The Sounds Of Silence: A Brief, Quiet History Of ‘Negative Space’ In Music

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim looks at the uses of well-placed pauses for the purposes of acoustical clarity, rhetoric, drama, surprise, and even humor, traveling from chanting monks and Monteverdi through Haydn and Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler and Berg, to (of course) John Cage. – The New York Times