Introduction

“Music as microclimate, in a constant state of becoming, floating around the edges of form, occasionally on the threshold of audition, shifting subtly, flowering, wilting, swelling, ebbing. All performed with consummate grace and sensitivity.”

Fergus Kelly, 2023

“Cage reminds us that a glass of milk comprises both the milk and the glass (1973); the emptiness that the glass circumscribes is necessary in the dyad. But this space acts both as the potential to contain something and as the means to shape that which is placed in it: it is empty of every thing but not empty of everything.

Dualist Western thought sees emptiness and fullness as opposites, but Eastern thought conceives of an empty space as standing on the verge of becoming less empty; a full space is pregnant with the possibility of being emptier. Transition, not opposition; fluctuation, not stasis; interplay, not homeostasis; reciprocity, not conflict. Our language, built on opposition, struggles to describe a state of continuous flux; we describe the boundaries of an oscillation between state X and state Y, the state between them thus existing conceptually only through inference. Not only does every state act as the potential for another, every state also contains the seed of another; if emptiness promises fullness, it also engenders the nature of that potential fullness.

In the crypt of Maria-Wörth church on the shores of Wörthersee, we heard a silence full of the shades of sound. Shaped by the acoustics of this ancient room, a nebulous mist of barely-present boat motors, voices and meandrous air painted the space with coalescing sonic forms, none complete, none truly present, all in a state of being and non-being together, a perceptual stream-of-shapes that scintillated at the edge of imagination. In this room, sound exists in a state of perpetual uncertainty, challenging us to resolve doubt or - better - to embrace it. The room was more than a glass into which the sound from outside had been poured; the intrinsic tint of its acoustics, its shape, its light, its independent presence in the world, its cultural meaning, shaped raw sound into experience. In this space, there is no hearing without its tinted emptiness; no perception without its potentiality; no sonority without its stain.”

John Godfrey
[From an essay for McCarthy, Danny. Beyond Silence: A Bell Rings In An Empty Sky, Farpoint Recordings ISBN: 9780955933486]