Stilla og det omvende i musikken

This essay by composer Knut Vaage employs the idea of silence, or stillness, in music, as a frame, first for describing certain characteristics found in the music of Magnar Åm, and then discussing several aspects of four of his own compositions. In the first part, he describes how Åm’s music paradoxically seems to evoke stillness whilst clearly moving forward, holding a productive tension between qualities of beauty and solace, and «rasping dissonances that last long enough to scratch scars on the soul». In the second part, Vaage describes how his own music often contrasts sharply with that of Åm, although both are concerned with the stretching-out of sound and qualities of stillness between more intense areas in the music. Another shared interest is the use of literature as inspiration for music, while differing in approach. Reflecting over his settings of texts by his grandfather, author Ragnvald Vaage, Vaage refers to the inevitable structural relationship between sound and silence, and how the effect of silence in music can be more dramatic than that of sound itself. Concomitantly, when repetitions and pauses are written into a dramatic text, as in the libretto for Vaage’s opera based on Jon Fosse’s play Someone is going to come (1996), Vaage fills these silences with music, creating an interpretative commentary on the drama of the silences themselves. Thus music, however noisy, may also communicate the complexity of human vulnerability.