Susan Tusing, professor of music at Andrews College in Georgia, sent me this photograph of the grave of Alfred Schnittke, which she took on a recent visit to Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow. She thought it might serve to illustrate the guiding concept of my book and site, "The Rest Is Noise," which indeed it does. The deceased composer asks for a very loud (fff) silence (rest), prolonged by an extra beat or two (the fermata overhead).
Some years ago I got into the morbid habit of snapping pictures of composers' graves, the more obscure the better. Here are the final resting places of Fibich, Enescu, and Xavier Scharwenka. And here are my 1992 and 1998 essays on the late Dr. Schnittke, whom I had the honor of meeting a few years before his death, oddly enough at the Watergate Hotel.
