A Brief History of the Silent School

The Silent School is usually described as a refinement. It was, in fact, a surrender — and understanding why it happened tells you more about the last two hundred years than most of what is taught about them.

Before the constraint

The historical record, such as it is, suggests that for most of human existence there was simply no problem to solve.

Consider the conditions. Dwellings were shared, draughty, and pungent with a dozen competing sources. Livestock lived indoors. Work was outdoors, loud, and conducted at a distance from other people. Clothing was voluminous. There was, in short, no silence to break and no still air to spoil, and a fart in 1400 was an event of roughly the same social magnitude as a cough.

The form was not suppressed because it was not yet audible, in the sense that matters. Audibility is not a property of a sound. It is a property of a room.

The three enclosures

What changed was not manners. What changed was architecture, and it changed three times.

The first enclosure was the plaster ceiling and the fitted window. Sealed rooms hold air. A sealed room converts a transient event into a lingering one, and for the first time in the history of the form the artist could leave and the work could stay. This is the origin of every technique in the modern repertoire, all of which are fundamentally techniques of departure.

The second enclosure was the carriage, and later the railway compartment and the motor car. Here the volume collapses to a few cubic metres and — critically — the company becomes involuntary and prolonged. The private carriage is the true birthplace of the alibi. You cannot leave a moving vehicle. If you cannot leave, you must explain, and if you must explain, you will very quickly learn to prefer not being identified.

The third enclosure was the open-plan office, and it is the one we still live inside. Its innovation was to combine the sealed air of the first with the involuntary company of the second, and then to add the one ingredient neither had: sustained observation. Eight hours. Forty faces. No walls. The open-plan office is the most hostile venue the form has ever been asked to survive, and the Silent School is the technique that survived it.

Every aesthetic movement is a solution to a room. Show me the architecture and I will tell you the art.

The doctrine

By the middle of the last century the school had hardened into a doctrine with three articles, and any competent practitioner can still recite them:

1. Sound identifies. Odour merely accuses. A sound has a direction and a moment; both are evidence. An odour has neither, and a room presented with an odour and no sound will, within about four seconds, begin to suspect itself.
2. The work must outlive the artist’s presence. Correct execution is timed so that the artist is elsewhere at the moment of reception. This is not cowardice, the doctrine insists. It is staging.
3. Never explain. The single most reliable way to be identified is to remark upon it. The doctrine is emphatic on this point and every generation rediscovers it the hard way.

It is a coherent and effective system. It is also, and this is the criticism that has never been adequately answered, entirely defensive. Every article of it is about not being caught. There is no article about the work.

The counter-movement

Which brings us to the small and unfashionable school that has grown up in opposition, and which this journal — while maintaining strict editorial neutrality — obviously supports.

Its position is simply that the Silent School optimised for the wrong thing. It treated the fart as a liability to be managed and produced, over two centuries, a body of technique of extraordinary sophistication and no joy whatsoever. An entire art form reduced to a discipline of concealment, practised by millions, admired by nobody, discussed by no one.

The counter-movement holds that the sound was never the problem. The sound was the form. The sound is the only part of it that has rhythm, dynamics, and a beginning and an end — the only part, in other words, that could ever have been composed. The Silent School threw away the music and kept the smell, and then spent two hundred years being ashamed of what was left.

We have a sequencer on this website. It has eight voices. Not one of them is silent, and we regard that as a position.