Towards an Absent Music

Abstract

Susan Philipsz’s Study for Strings (2012) is a 24-track sound installation originally set up at the end of a platform at the main train station in Kassel (Germany). The installation’s sonic material is drawn from a string orchestra composition of the same name by the Jewish-Czech composer Pavel Haas, written in 1943 while he was interned at Theresienstadt and shortly before his execution. For her installation, Philipsz recorded only the viola and cello parts from Haas’s score, allocated a pitch from each instrument to its own speaker, and played the sounds back on loop. According to the artist, the installation’s “silences” (the parts from Haas's score that she did not record) allude to the absence of those murdered in the camps. Departing from these comments, this paper argues that Study for Strings articulates silence as more than an element of aural experience; it is also an effect of the work’s technological, spatial, and architectural remediation of Haas’s musical material. The argument first draws on Juliane Rebentisch’s proposition that sound installation is distinct from music in its spatialization of sonic material. The work’s “absent music”—its silence—resides not only in the missing string parts but also in the way in which the retained musical parts are spatially remediated. This argument is framed by turning to ongoing discourses on how silence functions in Adornian “After Auschwitz” cultural practice.