In a sense great music exists for the sake of its pauses; for instance, the pauses that occur in the middle of a Beethoven symphony. These pauses are of course quite unlike bits of ordinary silence, because the whole symphony has led up to them — they are held and defined, and the music goes on the other side of them. Such pauses are silence charged with meaning. Music transcends music by producing charged silence.
Drop They still dews of quietness
Til all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of Thy peace.
