There is a real need and challenge for composers to find a way to create a music which actually goes beyond silence itself into a music of implications and tensions of a more mental nature.

John Cage did most to open silence up as a musical need, despite the paradox. However, musicologists may find many interesting uses of silence throughout history both in "serious" music as well as "ethnic" folk music. Nevertheless, not much has happened in terms of developing silence for nearly half a century since Cage composed his silent piece "4'33"" in the early fifties. Could this be due to the apparent difficulty of articulating musical energies and structures in silence? In actual fact there are now developments whereby it may soon be possible to "project" sounds to individual members of an audience without others hearing it. One day we may aspire to create music in someone's mind alone by some form of electronic radio device. These ways may show a future application of silent music.

At present, my own work contents itself with near silence in many places and the use of extraneous, signal- like sounds, written into the score as an integral part of it. My concept comes out of a piece I entitled with the serial number "Z2", which I remember composing in 1970-1. Being a conceptual work there are only a few instructions for performance - "choose a note on any pitched instrument; silence, play the note staccato, silence". The idea here was for a brief statement of existence and structure but that note took on a great significance in the way it reverberated in my mind and, in many ways, still does today. The piece was intended for meditation and questions such as "why that note" or "why that instrument?", "why so short?" etc became valid starting points for engaging the listener. The note was almost an interruption to silence - in my experience it is interruption which heightens awareness. This latter both musical and philosophical stance was born out by reading of the twentieth century mystic Gurdjiev, who apparently made his followers, frequently high society, dance or run and suddenly stop as part of a mystic experience.

Mysticism apart, however, my statement in Z2 seemed so complete and perfect that my very strong creative impulse was stilled for nearly fifteen years - how could one go beyond a statement which seems to say everything?

Eventually, around 1984, I had time to devote to the enormous musical tensions I could feel. A new, mental music to go even beyond Z2 was slowly forming into an actuality. There had been several ideas in psychology which seemed to come together to help me in my quest. I had always been intrigued by the way a dripping tap can start as an unnoticed sound gradually getting louder until each drip seems to be made with an amplifier and becomes such mental torture that someone has to switch it off to bring mental relief. Yet all this time the drip maintains a slow regular pulse and does not change in number of decibels. Just as interesting was the way a drip might sometimes not happen at the expected moment - the anticipation can lead to an almost mental "hearing" of the omitted drip. This led me to consider the use of writing sequences of sounds and occasionally omitting the expected value. This became a device to help hear the effect of the note, or even the note itself mentally only. I began conceiving of such sequences as "Forcefields" - a force consisting of actual sounds eliciting further, mental, sounds. Another idea from psychology which came to my help was the notion of condition and reflex. If I could condition the hearer through the use of actual sounds to create a reflex where the listener would experience the force of unheard sounds, or even the sounds themselves, I would be moving along the right path. I remembered reading about Pavlov and how, by using sound signals on dogs, he was able to make them salivate in anticipation of food, even when no food was offered. Could I use similar sounds signals as part of the continuing process to bring about a mental anticipation leading to the experience of musical energies, even when sounds were not actually present?

Gradually, my work moved out of the purely sequential ideas into a combination of sequences and signals. I further found that the use of very soft, staccatissimo sounds often led to a hearing of things not physically present and added to my technical armoury. A typical "forcefield" of mental music energy consists of the following:-

1) a brief prelude, extremely soft and staccatissimo, anticipating:-
2) what is essentially the same groups of sounds played louder (often variated in the same way),
3) a signal-like sound (often like the notes of a doorbell, for instance),
4) very quick staccatissimo sounds - usually composed of irrelevant material(s) to heighten tension,
5) a "debrief" to the forcefield, consisting of the signal and sounds of the prelude in retrograde.

This is a basic outline and variations do occur. One iteration of a forcefield may be anything from about half a minute to two, or even three minutes.

Of the above elements, the fourth needs some explanation. A further psychological idea which intrigued me was what de Bono called "lateral thinking". Basically, this is the idea that one may often find solutions to problems by thinking about something suitably irrelevant. If the musical material at stage 4 of a forcefield is suitably irrelevant then the tensions created should enhance and, indeed, amplify the tensions created through stages 1, 2 and 3. One may see here the concept of musical elicitation - a physicalisation, which I call "materialisation".

Each "forcefield" consists of different musics and is composed as a sequence. In this way we have a first statement, then the next value in the statement, followed by another, and so on. The first forcefield to be heard in a piece would be punctuated by other forcefields. Usually a work consists of about half a dozen such fields of musical energy.

After some time I began to conceive of a two movement format where the first movement would be an elicitation consisting of forcefields as described. The second movement would be harder to pin down since it would consist of lateral thinking, suitably irrelevant sounds. These are intended to further enhance and, therefore, amplify the combined musical effect of the forcefields making up the first movement.

In time my interest as a performer of music of the classical Viennese repertoire led me to the idea of a four movement form along the following lines:-

1st MOVT	2nd MOVT	3rd MOVT	4th MOVT
Forcefields	Elicitation or amplification of forces in the first movement	(new) forcefields but in themselves seeking to elicit those of the first movement	Elicitation or amplification of forces of the third movement

A broader outline would detail the 3rd and 4th movements as part new material and part amplification of the first four movements.

This plan leads me to where I am these days and is the intention behind the Micro Sonata for electric piano and a work in progress which is, in fact, my Symphony.

Stanislaw Hansel, Peterborough, 16th -17th August 1999