True prayer requires no word, no chant
no gesture, no sound.
It is communion, calm and still
with our own godly Ground.
~ Angelus Silesius
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.