In Silence was commissioned by James Bagwell for the Cincinnati May Festival Youth Chorus, but while I was paid, logistics prevented a performance. In April 2025 I had it performed by graduate singers of the Bard College Conservatory, Annabella Capaccio conducting. The text is a wonderful poem by Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the Trappist monk and mystic whose autobiography The Seven-Storey Mountain became a best-seller (translated into twenty languages), and who also wrote books about Zen and the early church fathers. Ironically (for the author of a book on 4'33"), I hardly ever incorporate silence into my music, but did so here because the original performance was supposed to be in a cathedral, and I wanted to let the piece echo. What I've learned from working closely with Bruckner's music may be evident; the influence of Guillaume Dufay less so, but I hear it. The text is as follows:

In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you
speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,

speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

"I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?"

Thomas Merton

from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS MERTON, copyright 1957 by The Abbey of Gethsemani. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Duration: 5 minutes

- Kyle Gann

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