Reader creativity and the spaces between moments

I have this double CD of Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. The first CD was recorded in 1955 when his career had just started, the second in 1981 a year or two before he died. It's amazing how very different they are. The 1955 version is all quickfire brilliance, brimming with confidence and bright technique. The 1981 version is quieter, more reflective. More melancholy. More beautiful.

One of the things that is interesting is the time difference. Take the first movement, the Aria. The first version lasts for 1 min 51 seconds and the second version at 3 mins 4 secs. I've posted a video giving both versions below at the end of this post and there's an interesting discussion between Gould and Tim Page after the music. Gould is critical of that earlier version - he says when he listened to it again he recognised the 'fingerprints' - the mechanical aspects of playing the piano - but he couldn't recognise the spirit of the person who made the earlier recording.

What's fascinating to me is that arguably the most beautiful parts of that 1981 recording happen in the tiny, almost imperceptible silences between the notes. In between the very deliberate notes, are very deliberate silences. And it makes you 'hear' the silence; it makes you realise that things happen in silences, however brief they may be. The silences draw attention to the notes that follow. They inform the notes. In short, they are part of the music.

A similar thing happens with comic books. I don't know much about them, but my brother is into them in a big way. Here is a snippet of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, which I bought him for Christmas one year and keep meaning to borrow back:

Don't you just LOVE that explanation? And the intoxicating idea that in that 3 or 4 millimetres of white space, your brain is filling in story, is creating as you read?

A book is not a piece of music or a series of drawings, but it has its silence, its gutter. It has those spaces between moments that are not really empty or silent at all but the place where the reader's brain engineers whatever it is that is not said.

I blogged recently about the reader-writer transaction and quoted Margaret Atwood: the act of reading is just as singular - always - as the act of writing. And I think this is why. Because the reader is engaged - in a small way - in a creative act, negotiating the silence and gutters between the moments reported by the author.