Creativity Quote by Andre Kostelanetz

For a musician to call silence “one of the greatest sounds” is a sly correction to how audiences think music works. Kostelanetz isn’t romanticizing quiet as spa-day serenity; he’s insisting that silence is an active material, not an absence. By repeating “to me it is a sound,” he nudges the listener into his professional reality: trained ears don’t stop hearing when notes stop. They register room tone, breath, the soft choreography of an audience trying not to be an audience. “Utter, complete silence” is less a natural state than a high-wire achievement, a moment of collective discipline that can only happen when everyone decides to cooperate.

The subtext is power and attention. In a concert hall, silence signals trust in the performer and respect for the event; it also creates suspense, the charged pause before a downbeat or the held breath after a final chord. Kostelanetz, a conductor and arranger who worked in the heyday of broadcast and mass entertainment, knew how quickly sound can become wallpaper. Against that noisy modernity, silence becomes a luxury good: rare, curated, and unmistakably meaningful.

There’s also a practical musician’s truth hiding in the poetry. Silence frames music the way negative space frames a photograph. Without it, dynamics flatten, emotion blurs, and impact evaporates. Kostelanetz’s line works because it flips the hierarchy: the “greatest sound” isn’t the orchestra at full tilt, but the shared void that makes everything else legible.