9/19/1999

There is a school of thought that understands the "real" to be the absence of something. I'll try not to get too complicated in talking about it. Basically, a number of philosphers hold that a thing is defined by the emptiness around it (Heidegger uses a jug as an example of this), and that it is the emptiness that is "the real thing". It's actually a fairly complicated argument, and quite a number philosophers have worked with it. I mainly come at it through Freud and a bit of Lacan.

The idea that absence is very important in the shaping of objects isn't particularly revolutionary these days, but it's an interesting way to think about things. It's not that, say, a jug has its shape so much as that the emptiness around it gives it shape. (I could be mangling this entirely -- it's been a couple of years since I actually read this stuff. Complaints at my inexpert presentation should be sent to the management.)

So, taking that idea and applying it to sound, and more specifically to drumming, the sense is that a rhythm is a mass of sound shaped by the silences between each beat. Just as words don't have much sense without stops and spaces -- little silences -- a rhythm in drumming is a sound interrupted by silence. We tend to think of it as the other way 'round -- silence interrupted by sound -- because we start with the silence and make the sound.

I got to thinking about this after my lesson yesterday, during which Alan commented how much he likes silence. (This after we'd been banging away for a few minutes.) I responded that he's in an odd profession if he likes silence so, but I've since rethought it, and I don't know that there's a more appropriate profession for one who likes silence. I mean, anyone who make music probably appreciates the import of silence, but drumming is more completely binary than your average instrument. That is to say, it goes *bang* (or maybe *ting* or *thump*, etc) but it doesn't have notes.

An appreciation for the complexity of silence is, for me, an integral part of communicating, either in words or, more recently, with my drum. Silence and sound are in a dialectical relationship, each defining the other. But which comes first? You start with nothing, silence, but silence isn't silence until it has something opposite it to make the distinction. We make the leap from nothing, from 0, to two.

This all might seem either really obvious or totally dull, or possibly both, to the rest of you out there, but I've really been having fun thinking about it all. This is very wrapped up with a lot of thinking I did for the religion major at Williams, so it's fun to revisit. I'd be quite interested to hear thoughts on or responses to this.