’ve added to this video celebrate silence, and music and its relationship to silence. If you’re thinking it’s strange to celebrate silence with music, you may think it’s even stranger to celebrate silence with trumpet music, but when you hear it I think you will understand.

The music is the opening movement of the trumpet concerto by Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus. This performance is by the great Maurice André, recorded from my old long-deleted vinyl LP (‘Trumpet Concert’, with the North German Radio Chamber Orchestra conducted by Gabor Ötvös). André gets it just right: he lingers in that silence just long enough to make it something truly out of the ordinary. Overall this is a slow-paced, leisurely, rather dreamy performance, but that suits the music, and I’ve never heard another that gets that wonderfully pregnant silence just right. (Notice also how André uses vibrato for expression on selected notes, as they did in the 18th century.)

Of course there is a lot of other music that has meaningful silences in it: ones that seem particularly pregnant to me are in Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in Alium and Haydn’s Piano Sonata no.31 in Ab (1st movement, especially as played by John McCabe). The many silences in Arvo Pärt’s Passio (St John Passion) and between the big chords at the end of Sibelius’s 5th Symphony also come to mind. But this one by Mozart’s dad in my opinion tops them all. If you know of any rivals to it, or other exceptionally pregnant musical silences, please let me know.

(For more thought-provoking or reflective music videos, you may like to subscribe to my YouTube channel ‪@neilbucklandmusic‬ ; the website for my own music is: www.neilbucklandmusic.com.)

These are (most of) the quotes on silence I've included in the video, with sources, where I know them:

When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music. – Rumi

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and mystical ecstasy and death – all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldous Huxley, ‘The Rest Is Silence’ in Music at Night (1931)

Good poems mean what they say, good silences
mean, if you listen, what the good poems say. – Gwen Harwood (Australian poet), ‘A Sermon’

Fatuous words I don’t trust you I trust silence
More than beauty more than anything
A festival of understanding – Frantisek Halas (Czech poet, quoted in Milan Kundera, The Joke)

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being. – Thomas Merton

You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself. ― Anaïs Nin

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
― Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea

I have always loved the desert. You can sit on a dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. Yet something is still radiating in the silence. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[We] then sailed on out "into the mournful wasteland of the sea." It is, as always, of cosmic grandeur and simplicity, compelling silence; for what has man to say here, especially at night when the ocean is alone with the starry sky? One looks out silently, surrendering all self-importance… The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over. The beauty and grandeur of the sea consists in our being forced down into the fruitful bottomlands of our own psyches, where we confront and re-create ourselves… ― Carl Jung, letter to his wife Emma (written when sailing away from America)