Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music 0826416152, 9780826416155

Citation preview

READINGS

IN MODERN

EDITED

CHRISTOPH

COX

AND

MUSIC

BY

DANIEL

WARNER

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/audiocultureread0000unse

UNDERCURRENTS: THE HIDDEN WIRING OF MODERN MUSIC Publ_ished by Continuum Books in 2002 to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the UK independent experimental music magazine The Wire, this anthology of essays, many adapled from back issues of The Wire, outlines the key concepts and underlying themes hardwired into the radical music of the past 100 years. Contents Recordlng Angels: The esoteric origins of the phonograph by Enk Davi On The Mlc How amplification altered the voice for good by lan Penm The Jarrybulh Future: The Sonlc Arts Unlon, ONCE Group and MEV’s live electronics by Chnstoph Cox Worship The Glitch: Digital music, electronic disturbance by Rob Youn: The Etermal Drone Good vibrations, ancient to future by Marcus B Slapplng Pylhngoras The battle for the music of the spheres by RobYt TheRngged Trousered An!hologlst Harry Smith and his worlds by Peter Shap.ro & Philip Sm The Solar Myth Approach: Sun Ra, Stockhausen, P-Funk, Hawkwind: the live space ritual by

Ken

Holhngs

Humans, Are They Really Necessary?: Sound art, automata, musical sculpture by David Toop Automating The Beat: The robotics of rhythm by Peter Shapiro The Aulobahn Goes On Forever: On the road with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Wim Wenders by Biba Kop! Rock Concré!e Counterculture plugs into the academy by Edwin Pounce Deck Wreckers: The turntable as Instrument by Peter Shapiro Destroy All Music: The Futurists’ Art of Noises by Mark Sinker The Limits Of Language: Sound poetry and Lettrism’s textual assault by Jultan Cowley The Music Of Chanca Cage, Kagel, Zorn: Chance operators, musical dice men Andy Hamilton Smiling Faces Sometimes: Soul music’s grinners and backstabbers by Peter Shapiro Frames Of Freedom: Improvisation, otherness and the limits of spontaneity by David Toop Generation Ecstasy: New York's free jazz continuum by Tom Roe Plus extensive Discography and Bibliography

WIRE

WWW

THEWIRE.COUK

Also available from Continuum: THEODOR W. ADORNO Philosophy of Modern Music ANDREW HULTKRANS Forever Changes

ANDY

MILLER

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society JOE

PERNICE

Meat is Murder

STEVE

TAYLOR

The A to X of Alternative Music

ROB YOUNG (ed) Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music WARREN ZANES Dusty in Memphis

Audio

Culture READINGS

IN

MODERN

Edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner

.\\contmuum NEW

YORK

o

LONDON

MUSIC

2009 The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2004 by Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner, and the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers or their appointed agents. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Audio culture : readings in modern music / edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. p. cm. Includes discography (p. ), bibliographical references (p. ), and index. ISBN 0-8264-1614-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8264-1615-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Music—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Music—21st century—History and criticism. |. Cox, Christoph, 1965Il. Warner, Daniel, 1954ML197.A85 2004 780'.9'04—dc22 2004009124

Contents

Acknowledgments Sources and Permissions Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture

Part One:

THEORIES

l. Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence Introduction . Jacques Attali, “Noise and Politics” . Luigi Russolo, “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto” . Morton Feldman, “Sound, Noise, Varése, Boulez" Edgard Varése, “The Liberation of Sound” Henry Cowell, “The Joys of Noise” . John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” . R. Murray Schafer, “The Music of the Environment” . Mark Slouka, “Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life” . Mary Russo and Daniel Warner, “Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands” 10. Simon Reynolds, “Noise” 11.

“The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow

Il. Modes of Listening Introduction 12.

Marshall McLuhan, “Visual and Acoustic Space”

13.

Hanns Eisler & Theodor Adorno, “The Politics of Hearing"

14.

Pierre Schaeffer, “Acousmatics”

15.

Francisco Lépez, “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter” . Ola Stockfelt, “Adequate Modes of Listening” . Brian Eno, “Ambient Music” . lain Chambers, “The Aural Walk”

19.

Pauline Oliveros, “Some Sound Observations”

20. J.K. Randall, “Compose Yourself”’

102 107

Ill. Music in the Age of Electronic (Re)production

113 115 127

-t

Introduction 21. Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording” 22.

Brian Eno, “The Studio as Compositional Tool”

23. John Oswald, “Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt”

131

24.

Chris Cutler, “Plunderphonia”

138

25.

Kodwo Eshun, “Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality”

157

Part Two: PRACTICES IV. The Open Work Introduction 26.

Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work”

27. John Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” 28. Christoph Cox, “Visual Sounds: On Graphic Scores” 29.

Earle Brown, “Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic”

30. John Zorn, “The Game Pieces” 31. Anthony Braxton, “Introduction to Catalog of Works" V. Experimental Musics Introduction 32.

Michael Nyman, “Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music”

33. John Cage, “Introduction to Themes & Variations” 34.

Brian Eno, “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts”

35. Cornelius Cardew, “A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution” 36.

David Toop, “The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital Culture”

VI.

Improvised Musics

Introduction 37. Ornette Coleman, “Change of the Century” 38.

Derek Bailey, “Free Improvisation”

39.

Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation”

40. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives”

VIl.

Minimalisms

Introduction Susan McClary, “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture”

42.

Kyle Gann, “Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism”

43.

Steve Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process”

—

41.

44. Wim Mertens, “Basic Concepts of Minimal Music” 45. Tony Conrad, “LYssophobia: On Four Violins” 46.

Philip Sherburne, “Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno”

Viil. 47.

Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, “Production—Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph”

48.

William S. Burroughs, “The Invisible Generation”

49.

Christian Marclay & Yasunao Tone, “Record, CD, Analog, Digital”

50.

Paul D. Miller, “Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory”

51.

David Toop, “Replicant: On Dub”

52. Simon Reynolds, “Post-Rock”

319

329 331 334 341 348 355 358

Electronic Music and Electronica

Introduction 53. Jacques Barzun, “Introductory Remarks to a Program of Works Produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” 54.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Electronic and Instrumental Music”

55.

Karlheinz Stockhausen et al., “Stockhausen vs. the ‘Technocrats

56. Ben Neill, “Breakthrough Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of 57.

289 299 304 307 313

DJ Culture

Introduction

X.

287

365 367 370 381

Contemporary Electronic Music”

386

Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digifal’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music”

392

Chronology

399

Glossary

409

Selected Discography

419

Selected Bibliography

427

Notes for Quotations

445

Index

448

Acknowledgments

Several years in the making, this book was helped along by a large network of people. Big thanks to Continuum’s David Barker for his enthusiastic support of the project and his extraordinary patience. Gabriella Page-Fort superbly copyedited the manuscript and made helpful suggestions and wise decisions. Rob Young, editor of The Wire (the world’s finest music magazine), connected us with Continuum and supported the project in a number of ways. Thanks also to The Wire's Tony Herrington, Chris Bohn, and Anne Hilde Neset, for whom it has been a pleasure and an education to write over the past decade. Andrew Kesin gave the project a push at a crucial moment. Aaron Berman, Dean of Faculty at Hampshire College, supported our work on the book with a series of Faculty Development Grants for which we are very grateful. A grant from Hampshire's European Studies Program, directed by Jim Miller, helped to make possible the translation of Pierre Schaeffer's “Acousmatics.” Several of our students put in hours of work to help prepare the manuscript: Matt Krefting, Matthew Latkiewicz, Daniel Lopatin, Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Rosenblum, Charlotte Schwennsen, and John Shaw. Amherst College Music librarians Ann Maggs and Jane Beebe generously granted us access to that library’s fine collections. Thanks, too, to a number of friends and colleagues who helped us to locate materials and track down authors and artists: Robert Walser, David Rothenberg, Marta Ulvaeus, Stephen Vitiello, Andrew Deutsch, Jon Abbey, Jonas Leddington, Oren Ambarchi, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, Jason Tors, and Eyal Hareuveni. Discographical advice was generously offered by Michael Ehlers, Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, Philip Sherburne, and Matt Krefting. Brian Eno’s assistant, Catherine Dempsey, put in hours of work comparing and correcting manuscripts. John Zorn offered helptul criticisms and generously took the time to talk with us about his work. We thank Daniel W. Smith for his superb translation of Pierre Schaeffer's text, and Philip Sherburne for the fine essay he wrote for this volume. Our warmest and deepest thanks go to Molly Whalen for her patience, support, and enthusiasm even during countless hours of single-parenting, and to Mary Russo for her love, advice, and encouragement. Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to the writers, composers, and musicians who generously allowed us to reprint their work for much less compensation than they deserve.

viii

¢

acknowledgments

Sources

and Permissions

Every reasonable effort has been made to locate the owners of rights to previously published works and the translations printed here. We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following material: Chapter 1

From Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. From Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986). Used by permission of Pendragon Press. From Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B.H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000). Used by permission of Exact Change Press. From Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Expanded Edition, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New York: Da Capo, 1998). Used by permission of ChouWen Chung for the Estate of Edgard Varése. From Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music, ed. Dick Higgins (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 2002). Used by permission of McPherson & Company and the David and Sylvia Teitelbaum Fund, Inc. From Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1961). Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

From R. Murray Schater, The Music of the Environment (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1973). Used by permission of the author.

From Harper's Magazine (April 1999). Used by permission of the author. From

Discourse 10, no. 1 (Fall-Winter

1987-1988):

55-76.

Used

by permission of the

authors. From Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990). Used by permission of the author and Serpent’s Tail Press.

From *‘The Beauty of Noise’: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow,” conducted

by Chad

Hensley,

Seconds 42 (1997). Used by permission of the author.

From Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village (New York: Oxford, 1989) © 1992 by Corinne McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. From

Theodor

From

Pierre

Adorno

and

Hanns

Eisler,

Composing

for the Films (New

University Press, 1947). Used by permission of Continuum Press. Schaefter,

Traité des

objets musicaux

(Paris:

Editions

du

York:

Oxford

Seuil,

1966).

Translated for this volume by Daniel W. Smith. Used by permission of Jacqueline Schaeffer and Editions du Seuil. From Francisco Lépez, “Blind Listening,” in The Book of Music and Nature, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Used by permission of the author and David Rothenberg. Modified in consultation with the original version of the article, which appeared as liner notes to La Selva, V2-Archief

va28. From Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz et al., (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997). Used by permission of the author. From Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). Used

by permission of the author. From lain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). Used by permission of the author and Routledge/Taylor & Francis. sources and permissions

e

ix

From Smith From of the From

Pauline Oliveros, Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80 (Baltimore: Publications, 1984). Used by permission of the author. Perspectives of New Music 10, no. 2 (Spring—Summer 1972). Used by permission author. The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

by permission of Malcolm Lester for the Glenn Gould Estate.

This article first appeared,

in two parts, in Down

1984). Used

Beat 50, no. 7 (July 1983) and 50, no.

8 (August 1983), edited by Howard Mandel. Used by permission of the author. From

The Whole Earth Review (Winter 1987). Used by permission of the author.

From Musicworks 60 (Fall 1994). Slightly modified and used by permission of the author. From Kodwo Eshun, More Birilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London:

Quartet,

1998). Used by permission of the author.

From Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1989). Used by permission of the author.

From Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1961). Used by permission ot Wesleyan University Press. From Pulse! (October 1999), slightly modified. Used by permission of the author. From Current Musicology 67/68 (2002). Used by permission of Micah Silver for The Earie Brown Music Foundation. The first portion of this chapter appeared as liner notes to John Zorn, Cobra (Tzadik TZ 7335),

used by permission

of the author. The

interview that follows was conducted

for

this volume by Christoph Cox. From Anthony Braxton, Catalog of Works (Synthesis Music, 1989). Used by permission of the author. From Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Used by permission of the author and Cambridge University Press. From John Cage,

Themes & Variations (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press,

by permission of Barrytown/Station Hill Press. From

Studio International (Nov./Dec.

1982). Used

1976). Used by permission of the author.

From Scratch Music, ed. Cornelius Cardew (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1972). Used by permission of Horace Cardew for the Estate of Cornelius Cardew. From David Toop, “The Generation Game,” The Wire 207 (May 2001). Used by permission of the author. From the liner notes to Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century (Atlantic SD 1327). From Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo, 1992). Used by permission of the author.

From Current Musicology 67/68 (2002). Used by permission of the author. From Black Music Research Journal 16 (1996). Slightly modified and used by permission of the author.

42

43

44

45 46 47

From Susan McClary, “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late-Twentieth Century Culture,” the Norman and Jane Geske Lecture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Used by permission of the author. From Kyle Gann, “Minimal Music, Maximal Impact,” NewMusicBox 31, vol. 3, no. 7 (November 2001). Used by permission of the author and NewMusicBox, the web magazine from the American Music Center. From Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) «» 2002 by Steve Reich. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. From Wim Menrtens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekier (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983) «» Usura 1980. Used by permission of the author.

From liner notes to Tony Conrad, Early Minimalism, Vol. 1 (Table of the Elements TOECD-33). Used by permission of the author. Commissioned for this volume. From "“Production—Reproduction” and “New Form in Music: Potentialities of the Phonograph,” in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Used by permission of Hattula Moholy-Nagy. X

e sources and permissions

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

From William S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. From an untitled discussion between Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone in Music 1 (1997). Used by permission of the authors.

From the liner notes to DJ Spooky, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (Asphodel ASP0961). Used by permission of the author. From David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995). Used by permission of the author and Serpent’s Tail.

From The Village Voice (August 29, 1995). Used by permission of the author. From the liner notes to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (Columbia MS 6566 LP). Used by permission of the author. “Electronic and Instrumental Music” was delivered as a lecture in October 1958 and published in German in Die Reihe 5 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1959). Newly translated here by Jerome Kohl in collaboration with Suzanne Stephens and John McGuire, the essay

55 56 57

will appear

in Karlheinz

Stockhausen,

Texts on Music,

Vol.

|, forthcoming

from

the Stockhausen Foundation for Music. The essay is reprinted with the kind permission of the author. From The Wire 141 (November 1995). Used by permission of Richard Witts, Lizzie Jackson for Soundbite Productions Limited, and Tony Herrington for The Wire. From

Leonardo Music Journal 12 (2002). Used by permission of the author.

From Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (Winter 2000). Used by permission of the author.

sources and permissions

¢

Xi

Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture

Over the past half-century, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of musicians, composers, sound artists, scholars, and listeners attentive to sonic substance, the act of listening, and the creative possibilities of sound recording, playback, and transmission. This culture of the ear has become particularly prominent in the past decade, as evidenced by a constellation of events. The academy has witnessed an explosion of interest in auditory history and anthropology led by social scientists who have turned their attention to sound as a marker of temporal and cultural difference.! In the art world, sound art has suddenly become a viable field, finding venues at prominent museums and galleries across the globe.?2 And, in music, once-marginal sonic and auditory explorers—Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros, R. Murray Schafer, and others—have come to be acknowledged as ancestors and influences by an extraordinary number and range of musicians working across the boundaries of jazz, classical, rock, and dance music. What accounts for this auditory turn in contemporary culture? Technological innovations have certainly played a decisive role. “Sound recording, audio tracking of movies and video, online MP3's, all have re-sounded our ways of thinking,” notes historian Richard Cullen Rath, recapitulating a view advocated by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s.2 McLuhan argued that the emergence of electronic media was causing a shift in the sensorium, deposing the visual from its millennia-old hegemony and giving way to an immersive experience exemplified by the auditory. In an illuminating history of musical technology, musician and theorist Chris Cutler offers a related view. He argues that sound recording has deposed the culture of the eye exemplified by the highly literate and score-governed field of European art music, and has “throw[n] the life of music production back onto the ear.” As with the orally transmitted folk music that was eclipsed by the European classical tradition, “the first matter is again Sound. Recording is memory of sound.”s Invented in the mid-1930s, but commercially unavailable until a decade and a half later, the tape recorder revolutionized music. Early experimenters such as Cage and Schaeffer noted that this device opened music to “the entire field of sound,”® rather than merely the restricted body of sounds produced by traditional musical instruments. Indeed, trained as a radio engineer instead of a composer, Schaeffer came to represent the new breed of musician: an amateur explorer working directly (“concretely,” as he put it) with sound material rather than going through the detours of musical notation, conductors, and performers. And just as introduction

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Schaeffer prefigured today’s music producer, who manipulates sound with inexpensive hardware and software on his or her home computer, he also prefigured the age of the remix. For recorded sound obscures the difference between the original and the copy, and is available for endless improvisatory manipulations and transformations. Finally, the tape recorder (and allied technologies such as the phonograph and the radio) made possible a new mode of listening, what Schaeffer termed “acousmatic listening’: listening to sounds in the absence of their original sources and visual contexts, a listening that thus gives access to sound-as-such. A second technological revolution has contributed to the rise to prominence of audio culture within the past decade: the advent of digital media. Compact discs, the Internet, MP3, Napster, the CD burner—all of these digital technologies have led to the creation of a vast virtual archive of sound and music available on a massive scale. The pristine clarity of digital sound fosters an attention to sonic matter and detail; and its replicability and microscopic malleability allows even a novice to become a sound artist or remixer. Finally, cyberspace enables the formation and flourishing of new audio communities, networks, and resources. Exploiting these technologies and networks, the emergent audio culture has achieved a new kind of sonic literacy, history, and memory. If the traditional conception of history as a continuous, linear unfolding can be thought of as analog, this new sonic sensibility might be called a digital one. It flattens the distinction between “high art” and “mass culture,” and treats music history as a repository from which to draw random-access sonic alliances and affinities that ignore established genre categories. For example, on the track “Djed,” by the post-rock quintet Tortoise, a sample from Edgard Varese’s /onisation is conjoined with Jamaican dub, motoric Krautrock, and minimalist mallet music reminiscent of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Sonic Youth links punk rock to the work of experimental music founders Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, and Takehisa Kosugi. Derek Bailey puts free improvisation into conversation with drum ‘n’ bass. DJ Spooky performs with composer lannis Xenakis and free jazz giants William Parker and Matthew Shipp. Techno producers sample, emulate, and remix the music of minimalist masters. Musique concréte pioneer Luc Ferrari collaborates with free improviser Noél Akchoté, electronica producer Scanner, and turntablists DJ Olive and Erik M . . . 7 The combinations are myriad and the cross-fertilizations ongoing. Indeed, across the field of modern music, one discovers a host of shared practices and theoretical concerns. For example, John Cage’s critique of the composer’s authority is also explicitly an issue in House and Techno, where producers take on a protean array of aliases and make their mark by mixing and remixing the music of others. The boundary between "music” and “noise” is challenged as much by Pauline Oliveros' environmental sound compositions as by Japanese noise composer Masami Akita's aural sado-masochism. Issues around technology and aesthetic originality pervade the contemporary musical spectrum, from the early collages ot James Tenney to the work of composer/improviser John Oswald, rock renegades Negativland, and HipHop turntablists DJ Q-Bert and the X-Ecutioners. Audio Culture attempts to map the musical terrain of this new sonic landscape. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, the book traces the genealogies of contemporary musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical forms and earlier moments of xiv

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audio experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. As such, the book poses, and seeks to answer, questions such as: What new modes of production, circulation, reception, and discourse are mobilized by vanguard musical production today? How do musical practices within the new audio culture complicate the definition of “music” and its distinction from “silence,” “noise,” and “sound”? In what ways do they challenge traditional conceptions of authorship, textuality, and ownership? How are musical strategies such as indeterminacy, minimalism, free improvisation, turntablism, and electronic experimentation employed by artists from different backgrounds? The texts included here are drawn from a heterogeneous array of sources. Statements by composers, improvisers, and producers are printed alongside essays by theorists and critics who provide lines of connection and historical contexts. Excerpts from books sit beside magazine articles, liner notes, and interviews that first appeared on the World Wide Web. This heterogeneity reflects the fact that the new audio culture is a discourse, a loose collection of terms, concepts, and statements gathered from across the cultural field. This discourse not only challenges aesthetic distinctions between “high art” and “popular culture.” In the age of the Internet, it also flattens traditional hierarchies between “high” and “low” venues for publishing. Most of the texts were written within the past half-century, though the book also includes several older texts that have been reanimated by the new audio culture. The group of texts in Part One expiores some key ontological and epistemological issues that have shaped music and sound over the past few decades. These texts investigate the shifting definition of “music” and examine the various modes of listening necessitated by the contemporary soundscape. Several texts discuss changes in the production and reception of sound that have resulted from newer technologies such as the Walkman, the sampler, and the laptop computer, and from reappropriations of older technologies such as magnetic tape and the phonograph. The incursion of music into everyday life and the spaces of everyday living raises political issues concerning the ways in which sound constructs us as human subjects and locates us in particular social and cultural contexts; hence, several texts in Part One suggest strategies for navigating the current sonic landscape. . Part Two more closely examines a spectrum of musical practices that are currently providing resources for musicians from different generations and backgrounds. Practices such as open-form composition, free improvisation, and experimentalism are taken here not as fixed historical entities but as ongoing musical strategies that are continually being adopted and reshaped for new contexts. Hence, each section attempts to give a sense of the particular practice as a general strategy, to trace some of its genealogical strands, and to examine some of its current inhabitations. Throughout the book, we have tried to foreground the ways in which these theoretical concerns and practices, though to some degree distinct, significantly overlap or flow into one another. All the issues in Part One are interlinked: musical ontology is shaped by musical technologies and by modes of listening and aural attention. The practices explored in Part Two similarly overlap. At its limit, openintroduction

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form composition becomes experimental music; Reich's early tape works and Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire propel experimental music into the minimalist domain; and minimalist methodologies drive a great deal of contemporary electronica. Turntablists such as Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, and Marina Rosenfeld, merge DJ Culture with free improvisation, which is also currently practiced by electronica producers such as Spring Heel Jack, Marcus Schmickler, and Christian Fennesz. And, indeed, all contemporary music is, in some sense, electronic music; hence, texts on electronic music are not only confined to the final section but are spread out over the entire book. Moreover, most of the authors and musicians presented in the book are linked to one another via myriad networks of influence or collaboration. Several of these—John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and Brian Eno, for example—form key nodal points to which most of the developments in contemporary music can be linked. Hence, their names are ubiquitous and constantly cross-referenced here. It will have been noticed that what we are calling “contemporary music” or “modern music” has a peculiar character. Though it cuts across classical music, jazz, rock, reggae, and dance music, it is resolutely avant-gardist in character and all but ignores the more mainstream inhabitations of these genres. In our view, it is the vanguard fringe within each of these generic categories that is fully and richly challenging prevailing assumptions about the nature of music and sound, and challenging these genre categories themselves. These vanguard practices destabilize the obvious, and push our aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities to their limits. They force us to confront the unheard core of all music: the sonic and auditory as such; and, hence, they provide the musical currency of the new audio culture.

NOTES 1. Prominent examples include: Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of America: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, lllusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19"Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and David Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). 2. A recent sampling includes: Treble, SculptureCenter, New York City, May—July 2004; Sounding Spaces: Nine Sound Installations, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, July— September 2003; Sonic Process: A New Geography of Sounds, Centre Pompidou, October, 2002-January 2003; S.0.S.: Scenes of Sounds, Tang Museum of Art, October 2000January 2001; Volume: Bed of Sound, P.S. 1, New York City, July-September 2000; and Sonic Boom, Hayward Gallery, London, April-June 2000. 3. Richard Cullen Rath, interviewed by Emily Eakin in “History You Can See, Hear, Smell, Touch, and Taste,” New York Times (December 20, 2003). 4. This view is presented most fully in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21* Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), particularly the chapter “Visual and Acoustic Space” (chap. 12, xvi

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below). See also Walter J. Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The Varieties of Sensory Experience. 5. See Chris Cutler, “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms,” File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (New York: Autonomedia, 1993), 33. For a related account, see Mark Poster, “Authors Analogue and Digital,” What's the Matter with the Internet? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 6. John Cage, “Future of Music: Credo,” chap. 6 below. 7. Tortoise, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Thrill Jockey THRILL 025; Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20 Century, SYR 4; Derek Bailey, Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass, Avant AVAN 060; lannis Xenakis, Kraanerg, Paul D. Miller and the ST-X Ensemble, Charles Zacharie Bornstein, Asphodel

ASP

0975;

Various

Artists,

Reich

Remixed,

Nonesuch

79552-2;

The

Orb,

“Little

Fluffy Clouds,” The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, Big Life BLR 98; Noél Akchoté/ Roland Auzet/Luc Ferrari, Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Blue Chopsticks BC 12 CD; and perform-

ances with DJ Olive, Scanner, and Erik M in 2003.

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Part One THEORIES

The concept of noise was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the jerrybuilt and already shabby proletarian living quarters and workplaces of Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, there was a constant din of construction and pounding, of the shrieking of metal sheets being cut and the endless thump of press machinery, of ear-splitting blasts from huge steam whistles, sirens, and electric bells that beckoned and dismissed shifts of firstgeneration urbanized laborers from their unending and repetitive days. The normal sounds of rural life—the bleating of domesticated animals, the chirping of birds and insects, the ping of hand-held tools shaping wood and stone—whether pleasant or not, were all recognizable. Here, however, the cacophony of sounds in the nineteenth-century street, factory shop, and mine— seemingly random and meaningless—could not be easily isolated or identified. They became novel and potentially dangerous intrusions on the overworked human mind. —Mel Gordon' The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can fiow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. —Aldous Huxley? Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. | do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but | understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation. —Lester Bangs?® [P]ost-Renaissance music differs from nearly all other musics, which love to use noise— sounds, that is, of no precise pitch or definite harmonic structure—as well as those pitches which lie between our twelve divisions of the octave, and which our music considers to be “out of tune” [. . .] Post-Renaissance musicians could not tolerate these acoustically illogical and unclear sounds, sounds which were not susceptible to total control. —Christopher Small* Edgard Varése described himself as an “organizer of sound.” That concept is probably more valid today than in any previous era. —John Zorn®

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber [. . .] a room without echoes. | entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When | described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until | die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. —John Cage® Noise may have lost its power to offend. Silence hasn't. —Dan Warburton’ The fear of silence is nothing new. Silence the silence of the vast universe hovers over of birth, the quiet silence of one’s return to rebellion against silence? Poetry and music ing the silence.

surrounds the dark world us, enveloping us. There the earth. Hasn't art been were born when man first

of death. Sometimes is the intense silence the human creature’s uttered sound, resist—Toru

Takemitsu®

A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined frequency and differing intensity. Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, and aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague. In its biological reality, noise is a source of pain [. . . .] Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, sound in the environment. A weapon of death. It became that with the advent of industrial technology. But just as death is nothing more than an excess of life, noise has always been perceived as a source of exaltation, a kind of therapeutic drug capable of curing tarantula bites or, according to Boissier de Sauvages (in his Nosologica methodica), “fourteen forms of melancholy.” —Jacques Attali® There is no difference between noise and music in my work. | have no idea what you term “music” and “noise.” It's different depending on each person. If noise means uncomfortable sound, then pop music is noise to me. —Masami Akita (a k.a. Merzbow)'®

I: Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence introduction What is music? A century ago, the question was fairly easy to answer. But, over the course of the twentieth century, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish music from its others: noise, silence, and non-musical sound. The reasons for this are many. Already at the turn of the nineteenth century, the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky challenged tonality on a number of fronts. Not long after, Cowell, Varése, and Cage began to explore nonpitched sounds. Ethnomusicological research into the nature of music outside of Europe began to suggest a need to expand the concept of music beyond the narrow and specialized domain it demarcated in the West. The tape recorder played a crucial role in blurring the lines of distinction between music and its others. Tape composition allowed the composer to bypass musical notation, instruments, and performers in one step. Further, it gave composers access to what John Cage called “the entire field of sound,” making conventional distinctions between “musical” and “non-musical” sounds increasingly irrelevant.' In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer broadcast over French radio a “Concert of Noises,” a set of pieces composed entirely from recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, canal boats, percussion instruments, and the occasional piano. Schaeffer called his new music “musique concréte,” in contrast with traditional “musique abstraite,” which passed through the detours of notation, instrumentation, and performance. Trained as a radio-engineer rather than a musician, Schaeffer's method of composition bore a closer resemblance to cinematic montage than it did to traditional musical composition. The major European avantgarde composers (Stockhausen, Boulez, etc.) flocked to his Paris studio; but, ultimately, the impact of Schaeffer's work was felt most strongly outside classical music, for example, in the early tape experiments of Les Paul, the studio manipulations of Beatles producer George Martin, the concréte pranks of Frank Zappa, the live tape-loop systems of Terry Riley and the sampling and turntablism of HipHop

DJs from Grandmaster Flash to Q-Bert.

In his 1913 manifesto, Russolo wrote that the traditional orchestra was no longer capable of capturing the imagination of a culture immersed in noise, and that the age of noise demanded new musical instruments he called *noise instruments” (intonarumori). Composer Edgard Varese dismissed the conventional distinction between “music” and “noise,” preferring to define music as *“organized sound.” In his writings of the 1930s, he described his own music as the “collision of sound-masses,” blocks of sound “moving at different speeds and at different angles.” Varése's use of sirens in the groundbreaking percussion piece lonisation (1929-31) gestured back to Russolo and forward to the development of electronic instruments that could provide the “parabolic and hyperbolic trajectories of sound” introduction

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of which he dreamt. Two decades later, in the early 1950s, the European avantgarde became captivated by the extraordinary powers of these electronic instruments, which extended the domain of music far beyond that of traditional instrumental sonorities. In the decades that followed, commercial synthesizers tamed these unruly powers and made tidy electronic instruments available to the general public. By the 1970s, such instruments had become the norm in rock and dance music. Aiming to revive and celebrate the powers of noise, British and European “industrial” bands merged punk rock attitudes, performance art sensibilities, and a Russolian fascination with mechanical noise to forge a retro-futurist music made with found objects: chains, tire irons, oil drums, and other industrial debris. “Industrial music” and the “noise bands” that followed highlighted certain cultural and political features of noise: noise as disturbance, distraction, and threat. Noise has also functioned as a vehicle for ecstasy and transcendence, shaping the musical aesthetic of drone-based minimalists La Monte Young and Tony Conrad as well as the free jazz players from Albert Ayler and John Coltrane through David S. Ware and Sabir Mateen. And punk, HipHop, and Heavy Metal have revalued the notion of noise, transforming it into a marker of power, resistance, and pleasure. The rise of interest in “noise” in contemporary music has gone hand in hand with a new interest in its conceptual opposite: silence. With his Zen embrace of contradiction, John Cage attempted to erase the distinction between silence and music, while simultaneously noting that perfect silence is never more than a conceptual ideal, an aural vanishing point. In the face of rising noise levels in urban and rural environments, composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer called for “the recovery of positive silence” and a subtle attention to the endangered non-musical sounds of our environment. Microphones and headphones brought the vanishing point of silence within aural reach, forever transforming the relationship of silence to sound, giving them equal ontological status. What is music? According to Jacques Attali, it is the constant effort to codify and stratify noise and silence, which, for their part, always threaten it from without. From Russolo through DJ Culture, experimental musical practices have inhabited that borderland where noise and silence become music and vice versa.

NOTES 1. John Cage, “Future of Music: Credo,” chap. 6, below.

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Noise and Politics JACQUES

ATTALI

During the 1980s, economic theorist Jacques Attali (1943— ) was Special Counselor to French President Francgois Mitterand. He subsequently headed the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and is currently contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine. With the publication of Noise in 1977, Attali quickly became one of Europe’s leading philosophers of music. For Attali, music, like economics and politics, is fundamentally a matter of organizing dissonance and subversion—in a word, “noise.” Yet Attali argues that, an all-but-immaterial force, music moves faster than economics and politics and, hence, prefigures new social relations.

[. . ] Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political. More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream—Music. It is at the heart of the progressive rationalization of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for residual irrationality; it is a means of power and a form of entertainment. Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms. Therefore, any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard jacques attali

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within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it.' And since noise is the source of power, power has always listened to it with fascination. In an extraordinary and little known text, Leibniz describes in minute detail the ideal political organization, the “Palace of Marvels,” a harmonious machine within which all of the sciences of time and every tool of power are deployed. These buildings will be constructed in such a way that the master of the house will be able to hear and see everything that is said and done without himself being perceived, by means of mirrors and pipes, which will be a most important thing for the State, and a kind of political confessional.? Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus. The symbolism of the Frozen Words,? of the Tables of the Law, of recorded noise and eavesdropping—these are the dreams of political scientists and the fantasies of men in power: to listen, to memorize—this is the ability to interpret and control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to channel its violence and hopes. Who among us is free of the feeling that this process, taken to an extreme, is turning the modern State into a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device. Eavesdropping on what? In order to silence whom? The answer, clear and implacable, is given by the theorists of totalitarianism. They have all explained, indistinctly, that it is necessary to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality: a concern for maintaining tonalism, the primacy of melody, a distrust of new languages, codes, or instruments, a refusal of the abnormal—these characteristics are common to all regimes of that nature |[.. . ] The economic and political dynamics of the industrialized societies living under parliamentary democracy also lead power to invest art, and to invest in ant, without necessarily theorizing its control, as is done under dictatorship. Everywhere we look, the monopolization of the broadcast of messages, the control of noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of others assure the durability of power. Here, this channelization takes on a new, less violent, and more subtle form: laws of the political economy take the place of censorship laws. Music and the musician essentially become either objects of consumption like everything else, recuperators of subversion, or meaningless noise. Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance. Muzak, the American corporation that sells standardized music, presents itself as the “security system of the 1970s” because it permits use of musical distribution channels for the circulation of orders. The monologue of standardized, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in which in reality no one has the right to speak any more. Except those among the exploited who can still use their music to shout their suffering, their dreams of the absolute and freedom. What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glori8

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fication of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector. Still, it is an activity that is essential for knowledge and social relations.

NOTES 1. “Whether we inquire into the origin of the arts or observe the first criers, we find that everything in its principle is related to the means of subsistence.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'inégalite. 2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Dréle de pensée touchant une nouvelle sorte de représentation,” ed. Yves Belaval, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise 70 (1958): 754—68. Quoted in Michel Serres, “Don Juan ou le Palais des Merveilles,” Les Eludes Philosophiques 3 (1966): 389. 3. [A reference to Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, b. 4, chap. 54.—trans.]

jacques attali

9

The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto LUIGI

RUSSOLO

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) was a prominent painter in the Italian Futurist movement. Yet he is best known for The Art of Noises, among the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics. Written in 1913 as a letter to his friend, the Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, this manifesto sketches Russolo’s radical alternative to the classical musical tradition. Drawing inspiration from the urban and industrial soundscape, Russolo argues that traditional orchestral instruments and composition are no longer capable of capturing the spirit of modern life, with its energy, speed, and noise. A year after composing this letter, Russolo introduced his intonarumori (*noise instruments”) in a series of concerts held in London. None of Russolo’s music remains; and the intonarumori were destroyed in a fire during World War Il. Yet, since the War, Russolo’s manifesto has become increasingly important, inspiring a host of musicians and composers, among them musique concrete pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, 1980s dance-pop outfit The Art of Noise, “industrial” bands such as Einstirzende Neubauten and Test Dept., turntablist DJ Spooky, and sound artist Francisco Lopez.

..] Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of men. Through many centuries life unfolded silently, or at least quietly. The loudest of noises that interrupted this silence was neither intense, nor prolonged, nor varied. After all, if we overlook the exceptional movements of the earth’s crust, hurricanes, storms, avalanches, and waterfalls, nature is silent. In this scarcity of noises, the first sounds that men were able to draw from a pierced reed or a taut string were stupefying, something new and wonderful. Among primitive peoples, sound was attributed to the gods. It was considered 10

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sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich their rites with mystery. Thus was born the idea of sound as something in itself, as different from and independent of life. And from it resulted music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolable and sacred world. The Greeks greatly restricted the field of music. Their musical theory, mathematically systematized by Pythagoras, admitted only a few consonant intervals. Thus, they knew nothing of harmony, which was impossible. The Middle Ages, with the developments and modifications of the Greek tetrachord system, with Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the musical art. But they continued to regard sound in its unfolding in time, a narrow concept that lasted several centuries, and which we find again in the very complicated polyphony of the Flemish contrapuntalists. The chord did not exist. The development of the various parts was not subordinated to the chord that these parts produced in their totality. The conception of these parts, finally, was horizontal not vertical. The desire, the search, and the taste for the simultaneous union of different sounds, that is, for the chord (the complete sound) was manifested gradually, moving from the consonant triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize contemporary music. From the beginning, musical art sought out and obtained purity and sweetness of sound. Afterwards, it brought together different sounds, still preoccupying itself with caressing the ear with suave harmonies. As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound. This evolution of music is comparable (o the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with man. Not only in the noisy atmosphere of the great cities, but even in the country, which until yesterday was normally silent. Today, the machine has created such a variety and contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion. In order to excite and stir our sensibility, music has been developing toward the most complicated polyphony and toward the greatest variety of instrumental timbres and colors. It has searched out the most complex successions of dissonant chords, which have prepared in a vague way for the creation of MUSICAL NOISE. The ear of the Eighteenth Century man would not have been able to withstand the inharmonious intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestra (with three times as many performers as that of the orchestra of his time). But our ear takes pleasure in it, since it is already educated to modern life, so prodigal in different noises. Nevertheless, our ear is not satisfied and calls for ever greater acoustical emotions. Musical sound is too limited in its variety of timbres. The most complicated orchestras can be reduced to four or five classes of instruments different in timbres of sound: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds, and percussion. Thus, modern music flounders within this tiny circle, vainly striving to create new varieties of timbre. We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators. We futurists have all deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. Beethoven and Wagner have stirred luigi russolo

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our nerves and hearts for many years. Now we have had enough of them, and we delight much more in combining in our thoughts the noises of trams, of automobile engines, of carriages and brawling crowds, than in hearing again the “Eroica” or the "Pastorale.” We cannot see the enormous apparatus of forces that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound disillusionment before its paltry acoustical results. Do you know of a more ridiculous sight than that of twenty men striving to redouble the mewling of a violin? Naturally, that statement will make the musicomaniacs scream—and perhaps revive the sleepy atmosphere of the concert halls. Let us go together, like futurists, into one of these hospitals for anemic sounds. There—the first beat brings to your ear the weariness of something heard before, and makes you anticipate the boredom of the beat that follows. So let us drink in, from beat to beat, these few qualities of obvious tedium, always waiting for that extraordinary sensation that never comes. Meanwhile, there is in progress a repugnant medley of monotonous impressions and of the cretinous religious emotion of the Buddha-like listeners, drunk with repeating for the thousandth time their more or less acquired and snobbish ecstasy. Away! Let us leave, since we cannot for long restrain ourselves from the desire to create finally a new musical reality by generously handing out some resounding slaps and stamping with both feet on violins, pianos, contrabasses, and organs. Let us go! It cannot be objected that noise is only loud and disagreeable to the ear. It seems to me useless to enumerate all the subtle and delicate noises that produce pleasing sensations. To be convinced of the surprising variety of noises, one need only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook the rustling of leaves, the trotting of a horse into the distance, the rattling jolt of a cart on the road, and of the full, solemn, and white breath of a city at night. Think of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that a man can make, without either speaking or singing. Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags. We will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing presses, electrical plants, and subways |. .. ) We want to give pitches to these diverse noises. regulating them harmonically and rhythmically. Giving pitch to noises does not mean depriving them of all irregular movements and vibrations of time and intensity but rather assigning a degree or pitch to the strongest and most prominent of these vibrations. Noise differs from sound, in fact, only to the extent that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular. Every noise has a pitch, some even a chord, which predominates among the whole of its irregular vibrations. Now, from this predominant characteristic pitch derives the practical possibility of assigning pitches to the noise as a whole. That is, there may be imparted to a given noise not only a single pitch but even a variety of pitches without sacrificing its character, by which | mean the timbre that distinguishes it. Thus, some noises obtained through a rotary motion can 12

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offer an entire chromatic scale ascending or descending, if the speed of the motion is increased or decreased. Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is thus familiar to our ear and has the power of immediately recalling life itself. Sound, estranged from life, always musical, something in itself, an occasional not a necessary element, has become for our ear what for the eye is a too familiar sight. Noise instead, arriving confused and irregular from the irregular confusion of life, is never revealed to us entirely and always holds innumerable surprises. We are certain, then, that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling all the noises, we will enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected pleasure of the senses. Although the characteristic of noise is that of reminding us brutally of life, the Art of Noises should not limit itself to an imitative reproduction. It will achieve its greatest emotional power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to draw from the combining of noises. Here are the 6 families of noises of the futurist orchestra that we will soon realize mechanically:

OO s WN

=

. . . . . .

Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms Whistling, Hissing, Puffing Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Humming, Crackling, Rubbing Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

In this list we have included the most characteristic of the fundamental noises. The others are only associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic motions of a noise are infinite. There always exists, as with a pitch, a predominant rhythm, but around this there can be heard numerous other, secondary rhythms. Conclusions 1. Futurist composers should continue to enlarge and enrich the field of sound. This responds to a need of our sensibility. In fact, we notice in the talented composers of today a tendency toward the most complicated dissonances. Moving ever farther from pure sound, they have almost attained the noise-sound. This need and this tendency can be satisfied only with the addition and the substitution of noises for sounds. 2. Futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms. 3. The sensibility of musicians, being freed from traditional and facile rhythms, must find in noise the means of expanding and renewing itself, given that every noise offers a union of the most diverse rhythms, in addition to that which predominates. 4. Every noise having in its irregular vibrations a predominant general pitch, a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quartertones is easily luigi russolo

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attained in the construction of the instruments that imitate it. This variety of pitches will not deprive a single noise of the characteristics of its timbre but will only increase its tessitura or extension. 5. The practical difficulties involved in the construction of these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle that produces a noise has been found, its pitch can be changed through the application of the same general laws of acoustics. It can be achieved, for example, through the decreasing or increasing of speed, if the instrument has a rotary motion. If the instrument does not have a rotary motion, it can be achieved through differences of size or tension in the sounding parts. 6. It will not be through a succession of noises imitative of life but through a fantastic association of the different timbres and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and novel emotions of sound. Thus, every instrument will have to offer the possibility of changing pitches and will need a more or less extended range. 7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, having perhaps a thousand difterent machines, we are able to distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, with the multiplication of new machines, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not simply by imitation but by combining according to our fancy. 8. Therefore, we invite talented and audacious young musicians to observe all noises attentively, to understand the different rhythms that compose them, their principal pitch, and those which are secondary. Then, comparing the various timbres of noises to the timbres of sounds, they will be convinced that the first are much more numerous than the second. This will give them not only the understanding of but also the passion and the taste for noises. Our multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears. Thus, the motors and machines of our industrial cities can one day be given pitches, so that every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noises [. . . ]

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Sound, Noise, Varese, Boulez MORTON

FELDMAN

Composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) began his career in the 1950s as a member of the “New York School” of artists and composers. Indeed, Feldman’s music emulated the canvases of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, who were among his close friends. Against the great modern systematizers, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Feldman championed an intuitive musical abstraction that he felt was exemplified by the music of Edgard Varése. During his own lifetime, Feldman worked in the shadow of his mentor, John Cage. But, over the past decade, Feldman’s work has become increasingly influential within and beyond the boundaries of contemporary classical music. Here, Feldman offers an eloquent description of the power and fascination of noise.

[....]lf one hears what one composes—by that | mean not just paper music—how can one not be seduced by the sensuality of the musical sound? It is unfortunate that when this sensuality is pursued we find that the world of music is not round, and that there do exist demonic vastnesses when this world leaves off. Noise is something else. It does not travel on these distant seas of experience. It bores like granite into granite. It is physical, very exciting, and when organized it can have the impact and grandeur of Beethoven. The struggle is between this sensuousness which is elegance and the newer, easier to arrive at, excitement. You have no idea how academic music is, even the most sublime. What is calculated is for me academic. Chance is the most academic procedure yet arrived at, for it defines itself as a technique immediately. And, believe me, the throw of the dice may be exciting to the player, but never to the croupier. Is noise actually so easy to arrive at? Noise is a word of which the aural image is all too evasive. On the one hand sound is comprehensible in that it evokes a sentiment, though the sentiment itself may be incomprehensible and far-reaching. But it is noise that we really understand. It is only noise which we secretly want, because the greatest truth usually lies behind the greatest resistance. morton

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Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music’s dreams of us. And those moments when one loses control, and sound like crystals forms its own planes, and with a thrust, there is no sound, no tone, no sentiment, nothing left but the significance of our first breath—such is the music of Varése. He alone has given us this elegance, this physical reality, this impression that the music is writing about mankind rather than being composed.

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The Liberation of Sound EDGARD

VARESE

Born in France, Edgard Varése (1883—-1965) emigrated to the United States in 1915. Like Russolo, he called for a new concept of music and new musicai instruments. Yet, where Russolo was inspired by the concrete noises of everyday life, Varése’s new musical vision was sparked by metaphors drawn from chemistry, astronomy, cartography, and geology. Describing himself as “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities,” Varése redefined music as “organized sound,” side-stepping the conventional distinction between “music” and “noise.” Varése’s music focuses on the matter of sound—on timbre, texture, and musical space, elements that would become increasingly important in later electronic and Ambient music. Indeed, in the 1950s, Varese composed two early masterpieces of electronic music: Déserts (1950-54), realized in Pierre Schaeffer’s Paris studio, and Poéme Electronique (1957-58), part of a “spectacle of sound and light” installed in the Phillips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier for the World's Fair in Brussels. Varese’s description of music as “the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes” and “beams of sound” aptly describes not only his own music but a good deal of modern experimental music as well, from Musica Elettronica Viva’s live electronic music to Merzbow’s noise composition and contemporary Powerbook music. The following text is excerpted from a series of lectures given by Varese from 1936 to 1962 and compiled by his student Chou Wen-Chung.

New Instruments and New Music (1936) [....]When new instruments will allow me to write music as | conceive it, the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-masses collide, the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different angles. There will no longer be the old concepedgard varese

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tion of melody or interplay of melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will flow as a river flows. We have actually three dimensions in music: horizontal, vertical, and dynamic swelling or decreasing. | shall add a fourth, sound projection—that feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being reflected back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful searchlight—for the ear as for the eye, that sense of projection, of a journey into space. Today with the technical means that exist and are easily adaptable, the differentiation of the various masses and different planes as well as these beams of sound, could be made discernible to the listener by means of certain acoustical arrangements. Moreover, such an acoustical arrangement would permit the delimitation of what | call “zones of intensities.” These zones would be differentiated by various timbres or colors and different loudnesses. Through such a physical process these zones would appear of different colors and of different magnitude, in different perspectives for our perception. The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it would become an agent of delineation, like the different colors on a map separating different areas, and an integral part of form. These zones would be felt as isolated, and the hitherto unobtainable non-blending (or at least the sensation of non-blending) would become possible. In the moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities, or are dilated in certain rarefactions. Moreover, the new musical apparatus | envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings—that is, their oxygenation. Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created by the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. The never-before-thought-of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound! | am sure that the time will come when the composer, after he has graphically realized his score, will see this score automatically put on a machine that will faithfully transmit the musical content to the listener. As frequencies and new rhythms will have to be indicated on the score, our actual notation will be inadequate. The new notation will probably be seismographic. And here it is curious to note that at the beginning of two eras, the Mediaeval primitive and our own primitive era (for we are at a new primitive stage in music today), we are faced with an identical problem: the problem of finding graphic symbols for the transposition of the composer’s thought into sound. At a distance of more than a thousand years we have this analogy: our still primitive electrical instruments find it necessary to abandon staff notation and to use a kind of seismographic writing much like the early ideographic writing originally used for the voice before the development of staff notation. Formerly the curves of the musical line indicated the melodic fluctuations of the voice; today the machine-instrument requires precise design indications |. . . ]

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Music as an Art-Science (1939) Personally, for my conceptions, | need an entirely new medium of expression: a sound-producing machine (not a sound-reproducing one). Today it is possible to build such a machine with only a certain amount of added research. If you are curious to know what such a machine could do that the orchestra with its man-powered instruments cannot do, | shall try briefly to tell you: whatever | write, whatever my message, it will reach the listener unadulterated by “interpretation.” It will work something like this: after a composer has set down his score on paper by means of a new graphic notation, he will then, with the collaboration of a sound engineer, transfer the score directly to this electric machine. After that, anyone will be able to press a button to release the music exactly as the composer wrote it—exactly like opening a book. And here are the advantages | anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space by means of the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall, as may be required by the score; cross-rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or, to use the old word, “contrapuntally,” since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction cf them—all these in a given unit of measure or time that is humanly impossible to attain {. . . ] Rhythm, Form, and Content (1959) My fight for the liberation of sound and for my right to make music with any sound and all sounds has sometimes been construed as a desire to disparage and even to discard the great music of the past. But that is where my roots are. No matter how original, how different a composer may seem, he has only grafted a little bit of himself on the old plant. But this he should be allowed to do without being accused of wanting to kill the plant. He only wants to produce a new flower. It does not matter if at first it seems to some people more like a cactus than arose [... ] Because for so many years | crusaded for new instruments’ with what may have seemed fanatical zeal, | have been accused of desiring nothing less than the destruction of all musical instruments and even of all performers. This is, to say the least, an exaggeration. Our new liberating medium—the electronic—is not meant to replace the old musical instruments, which composers, including myself, will continue to use. Electronics is an additive, not a destructive, factor in the art and science of music. It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony [. . . .] The Electronic Medium (1962) First of all, | should like you to consider what | believe is the best definition of music, because it is all-inclusive: “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in

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sound,” as proposed by Hoéne Wronsky.? If you think about it you will realize that, unlike most dictionary definitions, which make use of such subjective terms as beauty, feelings, etc., it covers all music, Eastern or Western, past or present, including the music of our new electronic medium. Although this new music is being gradually accepted, there are still people who, while admitting that it is “interesting,” say: “butis it music?” It is a question | am only too familiar with. Until quite recently | used to hear it so often in regard to my own works that, as far back as the twenties, | decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.” Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all, what is music but organized noises? And a composer, like all artists, is an organizer of disparate elements. Subjectively, noise is any sound one doesn't like. Our new medium has brought to composers almost endless possibilities of expression, and opened up for them the whole mysterious world of sound. For instance, | have always felt the need of a kind of continuous flowing curve that instruments could not give me. That is why | used sirens in several of my works. Today such effects are easily obtainable by electronic means. In this connection, it is curious to note that it is this lack of flow that seems to disturb Eastern musicians in our Western music. To their ears, it does not glide, sounds jerky, composed of edges of intervals and holes and, as an Indian pupil of mine expressed it, “jumping like a bird from branch to branch.” To them, apparently, our Western music seems to sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backward. But playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, | found that | had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all. The electronic medium is also adding an unbelievable variety of new timbres to our musical store, but most important of all, it has freed music from the tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace with the other arts and with science. Composers are now able, as never before, to satisfy the dictates of that inner ear of the imagination. They are also lucky so far in not being hampered by esthetic codification—at least not yet! But | am afraid it will not be long before some musical mortician begins embalming electronic music in rules. We should also remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to compose for us. Good music and bad music will be composed by electronic means, just as good and bad music have been composed for instruments. The computing machine is a marvelous invention and seems almost superhuman. But in reality it is as limited as the mind of the individual who feeds it material. Like the computer, the machines we use for making music can only give back what we put into them. But, considering the fact that our electronic devices were never meant for making music, but for the sole purpose of measuring and analyzing sound, it is remarkable that what has already been achieved is musically valid. These devices are still somewhat unwieldy and time-consuming, and not entirely satisfactory as an art-medium. But this new art is still in its infancy, and | hope and firmly believe, now that composers and physicists are at last working together and music is again linked with science as it was in the Middle Ages, that new and more musically efficient devices will be invented. 20

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NOTES 1. As early as 1916, Varése was quoted in the New York Morning Telegraph as saying: “Our musical alphabet must be enriched. We also need new instruments very badly. . . . In my own works | have always felt the need of new mediums of expression . . . which can lend themselves to every expression of thought and can keep up with thought.” And in the Christian Science Monitor, in 1922: “The composer and the electrician will have to labor together to getit.” 2. Hoéne Wronsky (1778-1853), also known as Joseph Marie Wronsky, was a Polish philosopher and mathematician, known for his system of Messianism. Camille Durutte (1803-1881), in his Technie Harmonique (1876), a treatise on “musical mathematics,” quoted extensively from the writings of Wronsky.

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The Joys of Noise HENRY

COWELL

John Cage called Henry Cowell (1897-1965) “the open sesame for new music in America.” Through his New Musical Edition, Cowell championed experimental music, publishing Varése’s lonisation and other scores. Cowell's own theoretical text, New Musical Resources, laid out his compositional innovations, most significantly extended piano techniques such as the use of “tone clusters” and the practice of striking or plucking the piano strings. This impulse to treat conventional instruments in unconventional ways directly influenced Cage’s “prepared piano” and, more generally, the unorthodox performance practices of free jazz, avant-rock, and turntablism. Cowell was probably the earliest 20th century composer to study African and Asian musics (a path later followed by Lou Harrison and Steve Reich, among others); and his own musical practice draws on those resources, extending the boundaries of compositional practice in the areas of rhythm and timbre. Russolo offered a largely historical argument in favor of noise, embodying the Futurist idea that speed, power, and noise will progressively overtake music and art traditionally conceived. Cowell's argument in the following piece, first published in 1929, is more conceptual. It presents a deconstruction of the binary opposition between music and noise, arguing that the latter is always already contained in the former.

Music and noise, according to a time-honored axiom, are opposites. If a reviewer writes “It is not music, but noise,” he feels that all necessary comment has been made. Within recent times it has been discovered that the geometrical axioms of Euclid could not be taken for granted, and the explorations outside them have given us non-Euclidian geometry and Einstein’s physically demonstrable theories. Might not a closer scrutiny of musical axioms break down some of the hardand-fast notions still current in musical theory, and build up a non-Bachian counter-

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point, a non-Beethovenian harmony, or even a non-Debussian atmosphere, and a non-Schoenbergian atonality? [. . . ) In almost any reliable book on harmony, you will find the axiom that the primary elements of music are melody, harmony and rhythm. If noise were admitted at all, and | doubt if it ever has been, it would unquestionably be classified as part of rhythm. This, however, is a faulty idea of rhythm. Rhythm is a conception, not a physical reality. It is true that, to be realized in music, rhythm must be marked by some sort of sound, but this sound is not itself the rhythm. Rhythmical considerations are the duration of sounds, the amount of stress applied to sounds, the rate of speed as indicated by the movement of sounds, periodicity of sound patterns, and so on. Sound and rhythm thus are the primary musical elements, sound comprising all that can be heard, and rhythm the formulating impulse behind the sound. Before sound can be divided into melody and harmony, another and more primary division must take place: a division into tone—or sound produced by periodic vibration— and noise—or sound produced by non-periodic vibration. Tone may then be divided into melody and harmony; noise remains a much-used but almost unknown element, little developed from its most primitive usages, perhaps owing toitsill-repute [. .. ) We are less interested [. . ] in primitive and oriental uses of percussion than in our own employment of it, and its power of moving. Noise-making instruments are used with telling effect in our greatest symphonies, and were it not for the punctuation of cymbal and bass drum, the climaxes in our operas would be like jelly-fish. In the search for music based on pure tone, we may turn hopefully to vocal works, only to find that they too are riddled by noises; for it is only while singing a vowel that a singer makes anything like a “pure” tone—the pronunciation of most consonants produces irregular vibrations, hence noise. But most shocking of all is the discovery that there is a noise element in the very tone itself of all our musical instruments. Consider the sound of a violin. Part of the vibrations producing the sound are periodic, as can be shown by a harmonic analyzer. But others are not—they do not constantly re-form the same pattern, and consequently must be considered noise. In varying proportions all other instruments yield similar combinations. A truly pure tone can be made only in an acoustical laboratory, and even there it is doubtful whether, by the time the tone has reached our ear, it has not been corrupted by resorsances picked up on the way. As musical sound grows louder, the noise in it is accentuated and the tone element reduced. Thus a loud sound is literally noisier than a soft one; yet music does not touch our emotional depths if it does not rise to a dynamic climax. Under the best circumstances, the emotions are aroused by musical noise and lulled musical tone. Since the “disease” of noise permeates all music, the only hopeful course is to consider that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good microbe, which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener, instead of producing musical oblivion. Although existing in all music, the noise-element has been to music as sex to humanity, essential to its existence, but impolite to mention, something to be

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cloaked by ignorance and silence. Hence the use of noise in music has been largely unconscious and undiscussed. Perhaps this is why it has not been developed, like the more talked-of elements, such as harmony and melody. The use of noise in most music today is little beyond the primitive; in fact, it is behind most native music, where the banality of the thumps often heard in our concerts would not be tolerated. Men like Varese, in his Hyperprism or Arcana or Bartdk, in his Piano Concerto, where he uses percussion noises canonically, render a service by opening a wide field for investigation—although they arrive at nothing conclusive. If we had scales of percussion-sounds, with each “key” determined by some underlying quality, such as drum-sound, cymbal-sound, and so on, we could produce music through the conscious use of the melodic steps that would then be at the disposal of the composer. Perhaps this is one of the things music is coming to, and a new chemistry of sound will be the result.

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The Future of Music: Credo JOHN

CAGE

No figure has had a more profound influence on contemporary musical thought and practice than John Cage (1912-1992; see also chaps. 27 and 33). A student of Schoenberg and Cowell, Cage pioneered a host of techniques and practices that have become central to contemporary music making. In his early percussion ensembles, he included tin cans and other found objects alongside standard orchestral instruments. His Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) was among the very first compositions to employ turntables; and he was an early proponent of live electronics, composing pieces for radios, phonograph cartridges, computers, and other electronic devices. In 1940, Cage began composing for “prepared piano,” which called for the insertion of screws, bolts, cardboard, weather stripping, and other objects into the piano’s strings to highlight the instrument’s percussive character and to extend its sonorous possibilities. In the early 1950s, he pioneered the use of “chance” or “indeterminate” techniques in composition. Cage’s most famous piece 4'33" (1952) calls for performers and audience members alike to experience four minutes and 33 seconds of “silence,” or non-intentional sound. In the following piece, written in 1937, Cage joins Russolo and Varése in imagining a musical future in which “noise” will be a crucial resource. “Whereas in the past,” Cage writes, “the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.” The future of music—from musique concrete and the classical avant-garde to free jazz, industrial music, HipHop and beyond—would certainly bear out Cage’s prediction.

| BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We johncage

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want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound eftects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide. TO MAKE

MUSIC

If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS

A MUSIC PRODUCED

WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THE AID

Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth- century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences. The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration. WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. Two hundred and eighty circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated fifty times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality. WILL BE EXPLORED. WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS. 26

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THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND. The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The “frame” or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach. NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVETONE SYSTEM Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony assigned to each material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respect to the fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg’'s method is analogous to a society in which the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group. AND PRESENT

METHODS

OF WRITING

PERCUSSION

MUSIC

Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden “non-musical” field of sound insofar as is manually possible. Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has already taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz.

CONCEPT

OF

AND ANY OTHER METHODS A FUNDAMENTAL TONE.

WHICH

ARE

FREE

FROM

THE

THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT WAS IN THE PAST, AT ONE TIME THE FUGUE AND AT ANOTHER THE SONATA, IT WILL BE RELATED TO THESE AS THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER: Before this happens, centers of experimental music must be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, turntables, generators, means for amplifying small john cage