FLOODESIGN

I am also familiar with booming silences. A ripe, weighty pause just before a recapitulated theme, or the space between the last note and the first applause. The space in which meaning is made and experienced all at once. Atmosphere-heavy, we keep ourselves buoyed above the density with a collectively held breath. But then there is quiet. In his book "The Sovereignty of Quiet," Kevin Quashie examines how the ethic and aesthetic of quiet continue to shape Black culture and history, offering an alternative lens through which to understand Blackness beyond narratives of resistance. In describing the difference between silence and quiet, Quashie writes: Silence often denotes something that is suppressed or repressed, and is an interiority that is about withholding, absence, and stillness. Quiet, on the other hand, is presence (one can, for example, describe prose or a sound as quiet) and can encompass fantastic motion ... Indeed the expressiveness of silence is often aware of an audience, a watcher or listener whose presence is the reason for the withholding ... This is the key difference between the two terms because in its inwardness, the aesthetic of quiet is watcherless. Quiet offers an internally generated context, an alternative set of guiding principles that alleviates the pressure to reach beyond the expectations of White supremacy in order to prove one's inherent worth. Here, exceptionalism and the push to "beat the odds" become irrelevant to one's humanity. Turning one's attention inward, one begins to make meaning of the unremarkable, the everyday. Framed as an alternative to resistance narratives that often flatten Blackness and Black identity into a singular trope, quiet is, per Quashie, an affect "akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, the edges of all the humanness one has." Quiet complicates the subject, offering opportunities to define oneself by the range of one's internal reality, versus the demands of publicness, hypervisibility and the limited projections of the White imagination. It is a porous yet protective refuge. The demand to keep my practice contained to "the music itself" (a phrase often used to silence musicians who have something to say about the conditions of their working environment) is a cruel and impossible task, for neutrality is both a symptom and expression of a deep privilege I do not have. Countless White instructors and colleagues have offered their sweepingly paternalistic two cents on why I should consider playing the saxophone or jazz flute; to study music by "my people." Hidden behind a thin veil of White innocence, this passive-aggressive condescension was frequently employed to diminish my sense of belonging. THE ABSENCE OF SOUND IS A LANGUAGE OF ITS OWN. IN THE MUSICAL LINEAGE OF WESTERN EUROPEAN ART MUSIC, I WAS TAUGHT TO CALL SILENCES "RESTS." A TIME TO WAIT FOR THE NEXT DIRECTIVE. THE NEXT ENTRANCE. A RIGID MOMENT OF "DO NOTHING" UNTIL IT'S TIME FOR YOUR NEXT SOMETHING. "REST POSITION" BECOMES ACTIVE PERFORMANCE. A WORDLESS, BREATHLESS, ANTICIPATORY SUBTEXT. WHAT QUIET OFFERS WHEN REPRESENTATION ISN'T ENOUGH BY SARAH CARGILL 3 | PEAKPERFS.ORG

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