In our third installment for Black History Month, we turn to William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), a renowned African-American composer, choir director, and professor. Dawson wrote chamber music, orchestral music, and choral music, and is best known for his arrangements of African American spirituals. Through all the forms he worked with, Dawson consistently incorporated African American themes and melodies into his music. In both his work and teaching, Dawson stressed that while African American musical heritage was key to many developments in jazz and jazz-derived music, it didn’t need to be limited to just these popular forms.

Dawson’s life took a multifaceted and variegated path, but education always remained his primary dedication. Born in Anniston, Alabama, Dawson ran away from home at the age of 13 to attend the Tuskegee Institute. There, he sang in the choir, played trombone in the college band, and started composing at age 16. After graduating in 1921, Dawson went on to study composition at the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, where he convinced the then all-white school to allow him to earn his BA through one-on-one tutoring sessions. Dawson later earned his master’s degree in composition from the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Dawson began teaching in the Kansas City public school system, and in 1930 was invited back as a professor at the Tuskegee Institute, where he played an integral role in founding the music school. There, Dawson also developed the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which became an internationally acclaimed ensemble, performing tours around the U.S. after their initial invitation to sing at New York City’s Radio Music Hall in 1932.

I talked to Dr. Gwynne K. Brown, Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, who is carrying out research on Dawson. Dr. Brown, currently writing a book on Dawson’s life and works for the American Composers Series published by University of Illinois Press, commented that a major theme for thinking about Dawson is the centrality of education in his life. As Dr. Brown describes: “He ran away from home as a young teenager to attend Tuskegee Institute, and he left a promising career as a trombonist in Chicago to return to Tuskegee in 1930 and create a school of music there. He was a devoted teacher and mentor to many young black musicians. He knew that the rigorous training he could provide, along with helping them to develop their self-discipline and resilience and ambition, he could help make sure that their talents and potential wouldn’t go to waste in a society that was ready to undervalue and discourage them. After he resigned from Tuskegee in 1955 he spent more than three decades sharing his knowledge and musicianship with young musicians of all races all over the country.” 

Indeed, after Dawson retired from teaching at Tuskegee in 1956, he spent much of his time conducting choral festivals and leading workshops around the world. Dawson was deeply committed to his art and had high standards for the students he worked with. In Dawson’s rehearsal notes for members of the All-Eastern Division Chorus in the 1961 Music Educators National Convention, he writes: “There will be no time to teach notes, rhythms, or pronunciations. All rehearsal time will be needed for fine points of performance such as interpretation, style and polish. Start learning now!” As a conductor Dawson asked for precision and attention to detail from his choirs. What set Dawson apart from other teachers, however, was his dedication to educating his choirs on the historical legacy and the proper singing techniques of the genre of spirituals. We’ll explore Dawson’s spirituals here, but first, let’s explore one of Dawson’s most well-known pieces for orchestra: his Negro Folk Symphony.

Listening to Dawson: The Negro Folk Symphony

One of Dawson’s keystone works is his Negro Folk Symphony, a significant yet largely unacknowledged contribution to the development of the American symphony. The Negro Folk Symphony was premiered in 1934 by the Philadelphia Orchestra with Leopold Stokowski conducting. It was Dawson’s aim to “to write a symphony in the Negro folk idiom, based on authentic folk music but in the same symphonic form used by the composers of the [European] romantic-nationalist school.” Inspired by Antonín Dvořák’s views towards nationalism in music, Dawson wanted his symphony to shed light on the African American voice, highlighting the music of his neighbors and ancestors alike in rural Alabama and the segregated South. Later in 1952, after a recent trip to West Africa, Dawson revised the piece to include more African rhythms, stating a desire to convey “the missing elements that were lost when Africans came into bondage outside their homeland.”

The Negro Folk Symphony sounds akin to late-Romantic orchestral music in terms of overall shape and instrumentation. However, as musicologist John Andrew Johnson describes, “Each of its three movements, while cast in a traditional form, is ultimately not controlled by these predetermined structures; rather, a continuous process of variation and development shapes its course.” Each movement has its own subtitle: “The Bond of Africa,” “Hope in the Night” and ”O, le’ me shine, shine like a Morning Star!” Dawson weaves characteristic melodies from African American folk songs and spirituals throughout each movement. While the piece can be appreciated without previous familiarity with the melodies or underlying background, there are strong programmatic elements in the piece that tie in with the titles of the movements.

The first movement, for example, “The Bond of Africa,” contains two related main themes. The first theme is original material by Dawson and represents the “missing link” from “a human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent into slavery.” The second theme, initially heard in the oboes, is based on the folk song ”Oh, m’ Lit’l’ Soul Gwine-A Shine.” Dawson incorporates some distinct techniques for programmatic effects in the second movement, as well. Tolling bells bring about an atmosphere of grief and lament, with a background of pizzicato strings representing the lives of slaves in bondage. Three gong strokes denote the Trinity, a symbol of hope guiding man through the night. In the third movement of the Negro Folk Symphony, Dawson takes on a lighter perspective. Here, he incorporates two African American melodies, “O Le’ Me Shine, Le’ Me Shine Lik’ A Mornin’ Star” and “Hallelujah, Lord, I Been Down Into the Sea” to illustrate a scene of children playing, unmoored by the despair of their slave heritage.

The Negro Folk Symphony is one of Dawson’s seminal achievements as a composer, but it remains relatively unknown today. In asking Dr. Brown about aspects of Dawson’s career that often go underappreciated or unacknowledged, she expressed to me that “many of Dawson’s choral works are routinely performed by high school and college and church choirs, so his legacy in that regard is firmly established. I do wish that more people had a chance to hear his Negro Folk Symphony. It is an American masterpiece. In my view, it should be in heavy rotation in the repertoire alongside the symphonies of Florence Price and William Grant Still. Every other time an American orchestra is about to program a symphony by Dvorak, they should stop and choose Dawson’s instead, or one of Price’s or Still’s.” (Stay tuned for our next post, which will kick off Woman’s History Month by featuring the works of Florence Price as well as several other noteworthy women composers).

All Classical will be featuring Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony on the air this Sunday (2/25) at about 6:30pm, so be sure to tune in then!

Dawson’s Spirituals

As Dr. Brown mentioned above, Dawson’s arrangements of spirituals remain popular among choirs. Songs including “Ain’-a That Good News,” “King Jesus is a-Listening,” and “I’ve Been Buked,” are regularly performed and recorded by choirs around the world. Dawson’s love for African American folk music emerged from a young age, having heard them in church, local concerts, and at home. Dawson spent hours playing with folk melodies, creating idiomatic settings that make full use of the human voice and adding new rhythmic elements to them.

African American spirituals themselves originated in slave plantations, where singing was the only way slaves could express themselves musically. Slaves often sang at religious gatherings, which served for slaves as a conduit of free expression. It was the intention of white masters to use religion as a means of controlling slaves, with preachers brought into plantations to preach to slaves on the “evils” of running away or disobeying masters. However, religion became an important means for slaves to speak out against their oppression and for hopes of freedom. In both their religious gatherings and in work settings, slaves imbued their songs with code words that allowed them to communicate messages to each other without the masters’ knowledge. The word “home,” for example, was an expression of yearning to escape and live in a free land. A chariot or train represented the means of traveling home. (Songs such as “Gospel Train” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” were references to the Underground Railroad). Crossing the Jordan River referred to crossing the Ohio River and into the North, where freedom could be found.

Dawson’s arrangements of traditional African American spirituals are classified as “concert” spirituals. The concert spiritual began with the 1871 tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, who gave performances across the country to raise funds for the school. The primary material this group used for their concerts were formal settings of traditional slave melodies, but sung in a style associated with European art music. Unlike anonymous and improvisatory folk song spirituals, concert spirituals are crafted, written-down pieces intended to be performed by classically-trained voices. One might compare the African American spiritual to European counterparts such as the French chanson, the German lied, the English lute song, and the Italian madrigal. Spirituals are generally intended for non-religious concert performances rather than sacred use in church services, but they can have religious texts or deal with religious subjects.

During the time Dawson was emerging as a young composer, professional touring ensembles from historical black colleges were beginning to face struggles due to budget retractions from the Depression and changing music fashions in pre-World War II America. Dawson’s Tuskegee Choir, which he led from 1931-55, brought about a resurgence in popularity for spirituals. Dawson’s arrangements were unique in that they brought a more vigorous style of singing to spirituals. There is a sense of rhythmic momentum in arrangements like Ezekiel saw de wheel, Ev’ry Time I feel the spirit, and Ain’-a That Good News! that recall the tradition of slaves singing in a ring shout. Ring shouts, often performed by slaves after the conclusion of a regular worship service, was an expression of their African roots. Men and women arranged themselves in a ring, dancing in a circle at a faster and faster pace until individuals reached an ecstatic state and dropped out in exhaustion. In Dawson’s arrangements, the rhythmic energy accumulates in a similar way, with richly voiced extended harmonies closing out each phrase in ecstatic jubilance.

Spirituals, including Dawson’s are typically performed with a distinctively Southern diction. Early composers of spirituals would often write the lyrics in the actual regional dialect. For example, ending consonants are softened, and final “r” consonants are modified to “h” (“over,” for instance, becomes “ovah”). This may have looked disrespectful to a performer in the post-Civil Rights era. Ultimately, however, composers incorporated this diction in their settings with intent of preserving and celebrating the unique quality of speech of a unique group of people in unique place and time. Commenting on a paper she wrote entitled “The Serious Spirituals of William L. Dawson,” Dr. Brown described to me how Dawson “crafted his choral spirituals with incredible care to make sure that they wouldn’t be performed or interpreted as humorous. Thanks to the legacy of blackface minstrelsy, there was a tendency in the early 20th century for white audiences to perceive all black music-making as comical. It’s fascinating to see Dawson’s strategic defusing of that danger through the way he handled spirituals in his compositions. He really valued the religious folk song heritage of his enslaved ancestors, and he cared both that they be taken seriously by white audiences, and that they not be abandoned by African American musicians who felt the songs were too demeaned to be worth saving.”

”I have never doubted the possibilities of our music,” Dawson once told an interviewer. Dawson’s works bridged the gap between listeners, having been known and loved by black and white audiences alike. If you are eager to jump into Dawson’s sound world, listed below are some suggested recordings of his orchestral and choral works:

Still: Symphony No. 2, Dawson: Negro Folk Symphony / Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Contains Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony

Steal Away: The African American Concert Spiritual / Seraphic Fire, Patrick Dupré Quigley, Piano and Conductor
Contains Dawson’s arrangements Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit and There is a Balm in Gilead

The Glory of the Father / Washington County Chorale, Bernd R. Kuehn, Conductor
Contains Dawson’s Ain’-A That Good News

References

1. Brown, Gwynne K. Personal Interview. 17 Feb 2018.
2. Emory University, “A Life’s Journey,” William Levi Dawson: The Collection at Emory, 18 Jan 2008. Web. Accessed 12 Feb 2018. http://wayback.archive-it.org/6324/20130124150530/http://larson.library.emory.edu/dawson/web/
3. Huff, Vernon Edward. “William Levi Dawson: An Examination of Selected Letters, Speeches, and Writings.” Arizona State University, Doctoral dissertation. May 2013. Web. Accessed 20 Feb 2018. https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/110287/content/Huff_asu_0010E_12647.pdf
4. Lloyd, Thomas. “A History of the African-American Spiritual: Dawson and the Emergence of Large Mized Choirs in the Historical Black Colleges.” Bucks County Choral Society. Aug 2004. Web. Accessed 12 Feb 2018. http://www.buckschoral.org/news-and-archives/resources/spiritual-history/chapter-11/
5. Pratt, Micheal. “The African-American Spiritual and its African Roots” Music for the Soul. 3 Sept 2009. Accessed 12 Feb 2018. https://michaelpratt.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/the-african-american-spiritual-and-its-african-roots/
6.  Quigley, Patrick Dupré. Steal Away: The African American Concert Spiritual / Seraphic Fire, Patrick Dupré Quigley, Piano and Conductor. CD liner notes.
7. “William Levi Dawson, African American Composer & Professor.” AfriClassical.com. 1 Jan 2016. Web. Accessed 12 Feb 2018. https://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/Dawson.html
8. “William L. Dawson, Composer, 90.” The New York Times. 4 May 1990. Web. Accessed 20 Feb 2018. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/04/obituaries/william-l-dawson-composer-90.html

Here at All Classical Portland, we have our own library of CDs which we draw from to use in our day-to-day radio programming. However, rather than playing these CDs directly on the radio, volunteers first burn each CD into our hard drives, where we can use them on-air  in the form of .wav files. One of my current tasks as an intern is to edit .wav files of pieces that have been burned into the computer but are still not quite ready for air play. Using a music editing software, I listen to each piece and edit the amount of silence that occurs before a piece starts, after it ends, and between movements of pieces like concertos and symphonies. This task is important because there are often up to four or five seconds of silence before sound starts on a CD track. I edit each piece to begin with just the right amount of pause for the radio host to press play after announcing the piece, and set the stage for the start of the music.

Measuring the moments of silence that bookend a piece got me thinking about the crucial role that silence plays in our experience of listening to classical music. Music, of course, is made up of sounds, but it is also characterized by the silences that happen between the sounds. The silence that takes place within a piece of music can create profound effects – effects of surprise, humor, fear, or a sense of expanded time and space. Sometimes these moments of silence are tiny, even unnoticeable to a listener. Other times, they can interrupt the flow of music and shock a listener into a new level of awareness. Throughout the history of classical music, many composers have realized that silence can be just as expressive as sound, holding different philosophies towards their use of silence as a tool to create different effects on the listener. Let’s explore some of those effects here.   

Silence as Surprise: Joseph Haydn, String Quartet Op. 33 No. 2, “The Joke,” IV. Presto (1781) 

Haydn’s music is filled with humor and wit, and one of his common tricks is to manipulate silence in his pieces, which deliberately thwarts listeners’ expectations of what will happen next within his otherwise predictable and logically organized forms. One of Haydn’s more famous uses of silences occurs at the end of his second opus 33 string quartet, nicknamed “the Joke.”   

The final movement, “Presto,” has a rondo form, containing a recurring main melody that alternates with contrasting themes. Haydn’s main melody is a buoyant tune comprised of four two-measure phrases. After several variations on the theme and a slower Adagio passage, Haydn starts up the theme again in its original form to close out the piece. This is where the “joke” of the piece happens – Haydn now splits up the tune into its four smaller components, with a two-bar rest between each one. When the melody finally ends, the piece appears to be over. Unsuspecting audience members might start to applaud, only to stop in confusion when the music starts back up again after a four-measure rest. The quartet plays the first half of the melody, but fails to finish out the phrase, leaving the audience hanging in suspense. As an uncertain and awkwardly hilarious silence fills the hall, the audience breathes out in relief and laughter as the quartet finally sets their bows down.   

Silence as Release: Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936) 

In contrast to the Haydn example above, silence can also be used for the opposite effect, creating a moment of space, relieving the audience and releasing tension built up after sound has said all it can possibly say. One example of silence as an act of release can be found in Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which was originally composed as an Adagio movement in his String Quartet, Op. 11. The piece outlines an arc that travels from hushed sadness to intense grieving, and finally back to silence. The entirety of the 8-minute work develops out of a stepwise melody stated at the start of the piece. The music progressively builds in intensity via denser textures, stronger dynamics, and ascending registers in the strings.   

 At one point, the intensity reaches such a level of agonized pain that the strings appear unable to go any further, stuck on a note in the melody that gets louder and louder until it is thrown off into complete silence, creating a climax of emotional catharsis. (This moment happens at about 5:23-6:05 in the above recording by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, but I recommend listening to the whole piece for the full effect). Echoes of the climax note are left resonating in the empty space before the strings begin again in a quiet understatement, slowly dying away to the end of the piece with a new sense of peace and resignation. One of our hosts here at All Classical Portland, Christa Wessel, often says on air that classical music can serve as a “respite from the ruckus of the world.” The impact of this silence in Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a moment to sigh and catch one’s breath, is one of those magical places of respite you can enter into that can never be explained completely by words.   

Silence as Interval: Toru Takemitsu’s The Dorian Horizon (1966) 

The silence in Barber’s Adagio for Strings serves as a turning point, marking a moment between the climax of the piece the gradual descent to the end. This notion of silence as an interval between two events was key to the compositional technique of Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996), a Japanese composer known for his works which synthesized Western classical forms and experimental 20th century techniques with traditional Eastern sounds and instruments.  

Takemitsu was skilled in subtlety manipulating orchestral colors using unusual percussion, electronics, spatial arrangements of instruments, and silence, imbuing music with a sensuality he believed it had lost. Takemitsu’s use of silence in particular was heavily informed by the Japanese aesthetic of ma. Ma is an everyday word from the Japanese language that incorporates various meaning of space and time – the space between two structural parts, the gap between two events in time. Ma is a type of emptiness, an interval of in-between, or a negative space. Ma can be seen in various aspects of Japanese culture, such as the deliberate pause at the end of a bow before coming back up, or the honoring of pauses and silence in conversation. Ma is a core concept underlying Japanese art forms, including architecture, gardens, sumi-e brush painting, and Noh theater. For music, Ma is the silence between all notes.   

The empty space of ma is not a void, but an energy filled with possibility. This sense of possibility can be heard in the silences of Takemitsu’s 1966 piece The Dorian Horizon. The Dorian Horizon is a collage of varying orchestral textures, some dissonant and grating, some soft and gentle. Each sound event is separated in space and time by intervals of silence or near silence. Sometimes this silence is absolute, creating a sense of space and sparseness. Other times, the silence is colored with deep ominous drones in the cello and bass, creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia and unease. In his own writings, Takemitsu defined ma as “the powerful silence.” Throughout The Dorian Horizon, it is the silences from which the events of sound arise, more than harmony or form, that create a sense of tension and resolution.  

Silence as Sound: John Cage’s 4’33“ (1952) 

Early on in Takemitsu’s career as a composer, he was preoccupied with absorbing Western European orchestral music into his idiom. In his later years, however, Takemitsu found himself returning to experimentation with Japanese instruments and music styles. He credited this return in part to his contact with John Cage, who’s own artistic philosophy was greatly influenced by Japanese art and thought.   

One cannot discuss silence in music without addressing John Cage, who proposed the radical notion that there is no such thing as silence. Cage expressed his artistic philosophy through his compositions, but also through a series of essays and performative lectures throughout his life which are summarized in his book Silence: Lectures and Writings. As Cage describes in Silence, artists have always wanted their work to mean something, to do something. Cage, rather, aspired to be meaningless through his work. For Cage, that idea that art is useless and it expresses nothing is the very source of its strength. He declares in his “Lecture on Nothing,” “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”   

Silence, in a way, became Cage’s symbol of this profound meaninglessness. Arguably Cage’s most famous (or infamous) work is his 4’33”, a three-movement work composed in 1952. 4’33”‘s score consists of three blank pages. The performer is instructed not to play their instrument throughout all three movements, which are to be timed with a stopwatch. Such a concept may seem like a gimmick, but unlike Haydn’s motivations in his Op. 33 quartet, Cage did not intend for 4’33” to be treated as a joke. 4’33” is a piece comprised entirely of silence – or is it? Without any notes to latch onto, the listener starts to become aware of the sounds in the environment around them – the uncomfortable rustling of clothes, the ever-present hum of the air conditioning, the traffic outside, even the thoughts running through their head.  According to Cage-ian scholar Kyle Gann, 4’33” represents “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music.” And indeed, in a recollection of the premiere, Cage describes: “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.” Through the conduit of silence, Cage gave countless musicians and performers permission to go beyond the limitations of standard instrumentation and embrace all sounds as music.   

 After the Last Note 

One of my favorite moments to experience in classical music concerts is witnessing the very last note of a piece. As the final chord hangs in the air, the reverberations gradually dissipate through the concert hall. In that moment before the applause, it is as if the entire audience is holding their breath together in suspense and awe. Each listener was taken on a different emotional journey while listening to the piece just played, but in this moment everyone has arrived in the same place. Then, as the conductor lowers their baton, there is sudden exhale of relief. The hall once again resonates with life; this time not with the tones of instruments, but with the warm rush of applause and elated “bravos.”   

Even though the radio is not quite the same as a live concert, I feel that the hosts at All Classical are also sensitive to this special moment after a piece ends. When I edit the length of silence at the end of a piece, it is my job to create a fade out with a generous six seconds of silence after the last note ends. This gives the radio host the freedom to let the resonance of the last sounds and the emotional weight of the piece settle in with the listener before announcing the conclusion of the piece and moving on to the next track of the day’s program.  

By holding that precious space of silence with their listeners before speaking again, an All Classical host acts like the conductor in a concert, holding the baton up in the air before lowering it as a signal of finality, welcoming in applause from the audience. While everyone listens and experiences the station in their own way, I often personally feel that when listening to radio I am not truly listening alone. Rather, I am listening simultaneously with thousands of other people also tuned into the station.  Maybe this is why when a piece ends on All Classical I get that same feeling of shared suspense and relief as I experience in concerts.  

In the concert hall, on the radio, and in our daily lives, where does the sound end, and when does the silence begin? Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died only nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the “Pathetique.”* Like the man himself, the end of the final movement fades away into complete silence. In the last few measures, the only sounds come from muted cellos and basses playing a low, deep B minor chord and sounding as if coming from some distant, far-off place. In the last measure of the symphony, Tchaikovsky places a rest sign with a fermata (a musical “pause”). The piece concludes in open-ended silence, merging in with the ambience of the concert hall and the energy of the audience members. When does the piece end, and when does life begin again? The conductor lowers their arms, but a heaviness remains.  

How do you experience silence in classical music? Let us know by emailing intern@allclassical.org.  

*The Oregon Symphony will be performing Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, along with Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Salem on Friday, February 9 at 8:00pm at the Smith Auditorium and in Portland on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, February 10, 11, and 12 all at 7:30pm at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Visit the OSO website for details and tickets.  

References 

1. “Adagio for Strings.” The Kennedy Center. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. http://www.kennedy-center.org/artist/composition/3215  
2. Canning, Donna. “Ma.” Unique Japan. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. http://new.uniquejapan.com/ikebana/ma/  
3. Davis, Ian. “Loud Silence and Quiet Sound: The Illuminating Music of Toru Takemitsu.” Flypaper. 20 Oct 2016. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. https://flypaper.soundfly.com/discover/loud-silence-quiet-sound-the-illuminating-music-of-toru-takemitsu/  
4. Kaye, Colin. “Classical Connections: The Sound of Silence.” Pattaya mail. 23 Sept 2015. Web. Accessed 7 February 2018. http://www.pattayamail.com/arts-entertainment/classical-connections-the-sound-of-silence-51527  
5. Reel, James. “Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet No. 30 in E flat major (“Joke”), Op. 33/2, H. 3/38.” AllMusic.com. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. https://www.allmusic.com/composition/string-quartet-no-30-in-e-flat-major-joke-op-33-2-h-3-38-mc0002369852  
6. Ross, Alex. “Searching for Silence: John Cage’s art of noise.” The New Yorker. 4 Oct 2010. Web. Accessed 25 Jan 2018.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/searching-for-silence   
7. Ross, Alex. “Toward Silence: The intense repose of Toru Takemitsu.” The New Yorker. 5 Feb 2007. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/toward-silence  
8. Swafford, Jan. “Silence Is Golden: How a pause can be the most devastating effect in music.” Slate.com. 31 Aug 2009. Web. Accessed 25 Jan 2018.  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/08/silence_is_golden.html   
9. “The most crushing, perfectly placed silences in classical music.” Classic FM. 15 Jan 2016. Web. Accessed 25 Jan 2018.  http://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/best-silences-in-music/   
10. “Toru Takemitsu.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. Accessed 7 Feb 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Takemitsu-Toru