Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. . . . Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. (Jean Arp)
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
I just got back from a concert by Kammerchor Stuttgart. The ensemble came to Indonesia for the first time about 6 years ago, and the conductor, Frieder Bernius, wants to return. (I suppose he's the one who's keen on revisiting Bandung and Jakarta because the singers are all new).
One thing I develop after spending more time making concerts for the past 3 year is the so-called "audience insting". There were about 500 people when I walked into the concert hall (by the way it's Aula Barat ITB) but I had this not-so-nice gut feeling that they are going to be naughty. (It's the same with Sam's concert the other day.) To start with, a guy nearby seemed so bored that he kept on flipping the pages of the programme booklet (I don't know what he looked for since it was very dark) and created a perpetual pianissimo 'flap...flap...flap' sound that finally came to an end before the intermission. My best friend, who sat next to me and then moved, had worse luck. Her neighbors were three youngsters who kept on playing with their phones and texting devil. For a while I also heard an annoying 'clickclickclickcliclikclick' but then somehow it stopped. My friend said she threw them a killer look which probably stopped them from touching the buttons of their mobiles but apparently didn't stop them from talking during the first half of the performance. She was outraged as she missed a lot of ethereal moments.
During the intermission, she moved back to a chair next to me. She pointed out a lady who previously sat behind her.
"That one, her. It's scary. She called someone and said that she's been trying to reach that person all night. Gosh, I'm not sitting next to her. She might try to reach someone else during the second half."
Afterward, we both moved to a better teritory where we thought the environment would be more conducive. Nothing bad happened in the second half, probably because the programme was lighter and more melodius for the common ears (Brahms and Schumann) so people finally were listening. Then end of programme. Applaus. Curtain calls. Mr. Bernius kindly consented to give an encore.
There was this period of complete silence prior to the extra piece when suddenly a phone, with a silly traditional ringtone, rang. (I don't hate traditional tunes, but I hate anything out of context.) To our horror, it came from just behind our back. The same lady my friend dreaded sat just behind us and it was her phone that destroyed all those holyness. Mr. Bernius even had to turn his back and begged for mercy. All singers at the stage looked at our direction. It was so stupid, insensitive, impolite and uncivilized. And it lasted for a good 10 seconds, out of total nothingness.
To this day I still wondered about people's reason to go to a classical concert. Don't they know that it is one of the places on earth where one must be still and at peace with oneself? If I were a writer of a book about living at the moment, enjoying the now, like Eckhart Tolle, I would tell my reader to go to a high-profile classical concert, because it's the place to train yourself to live inside the present. No past, no future, just now. Just the music, all those juxtaposing melodies and harmonies that form an art and show how good God is as to allow us to create and enjoy such beauty. Every second of it is worthwhile. Every beat is meaningful.
That's why I sometimes dreaded having a big audience. For so long I always prefer things in small portion, because it's much easier to control the quality. Like tonight, I'm sure one-third of the people who came asked themselves in the end why they landed there in the first place. Last year I organized a recital by a wonderful Indonesian pianist who now resides in the US, Aemilia Teguh. Everything was done in last minutes and so the promotion was not good. There were only 50 people at the hall, but they were amazing. They practically pricked their ears during the whole performance, they breathed with her, felt for her. Aemil was so contented and inspired, I remembered, as she told me afterward.
But I have to say that I'm very happy to have developed a wonderful audience during the 2 seasons of Chamber Music Series in Bandung. There are familiar faces who greet me at the door and it's always a pleasure welcoming those people who I know will share the joy of listening to beautiful music. The most satisfying moment of the job is when I can hear overwhelming passages in complete silence, thus leaving me feeling so solemn and at one with God. It is, of course, not difficult to achieve that. The quality of performance is world-class. It's one the purest form of art, as pure as an oxygen that circulates around the body so that the brain has no problem recognizing this. Maybe CMS has changed the brain structure of their loyal fans in a way that they can come to just sit and listen. Other things can wait.
It's a pity that modern humans are so easily distracted and voluntarily choose to be so. So many people couldn't leave their phones off for just 2 hours in the day. And I think people must train their brain to not to obey the impulse to say something all the time, even though it's important (at least according to themselves).
Mother Teresa once said, "We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. . . . We need silence to be able to touch souls." I think all valuable things need silence to reveal their value. Imagine looking at van Gogh's Starlit Sky at Rhone in the middle of a fish market in Beijing. Compare the feeling of embracing your lover in the middle of Love Parade in Berlin, and at a private beach in Lombok while watching sunrise. And all mothers always say that no matter how bad their kids are during the day, their love for them will always return as soon as they see them sleep. It is only through silence that we can appreciate the precious things in life, and be grateful for it.
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? (Marcel Marceau)
(Imported old blog, originally written on August 1, 2008)
