# Start with silence *Written 4 October 2026.* This post answers a question a fellow educator put to me a while ago: what could I suggest for musical work in his classroom? Most of the activities are drawn from two books, [[R. Murray Schafer]]'s *A Sound Education* and [[Rod Paton]]'s equally great *Lifemusic*, plus a few games that circulate among music teachers without a known author (if I am wrong and unintentionally miss an attribution, please don’t hesitate to send me a line and I will make a correction asap). They run here in roughly the order I used them in the first two music meetings of Listir I, an arts course for student teachers at the School of Education, University of Iceland. This is meant to be an inspiration for *your* practice, not a lesson plan. It is a sequence collected over years and borrowed with thanks. It has worked for me in many different variations, depending on the circumstances, the age group, the classroom environment and the mood. You don’t need to be a trained musician to try it out. "If everyone is musical," Paton writes, "then running a music session need not be restricted to trained musicians" (Paton, 2011, p. 220).[^1] I agree. You might also want to pick a few of these and bring them gradually into the way you already teach. What is essential to me is Rod’s notion that instructions are *not* meant to be followed, *but to inspire* (Paton, 2011, p. 219).[^2] Hence, there is no single ‘right outcome’. Instead, we keep evaluating how they worked, and try to build our next step on this in situ assessment. ## Listening first Schafer's book is a hundred numbered exercises, most of them a few lines long. Two of them close a short series "designed to reach the still centre" (Schafer, 1992, p. 102). I have opened several classes and workshops with them.[^3] Their simplicity is the point: they need a sheet of paper and a few minutes. ### Setting the tone A sheet of paper is passed around the room, hand to hand, in “absolute” silence (exercise 73),[^4] and Schafer asks whether that is even possible, "or don't we hear the pianissimo brushing of the paper as we pass it from hand to hand?" (p. 104). Then the paper becomes an instrument (exercise 74). It goes around again, and each person has to make a sound with it that nobody has made before. There is a variation on exercise 73 that circulates among music teachers, and I use it often if I want the group to calm down after a more energetic activity. Instead of paper, the group passes a shaker that sounds at the slightest movement (orchestral chimes work too). If anybody hears a sound, it goes back to the start. ### A listening walk Further from the classroom, exercise 13 is a *Listening Walk* (Schafer, 1992, pp. 31–32). The group walks in single file, each person just out of earshot of the footsteps of the person ahead. Back in the room, everyone answers a list of questions, among them "A soft sound destroyed by a loud sound" and "Three sounds that moved with you". With my distance students the walk becomes a longer assignment: they draw a map of a route, record short clips along the way, mark each recording spot on the map, and then reflect on what changed in a place they thought they knew. ## Sound and space Paton's book has a chapter of what he calls "30 Improvisation Starters" (Paton, 2011, p. 242).[^5] Here are two of them, roughly as I run them. I only give them here as a small excerpt meant to inspire you to reach out for the whole book. *Points in Space* (p. 243). The group sits in a circle with instruments. Each person tries to make one short sound when nobody else is sounding, so that every sound lands in its own gap. It is important to place the emphasis on avoiding landing the sound at the same time with anyone else. The more you do, the more... Try yourself! *Invitations* (p. 246). One person starts to improvise and then, with a gesture, invites someone else to join in. That person invites a third, and so on, until everyone is playing. The players, not the teacher, choose who comes in next. Several others belong in the same early stretch. *Sound and Silence* (p. 243), where anyone can stop the whole group, works as a first game with body percussion before any instrument is handed out. *Time Holes* (p. 242) is built largely out of silence. *Dropouts* (p. 247) thins a full sound down to a single soloist. And *Clock and Clouds* (p. 252) moves between strict ticking and a sound with no pulse at all. The book gives each of them with a list of extensions. ## Grouping the instruments Before a class plays together, I often sort the instruments, following Paton, by the material of the part that makes the sound: metal, wood, skin, and air (voices and wind instruments). It is a very old way of classifying instruments, and traces of it survive in the sections of a modern orchestra. It is a good way of organising a classroom arrangement, and it gives a teacher four sections to cue. It is also a version of something Paton argues for directly: "This principle of limitation is fundamental to any creative work" (Paton, 2011, p. 231). ## Voices The voice rainbow needs no instruments. The leader's hand moves slowly from the floor, up through the air in an arch, and back down to the floor. The voices follow it up and down in pitch, and usually in volume too, without being told to. Since every voice has its own colour, the arch comes out as a rainbow of sound. ## Leading and composing In the *Conductor* activity, I ask one of the group members to try to conduct the whole group, using simple gestures. They are free to rehearse once or twice, propose meanings for gestures of their choice. This exercise is powerful for two different reasons: firstly, it hands over the power of facilitation to a group member. Secondly, it lets them experience, that the pleasure from leading an ensemble grows with the clarity of the instructions: messy, noisy, self-centred gestures are difficult to understand and follow, and hence will not provide satisfying results. I don’t need to say it. The conductor finds out instantly. The last step hands the leading over to the group. In Paton's *Conduction* (p. 253), which he bases on the work of the improviser Butch Morris, a conductor stands in front of the group, but responds to what the players are doing rather than directing them. Any player can stand up and take the conductor's place. From there, students may want to compose. In small groups they make a short piece, lead the whole class through it, and perform it together. This is also a great opportunity to use invented notation, which deserves a whole other post, which I might write someday, soon. What matters here is that after several warm-up activities, the group is prepared to listen to one another and *wants* to do so, having experienced the joy of being an ensemble. ## The books ![[Screenshot 2026-10-04 at [email protected]|295]] Available from the publisher: https://patria.org/arcana/arcbooks.html ![[IMG_1994.jpg|307]] Available to be purchased online: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lifemusic-Connecting-Dr-Rod-Paton/dp/190628914X Everything above from Paton is merely a small part of his book, which I have been recommending to my students every year, for more than a decade. The starters chapter has many more, sorted into structural, relational and thematic types (Paton, 2011, p. 242). The chapter before it, on facilitation, is the one my student teachers read before the second meeting, because it is about the person leading the games. It rests on the difference between instructing and facilitating: an instructor teaches skills that are hard to master, whereas "a facilitator, by definition, makes things easy" (p. 221). If these activities are useful to you, buy the book. Schafer's book runs to under 150 pages, and I have used three of its hundred exercises here. And if you only have five minutes, start with Schafer's sheet of paper: hand it to someone and ask the room to pass it on without a sound. You will see how much there is to discover in a simple movement. Enjoy! PS: I once created almost an entire musical score for a theatre play using sampled paper sound. The magical thing about working with paper as an instrument, aside from how great it is for sparking creativity, is that it changes its texture, and hence feel and sound, as it gets more fatigued. The more rounds a sheet of paper survives, the more opportunities open. Try it! You might be surprised! ## See also - [[The unmusical self]] - [[Re-becoming musical]] - [[How to play (almost) all pop songs]] - [[Facilitation]] - [[Principle of limitation]] [^1]: Paton, R. (2011). *Lifemusic: Connecting people to time* (p. 220). Archive Publishing. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lifemusic-Connecting-Dr-Rod-Paton/dp/190628914X [^2]: Paton, R. (2011). *Lifemusic: Connecting people to time* (p. 219). Archive Publishing. Paton describes the facilitator's work as "never allowing attachment to a rule to stand in the way of changes of direction driven by inner necessity". [^3]: Schafer, R. M. (1992). *A sound education: 100 exercises in listening and sound-making* (pp. 31–32, 102–105). Arcana Editions. First published in Japan by Shunjusha. Available from the publisher at https://patria.org/arcana/arcbooks.html [^4]: We know no such thing exists, right? :) [^5]: Paton, R. (2011). *Lifemusic: Connecting people to time* (pp. 242–254). Archive Publishing.