The creative silences of artists have been a matter of continuing fascination for the past two hundred years. Pondering the drying up of the springs of inspiration—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s manic-depressive blocks, Harper Lee’s withdrawal after the Mockingbird, Salinger’s post-Rye-catching seclusion—seems to have an appeal equal to that of pondering them when fully flowing. Our postromantic world still tends to view the source of inspiration as mysterious and unknowable, but its inverse, a creative block, seems by contrast to be finite and thus more easily comprehensible. Hunting for the source of the Nile is a strenuous exercise that must end inconclusively in muddy mountain marshes in the Congo. But there is little that is inconclusive about it when it hits the Aswan Dam.

Creative blocks occurred long before Coleridge and others declared their blockedness, but there seems to have been no general awareness of their existence before the late eighteenth century allowed creativity to leave the realm of artisanship for that of high art. There are innumerable medical and psychological explanations for writer’s block in the literature today, but there are no records of J. S. Bach telling his employers that he couldn’t write next Sunday’s cantata because he was feeling a little bipolar, just as Haydn presumably never told his employer Prince Esterházy that he couldn’t dash off his hundred-and-somethingth baryton trio because he felt his defenses crumbling against an oral-masochistic conflict. As soon as artists had to be “inspired,” however, they found that they could also be uninspired.

In the world of music, the most famous silent composers were Gioachino Rossini, who wrote almost nothing in the thirty-odd years after his Guillaume Tell, and Jean Sibelius, who fell silent after his Seventh Symphony (though there are reports that an Eighth was all but completed until put to a fiery end by the composer himself). Rossini had been a workaholic, but after Guillaume Tell he acquired the financial means to abandon his work and relax and eat instead, and so he did. Sibelius, on the other hand, was an alcoholic, and this presumably played a role in his silence. Other composers have been creatively becalmed for shorter or longer periods.