Silver Silence was composed on behalf of the TRANSIT Festival Leuven (Belgium). Silence with old master Cage signals the abandonment of any intention. The music can be silent and allow everything else that can be heard into this “organized” time. But infinite reproduction of music and thus of intentions can also achieve the desired lack of intentionality. The necessary beginning and end setting still has work-like remains. Nono arches silence with huge Fermata towers in order to conceptualize time in the work as freedom, in which one should listen to the unheard or the unheard in order to be able to break down one’s own limitations – social, human impulses, natural discoveries, colors, paths…

In “Covered with music” and in “Solo with Koonstück” I tried to integrate not silence but the soundless into the music. In “Silver Silence,” silence is not just silvery, but as silver often is – dark, brown-black. From the beginning in this piece, I had an insistent tempo of quarter = 138. Examining this number, I came up with 69 and 23 (6 x 23 = 138), the number of Alban Berg, the composer of magnificent silences in “Wozzeck”. 77 x 23 (plus 1 quarter) is the time structure on which the piece is based. The events swim in these time brackets and in the end stay almost completely out of them. For me, silence became a more interesting way of perceiving time connections. There is a single point of exact TRIO synchrony, next to it a single point of exact string synchrony and the partial synchronicities that slide into silvery silence, blurring, block-like solos of the individual instruments, leaving the instrumental note positions, etc. “Silver Silence” is therefore a listening and comprehension setting for the temporal and musical no’s in the macro area. And while composing, I often had the impression that they would shrug their shoulders in surprise at the types of yeses and strongly recommend the silver dark. As Brockhaus writes: Silver is softer than copper and harder than gold. Of all metals, it conducts electricity and heat best, is stable in air, and is the best reflector for visible and infrared light…

Even Silence sometimes works up a sweat!!!

Nicolaus A. Huber (May 2006)