If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps it can be said that a rest is worth a thousand notes. Well, it’s hard to quantify exactly, but rests are certainly important in creating a musical landscape.
As one expert in the industry, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, said: “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Rests are to music what breaths are to the human voice, or what punctuation is to grammar, or what silence and meditation are to the busy mind. Rests provide contour to musical phrasing and give expression to otherwise incessant chatter. If we removed rests from music, would it not then become just noise?
Most of us have been guilty at one point or another of foregoing the rest in our musical practice, simply because we are so focused on getting the notes right. It takes concentration and memory to give each rest their due and make sure they are included in our rhythmic calculations.
Perhaps the unsung hero in music is not the musical note, but the musical rest. As Claude Debussy keenly observed, “”Music is the silence between the notes.”