Music and Silence

Music and Silence are two sides of the same coin. There is no music without silence and no silence without music. Music consists of beats with varying lenghts, spaced out by silent gaps, if there were no silent gaps, then there would only be constant sound and it would become noise. This means that we are not only attracted to particular sounds when we listen to a song, but mostly to the contrast between different sounds, and a melody is made as much of sounds as it is made of silence. But it’s not only in music that contrast plays the fundamental part, take paintings, what is a painting? a painting is a mix of colors that have contrast between them, if there is no contrast, then the painting is not interesting, blue contrasts with orange the most, purple contrasts with yellow the most, red with green and so on, but a painting is also composed of light and dark shades, if there is no variation in light and shadow, it will look flat and lifeless, it is the play of light and shadow that makes a painting look three dimentional and amazing, rather than flat and dull.

This is one of the fundamental laws of the universe, that eveything comes in opposites so that we can know the difference between anything at all. If we were ecstatic at all times, we wouldn’t even know what ecstasy is, we would be indifferent to it. We need dark times so that we know when the light has come. There is no point in resisting darkness, for in doing that, we would be resisting light too.

“People think the world is light, so they push away the darkness, but if the world was darkness, would they push away the light?” – Gincola