FRIPP & SINGLETON ON SILENCE
Posted by
Iona Singleton
on Feb 24, 2023
In a conversation at The City Winery in New York City on September 23rd 2022, Robert Fripp & David Singleton answer some “burning questions” from the audience.
Audience
Hello, Robert.
RF
Excuse me. Are you one of my very favorite guitar players?
Audience
No.
RF
Yes, you are.
Audience
You talk about silence in your book, but different composers mean different things by that. Cage meant silencing yourself and listening to the outside world. Some composers think that means silence in the outside world and listening to yourself. Maybe that means silencing both and listening to music coming from another place. You talk about where music comes from. What does that mean?
RF
May I ask David first; David is a philosopher from Cambridge University.
DS
Which does not qualify you in the least to answer that question. But I was recently reading a book called The History of God.
RF
Karen Armstrong?
DS
Yes. And what struck me about that was that if you go back to the early origins of virtually all of the religions, they speak about silence. Silence as God or heaven. And that is what I have always related to when Robert talks about the relationship between music and silence. That ultimately, heaven or the origins of everything start in silence. We start in silence.
RF
My experience of silence comes primarily from guitar craft and guitar circle courses. Please forgive me here if I begin to veer off into cosmic horseshit. My experience is one of silence walking in the room and the space changes. And a primary site in the world where this happened regularly and reliably was in a retreat house in Tepoztlan Mexico. Going back to 2013 and at 19 minutes past eight in the morning at breakfast time, with all the chatter and conversation going on as 70 or 80 people were having breakfast silence would walk in the room. I look at my watch at 8:19am; and the next day, 8:19am. My experience is of this is: imagine someone you love more than anyone else in the world that wishes for you everything that you could wish for yourself, perhaps your mother, you close your eyes and your mother walks in, and you know they are there.
And you open your eyes and there is nothing to be seen and nothing needs to be seen, because the presence is there, unmistakably, and tangibly, and will remain for as long as the people within that space are able to bear doing nothing as much as they can. That is, within ourselves, we contribute our own personal presence, intention, our own personal silence, and in that space, there is no separation. And then at a clear moment, the visit has passed. And I have experienced this on four continents over 36 years. Which does not mean to say that these are the only places where silence has walked in the room. But there are some places, possibly because of decades and sometimes hundreds of years, since a lot of these courses were in Catholic retreat houses, where the work of the members of that community embracing and welcoming silence, a door was opened. That door over there. Through hundreds of years of knocking on that door, the door would open and stay open for quite some time. And when that silence walks in the room. I recognize what I saw when Fripp and Eno ran over my head in July 1981, in Chelsea, New York City.
Thank you for that questioning.
