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James Davy, Blackburn Cathedral's assistant director of music, writes about noise and silence.

As a musician, I am concerned primarily with noise; ordered noise, in music and speech, although silence is very important too!

The composer and philosopher John Cage famously wrote' a piece of music called 4' 3'' involving a performance where no music is actually played, but the little noises of the world become part of the music itself, even if the instruments themselves are silent.

All the earlier noise of Holy Week, the cries of Hosanna' on Palm Sunday, Jesus' words the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday and the singing of Jesus and his disciples afterwards, were all to be quieted at his crucifixion - I suspect that once the noise and tumult of Jesus' trial was over, the crucifixion was mainly a rather quiet experience.

The noises of life on that afternoon before the Sabbath fell must have been there, the wailing of the women standing by, perhaps, and the odd cry of mockery from a passer-by, but all these would have seemed very secondary to the silence emanating from the power of the scene, broken occasionally by Jesus himself crying out, of which more later.

The words of the High Priest and Pilate, Herod and the crowd baying for the blood of this man all melt away, left only in the written accounts of Christ's passion, so movingly portrayed in a setting by Bach, performed here at the Cathedral on Wednesday night.

Perhaps the most poignant moment of that great work is after the death of Jesus, where instruments and singers fall silent and where, on Wednesday (as at the very end of the performance) you could feel the immensity of the silence as people took a moment to reflect on what had gone before.

I know from experience that silence can feel like an eternity; even a short silence, like the 2 minutes observed every year on November 11.

Some refer to silence as being kept for a space'. In such a space, the mind can race to all sorts of things, or can be focussed on something particular, and the lack of distraction can help to clear the mind of outside interference.

It will, hopefully, be the concentrated, reflective silence that falls over the worshippers at services today, Good Friday, as they consider the scale of the crucifixion.

Last night, at the watch of the passion, members of the clergy, choir and congregation watched in silence with Jesus reflecting on the story of his arrest.

Today, we will express our feelings, and those of others, in words and music: The Cathedral Choir leads the liturgy of Good Friday at 10 am and the cross is exposed to be adored, ironically, given its grim purpose.

At 12 noon, the watch at the cross will be kept for three hours. Hymns will be sung, and the Johnston String Quartet will play the Seven Last Words of Christ from the Cross' by Joseph Haydn (each Word' being a saying of Christ in his last hours).

Haiku poems written by Canon Chris Chivers, and meditations by our Holy Week preacher Canon Michael Hunn will provide the written focus for our thoughts, but here again, the over-riding element of the service will be silence.

Space for reflection, forcing the mind to focus harder on what it is we're actually witnessing, albeit some 2000 years later.

In the evening, at 8 pm, the Cathedral's Young People's Choir will lead a sequence of music and meditations; each piece of music and each meditation, again by Canon Michael Hunn, a moment to invite reflection in silence on the momentous events of the day and the death of Jesus.

On Easter Eve, or Holy Saturday as it is sometimes called, the silence of the tomb is reflected by the disruption to the usual pattern of services and way of life - there is no communion service, and the cathedral is bare and empty as disrupted, bare and empty the lives of Jesus' apostles and his mother Mary must have been that first day after his death.

Then at 5 am on Easter Day itself, we begin a new silence.

Not now one of reflection or mourning, but a silence of waiting, waiting for the noise of the opening back of Christ's tomb, the rolling away of the stone, until as his resurrection is proclaimed, the congregation will make a huge noise, with trumpets, drums, rattles and other things to acclaim the risen Christ, and break that dark silence kept since Thursday evening, and then the Cathedral will be filled with light and joyful noise, as the world awakes to a new life.

8:00am Friday 21st March 2008

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