Arwokan Swidołaskow

A CONCERT FOR AN EMPTY HALL AND NO ORCHESTRA

The one who maintains                    that nothing can be heard would be wrong. People (both listeners and players) are not needed to fill the hall with sounds. Even if the intention is to achieve the absolute silence, or the state when absolutely no sound will appear, with no doubt something will be heard. The point is this work is not to be listened to, and this is something absolutely different than not to be heard – that is why it is forbidden to enter the hall where the concert is being played, or rather to the hall which is playing this concert. What can a zealous, never giving up music lover, a fanatic fan of the arier-garde art do? Press an ear to the wall? It can turn out the intention of the “composer” (quotation mark seems necessary, although only seems so) is really different than achieving the absolute silence. If an army of hungry termites has been let into the hall and now they are devouring the seats, parquetry, floor of the stage and all other wooden furnishings and fixtures of the hall which soon will begin to break, crack, split, fall into pieces, into sawdust (or mandibledust) definitely not silently? If a special machinery has been installed to put up and down the seats: at first the third row, then the seventh row, then the centre section of the fourth row, and so on, and then the curtains are drawn, air conditioning is on and off and on and off? Or just a natural process of self-destruction, not provoked, not pushed forward, not accelerated, is going on? . . . . . . . . . . How patient the arier-garde music fans must be, oh, how hard is their life . . . . . . . . .