Aphonos

written for the Varsity Tuba Quartet: Morgan Skelley, Kannon Goodman, Cooper Divet, Samuel McHenry.

recorded January 25, 2026

“The music also revealed the complexity of ‘silence’ itself. Silence in music was not the cessation of sound, or even a gesture: it was a different sound , one with more density than those sounds made by instruments.”

– Michael Pisaro-Liu, Wandelweiser (2009) on Kunsu Shim’s silent music

Aphonos (from biblical Greek, meaning “voiceless” or “without sound”) traverses the concept of silence as a different, dense sound. In the context of this work, silence and non-silence are equal temporal events, bound to only scale in magnitude by the time domain.

Inspired by the iconographic scores of Kevin Sims, Raven Chacon, Olivia Katz, Pauline Oliveros, alongside the aesthetics of the Wandelweiser ‘group’ (namely Michael Pisaro-Liu and Jürg Frey), Aphonos adopts a minimal notation scheme.

Aphonos is written for and dedicated to the Varsity Tuba Quartet.

Aphonos score