SOUNDS AND SILENCE: Beckett's Music

Abstract

and being silent ? which are not normally brought together. Two of them might be brought together, but not three: we might readily associate silence with the act of writing, and writing in ink is easily visualised as being an act of staining a blank, white piece of paper. The collocation of silence and staining is less accessible. The word has many pejorative connotations. Stains are seen as unwelcome intruders: we rub hard to try to get rid of them. Of course, the word can be used metaphorically ? theologians may discuss, for instance, the of sin' ? but the efficacy of this metaphor depends upon the familiarity of the receiver with staining as a physical effect exerted upon matter. So why does Beckett refer to unnecessary stains? Are not all stains unnecessary? Isn't that word unnecessary itself staining the silence unnecessarily? Yet some stains can be, if not necessary, then at least desirable. We stain wood to make it a richer colour; we stain glass to create effects of light. An unnecessary stain is therefore unambiguously pejorative, leading to the irrevocable conclusion that sound violates silence: that silence is good, and writing is less good, or even bad. Beckett's remark is examined in some detail here since those two characteristics of the Beckettian silence ? its privileging over sound, and its density or physicality ?- are fundamental in Beckett's writing. Moreover, that concentration upon the relationship between sound and silence leads to the domain of music. Within that act of music, a listener is presupposed. To compose, one must first have listened. To play or sing well, one must have, or develop, an 'ear'. Luciano Berio asserts that: Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.2 When we read or hear Beckett's texts, we are being drawn into their musicality, exhibiting as they do an extraordinarily acute attunement to sound: not just to noise, but to intimate, ambient sound. Moreover, they also demonstrate the peculiarly rich role allocated to silence in Beckett's writing. Conventionally, ambient sound, noise, and silence are viewed as being at variance with music, as schematised by Beckett's contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, in a 1978 interview: On congoit