I tell my students all the time, "Honor the rest." Most of my students will clip rests short or otherwise completely ignore them. I remind them that rests don't get zero-value but that a quarter rest gets one full beat of silence, just like a quarter note gets one full beat of sound.
But I get it. My students aren't the only ones who rush the rests.
I rush rests.
My colleagues rush rests.
Every choir I've sung in rushes rests.
Every band I've heard rushes rests.
If nature abhors a vacuum, then musicians despise silence, so we rush to fill that silence with sound. This framework suggests a wrong understanding of musical silence because a rest is not a vacuum. It does not suck energy out of a musical phrase.
I can hear a former choir director saying, "What's the purpose of a rest?" And we'd respond with, "To reenergize the music!"
Musical silence - the essence of timing - carves sharp lines of energy in the music. A prolonged grand pause generates suspense. A percussive kick is preceded by the briefest of 8th rests; the antecedent silence jump-starts the rhythm.
Every symphonic musician knows that the silence between movements creates space for the preceding movement to settle and the subsequent movement to begin. This is why symphonic musicians brace themselves for the inter-movement scherzo of coughs and grunts from the audience.
People truly abhor a vacuous space.
I'm learning that my mind and body do not tolerate rest from training. I've placed a 90-day moratorium on all athletic competitions to allow my body to rest from a busy season of endurance races. Despite no races on my calendar, I'm still training, as if there's a triathlon next week.
Crosstraining 3-4 days a week.
Two days in the pool.
Two days on the bike.
A run thrown in there.
It shouldn't have taken a Newtonian genius to determine that a body in motion tends to stay in motion; look at an endurance athlete. Indiana State Auditor Chris Traeger *literally* spoke for all of us.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I forced myself to slow down. I didn't get on my bike, even though the weather was gorgeous, because my body was beat. When I wanted to run, I walked my neighborhood instead. I even took a few midday naps on my sofa with the cat curled up on my belly. I didn't like any of it. My muscles felt restless; my mind felt low-key anxious.
I wanted to rush through this rest, ignoring what my body wanted to do. My ego was worried that a slower training program would ruin any fitness I've built up.
Yet my musical experience knows that rest reenergizes the musical body; rest doesn't suck the musicality out of me. Following the success of our Murder, She Wrote concert, I took a week off from practicing any music, and I felt no guilt in doing so. Over the holiday weekend, I ran through the entire program in preparation for our final concert, and I discovered, to my delight, that all my musicality was still in my fingers. Rest refreshed my mind to return to a more vigorous practice routine.
So why do I feel so anxious about physical rest? I have decades of experience with music but only a few years of experience with athletics. I'm learning yet again that my lifetime with music is teaching me a valuable lesson about fitness. Honor the rest. It energizes your life.