ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the two main themes concern the apparently paradoxical concept of 'silent music'. It focuses on poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite St John of the Cross and concerns human, mystical perceptions of 'silent music'. The chapter discusses whether St John's experience of 'silent music' was veridical. St John places the ideas 'silent music' and 'sonorous solitude' not among other paradoxes, however, but straightforward natural images: valleys, islands, rivers, breezes, the night, even food. St John's 'silent music' was primarily a religious experience, but one which offered the possibility of music disassociated from the flesh. Silent music' is 'more' than music and more than silence - more even than the most pregnant of silences. Music also encounters its other in the 'silences of the frame' which mark the thresholds of musical works. The eternal silence can be conceptually present during the silences of music, and 'silent music' is immanent in the silence of contemplation.
