I need time to listen, to examine, and to confess ... to listen for the Voice, if for no other reason that so I will recognize it more clearly in the ways it speaks into the noise and bustle of the life I lead. The silence that I seek must be nurtured until it lives in me no matter where I am at the moment. The silence I seek must be something more than the absence of the numbing noise and debilitating detail of life in our society. It must be a solitude that is transcendent, a stillness that can be found in the midst of noise, a silence that is portable.
I'm coming to believe in the importance of silence in music. The power of silence after a phrase of music, for example: the dramatic silence after the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or the space between the notes of a Miles Davis solo. There is something very specific about a "rest" in music. You take your foot off the pedal and pay attention. I'm wondering as musicians whether the most important thing we do is merely to provide a frame for silence. I'm wondering if silence itself is perhaps the mystery at the heart of music. And is silence the most perfect form of music of all? Songwriting is the only form of meditation I know. And it is only in silence that the gifts of melody and metaphor are offered.
