All music emerges from silence, to which sooner or later it must return. At its simplest we may conceive of music as the relationship between sounds and the silence and the silence that surrounds them. Yet silence is an imaginary state in which all sounds are absent, akin perhaps to the infinity of time and space that surrounds us. We cannot ever hear utter silence, nor can we fully imagine such concepts such as infinity and eternity. When we create music, we express life. But the source of music is silence, which is the ground of our musical being, the fundamental note of life. How we live depends on our relationship with death; how we make music depends on our relationship with silence.
Arvo Part by Paul Hillier
Oxford Studies of Composers
Paintings start with the blank white canvas and the 'story' of painting follows a linear narrative which which was finally confronted when Malevich's monochrome Black Square was first displayed at the 0-10 exhibition in Petrograd 1915. Critics saw this as the corpse of the Art of Painting being marked with a Black Square. Malevich saw it as a beginning but also as an emblem of a wiping out of the art of the past . Ryman's white squares were also seen as a beginning but while contained by the strictness of monochrome art remains a blank page or a tabula rasa.
It could be, as it were, the banner of an open future. That would one way we might slip between the disjunction's horns, treating the white square niether as beginning nor ending, but as embodying a meaning analogous to that embodied by the Black Square. But both readings must then reject the suggestion of emptyness which comes naturally to mind when one contemplates this genre of art. The monochrome square is dense with meaning. Or its emptiness is less formal truth than a metaphor-the emptiness left by the flood, the emptiness of a blank page.
Arthur C Danto AFTER THE END OF ART