A series of musical performances that celebrate ‘silence’ in music

Posted on: 11 April 2017

Details: Musical performance and presentations 1.30pm – 8.00pm Tuesday, 11th April 2017, Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. Musical performances and presentations 2.30pm – 8.00pm Wednesday, 12th April 2017, Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College Dublin. 

As part of this year’s Trinity Creative Challenge, Professor Adrian Tien, Associate Professor in Chinese Studies, and Professor Richard Duckworth, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, will present a series of musical performances in celebration of silence in music.

This collaboration between the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies and the Department of Music is set to explore the role of “silence” in music like it has never been done before.

Taking place in the Edmund Burke Theatre, this project brings together accomplished musicians from many different cultures to try and answer the question, can “silence” be musical?

Or to put it another way, can music exist when there is “silence”?

The answer to this question depends on what "silence" really means and how it is interpreted culturally and musically. Different cultures respond to this question differently.

This project sets out to show that true “silence” in the sense of a "complete absence of sound" does not exist.

Using Chinese, Japanese, Korean as well as Western music, both classical and contemporary, as examples in performance, Professor Tien and Professor Duckworth will demonstrate that different musical traditions have different culture-unique interpretations for something like “silence”.

Through a series of high-quality and original musical performances by musicians from these cultures, Professor Tien and Professor Duckworth will explore the central theme of “silence”, or something like “silence”, how “silence” is created, controlled, destroyed, present at the heart of cacophony, ephemeral, and ontologically problematic, given its inaudibility.

This project was made possible by the Trinity Creative Challenge which is an initiative of Trinity Creative sponsored by the Provost of the University, Dr Patrick Prendergast.

Last year the initiative awarded €40,000 to be split among five winning proposal. The artists worked on those proposals across the academic year and are due to present them in the coming weeks.