Sounds of Silence
As we mark Armistice, a playlist of poems by Rilke, Krishnamurti, Wordsworth and music by Hildegard of Bingen, Arvo Part, Haydn and Sibelius.
To mark Armistice Day, Words & Music takes up the theme of silence.
From the devotional searching of Bach’s Actus tragicus, via Haydn’s String Quartet called The Joke, which ends with deliberate pauses from the players, to the experimental explorations of modernists like György Ligeti, silence has meant different things to different composers. Before and after live performances, conductors try to hold a silence in the concert hall, and in recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler left long gaps between the famous opening notes.
In literature too, the meanings of silence range from the awkward in Jane Austen to the stultifying in Charlotte Brontë, via peacefulness in Wordsworth to the meditative in mystic writings of the Sufi poet Rumi. And the meanings of silence in wartime are explored by the poets Ivor Gurney and F.S. Flint and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The readers are Sian Clifford, seen on TV this summer in the latest series of Ludwig, and Ray Fearon, who has just finished appearing on stage in Headlong's production of Fences.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
On radio
Broadcast
- Sun 8 Nov 202619:45BBC Radio 3
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