Rests Are Part of the Score

There is a line often attributed to Debussy: that music is the space between the notes.

I can’t find it in anything he wrote, and it gets credited to others too. I have decided not to mind.

For most of my life I have believed the notes were the point. The meetings, the decisions, the long run of days with no room left in them. The gaps were what you got when the work paused, and a pause felt like time lost.

But a composer writes the rests in. They are marked, counted and given a value. A player who rushes through them has not worked harder, only misread the piece.

Take the rests out and you do not get more music. You get a long, tiring sound that nobody would call a piece.

I think work is much the same. The effort matters, but it only becomes something worth hearing because of what surrounds it. Rest is not the interval before the real thing. It is part of the real thing.

I begin a long rest soon. I mean to play it as marked.