I taught improvisation for thirty years using the Divided Sky pause

I taught high school music for thirty-one years. Somewhere around year twenty I started using the pause in Divided Sky as the entire lesson on tension.

You play them the recording. The band stops. Nothing happens. The crowd is roaring at silence. Fifteen seconds, twenty, sometimes a full minute — and a room of sixteen-year-olds who have never heard this band get visibly, physically uncomfortable.

Then you ask: what were you feeling in that gap?

They always say some version of "I wanted it to come back." And then you explain that this is the only thing music does, and that a rest is a note, and that a guy in Vermont figured out you can make thousands of people want something just by not giving it to them yet.

Best twelve minutes of curriculum I ever had. Zero of them became fans. All of them got the point.