Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Erik Satie /A Day in the Life of a Musician
A Day in the Life of a Musician
Erik Satie
An artist must regulate his life.
Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.)
Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.
My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.
I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.
My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely.
I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.
Erik Satie
An artist must regulate his life.
Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. From 5 to 6.47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.)
Dinner is served at 7.16 and finished at 7.20 pm. From 8.9 to 9.59 pm symphonic readings (out loud). I go to bed regularly at 10.37 pm. Once a week (on Tuesdays) I awake with a start at 3.14 am.
My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuschia. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling myself.
I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my ribs and look steadily behind me.
My expression is very serious; when I laugh it is unintentional, and I always apologise very politely.
I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.
William S. Burroughs/The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin
The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin
William S. Burroughs
At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. AndrÈ Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicitó all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointóhad no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite differentócutting up political speeches is an interesting exerciseóin any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: ìPoetry is for everyone.î And AndrÈ Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: ìPoetry is for everyone.î Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaude is a Rimbaud poem cut up.
Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions ... all harmonic pine for strife.
The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.
Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.
The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist.
Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall.
Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performance of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cutting Rimbaud and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his ìsystematic derangement of the senses.î The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.
The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and military strategy: assume that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he can not predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by accident? We can not produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best. And the best is there for all. ìPoetry is for everyoneî . . .
Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged:
ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL: ìPOETRY IS FOR EVERYONEî DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE PROCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY, VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OF REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD ìSYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENTî OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING.
William S. Burroughs
At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. AndrÈ Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicitó all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointóhad no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite differentócutting up political speeches is an interesting exerciseóin any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: ìPoetry is for everyone.î And AndrÈ Breton called him a cop and expelled him from the movement. Say it again: ìPoetry is for everyone.î Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaude is a Rimbaud poem cut up.
Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions ... all harmonic pine for strife.
The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.
Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.
The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist.
Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall.
Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performance of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cutting Rimbaud and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his ìsystematic derangement of the senses.î The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.
The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and military strategy: assume that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he can not predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by accident? We can not produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best. And the best is there for all. ìPoetry is for everyoneî . . .
Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rearranged:
ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL: ìPOETRY IS FOR EVERYONEî DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE PROCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY, VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OF REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD ìSYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENTî OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING.
Futurism and Musical Notes/Daniele Lombardi
Futurism and Musical Notes
Daniele Lombardi
(Artforum, translated by Meg Shore)
Discussions of Futurist music have been incorrect and misleading because after the period, musicians and critics have known only a concept of the music, which has been modified by subsequent theorizing and interpretation. Everything that does not fit into the theories has been regarded with suspicion, considered not to be music, and "relegated'' to the domain of the visual arts or theater. History needs to be reevaluated in terms of avant-garde movements such as Futurism so that those attempts that have opened the path to later artistic activity may be distinguishable from those which have fallen back on themselves, and have therefore failed to connect with the evolution of artistic thought.
Early in the 20th century the Italian musical world was characterized by the persistence of the late Romantic tradition, The curtain had already come down many times on Parsifal and on "program music'' but the "season" continued (with inferior imitations). During this time one figure stands out as the initiator of a new musical concept (one that can be located at the root of Futurism and other avant-garde movernents) Ferruccio Busoni, who was also one of the greatest pianists of his time. Seeds of all the ideas that were later enthusiastically expressed by the Futurists Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo can be found in Busoni's essay, Entwurf einer neuen Astetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Esthetic of the Art of Sound), 1907, published in Trieste by Schmidl.
Busoni speaks of "renewal" through a re-reading and synthesizing of the past, In contrast to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Let's destroy the museums and libraries,'' Busoni believed in the importance of tradition:
The transitory qualities of a work constitute the "modern'' ' those qualities which are immutable preserve it from becoming "old fashioned.'' In the ''modern'' as in the ''old there is the good and the bad, the authentic and the false. In an absolute sense, the modern does not exist-in art there is only that which is born earlier and that which is born lateri that which flowers for a long time and that which soon withers. There has always been the modern and there has always been the old.
This relationship to history is all that differentiates Busoni's programmatic principles from those of the Futurists, Coinciding with Busoni's concept of renewal but more importantly revealing the relationship between Futurism and anti-traditionalism, Pratella begins his second manifesto with:
All innovators have, logically, been Futurists in relation to their times, Palestrina would have judged Bach mad, as Bach would have judged Beethoven, and as Beethoven would have judged Wagner.
The significance of Busoni's essay lies in his statement that traditional instruments were "tired." His intuitive recognition of new tonal possibilities allowed him to believe " …in abstract sound in technique without obstacles: in the limitlessness of sounds.
Every effort, therefore, must lead toward a fresh source, a new beginning, "Six years later Russolo applied himself to this process of innovation, writing: "We must break this restricted circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds." (This, also in order to come to terms with Beethoven and Wagner but not through Busoni's solution of continuity.)
Microtonal research-which Busoni deals with amply (as do Charles Ives, Alois Hába and the later proponents of electronic sound) is the basis for the application and practice of this new musical concept which Russolo put into effect by constructing intonarumori or "noise-intoners." This decompositive process first explored by early Futurists, then adopted by the Dadaists, to finally become a characteristic of all the historical avant-gardes, is what really lies on the threshold between the 19th and 20th centuries. A sharp change had occurred in the definition of the nature of a musical work, now understood as a structure of sounds.
It is no accident that John Cage was one of the first musicians to be interested in Futurism and in Russolo's experiments. In 1946, when he had already created works for a prepared piano, he wrote:
In several of its important aspects, modern music of the twenties is known only by hearsay. The Italian ''Art of Noise'' established by Luigi Russolo has totally disappeared, in memory it is mistakenly associated with Marinelli. The work done with speech orchestras, divisions of the half-tone and electrical instruments is, for the most part, forgotten Many composers exist today only as names.
Cage was absolutely correct; musicians like George Antheil are little-known, and the history of 20th-century music ought to be rewritten, giving a greater emphasis to the many artistic experiments of musicians who were neither appreciated nor encouraged during their lives.
Contemporary music owes Busoni and the Futurists considerably more than has been acknowledged. They are responsible for fundamental innovations which were later developed in numerous ways throughout the 20th century:
1 Noise-sound, tone-research which led to the introduction of noise as a musical possibility
2 Micro-spacing, research which has since been adopted by electronic music
3 Improvisation, practiced since Russolo by most Futurist musicians and set out as a theory in a manitesto written in 1921 by Bartoccini and Vantia
4 Simultaneity, an attempt at interweaving sound fragments at the time this was an attitude parallel to and contemporary with that of Claude Debussy and Anton von Webern, although pointing in a contrary direction.
5 Interdisciplinary activity, a theatrical concept whereby the music flows and combines with mixed-media, taking forms other than traditional grand opera and ballet
6 Mechanization, the myth of industrial society and of the machine, expressed by insistent isochronal rhythmic structures
One of the first music critics in Italy to be interested in Futurist music was Luigi Pestalozza who: in a lengthy preface to the Antologia della rassegna musicae (Anthology of Musical Reviews), placed Pratella and Russolo in the broader context of Italian music.
Beyond any other consideration the originality of the Futurists was in having caught the mechanistic and therefore technological spirit of the century the rise of a superindustrialized mass society This had notable musical repercussions, although the Futurist contributions of Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo in this field were, above all, theoretical.
In an essay published in 1971 that discusses the relationship between Futurism and post-Second World War musicians, the composer Armando Gentilucci gives special attention to Pratella's L'Aviatore Dro (Dro, the Aviator). 1920, which he defines as ''Future Expressionist. 'Although this long opera contains all the calls for spectacle of the early manifestoes (total action-theater of lights, colors, sounds, etc.) it still suffers from Pratella's provincialism and his idiosyncratic choices. His revolution was a storm in a teacup. (It is important to note that Pratella had studied under Mascagni.) Although L'Aviatore Dro did introduce aviation as a theme-one that continued on in such works as Luigo Dallapiccola's Volo dl notte (Night Flight), 1940-it is only an example of realism and popular entertainment.
Gentilucci asks: ''Is there a relationship, a thread, which connects the post-war experimental avantgarde with Futurism? " He answers that one can assume a connection, citing Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cage and Luigi Nono as exponents of three different attitudes which he claims are all, in some way, related to the work of Pratella and Russolo. One could also answer his question by mentioning Fluxus or the many performances in the 60s and 70s, which were defined by the participants themselves as neo-Futurist. Pestalozza is absolutely right in saying: "Russolo's experiments avoided the problems of modern music and outshone them in every sense by proposing questions which were far too dangerous to handle." Russolo's background was that of a visual artist. rather than a professional musician. He was. therefore, quite far removed from the linguistic studies of the Conservatory composition classes and was the first to have the courage to create something like noise-intoners even if the kind of precedent as cited by Fred Prieberg in Musica ex machina did already exist:
The close relationship between exotic music and noise was made public for the first time in the work of Carol-Bérard who was born in 1885 and was a pupil of Isaac Albeniz He not only studied and was influenced by primitive music and instruments, he also composed a Symphony of Mechanical Forces in 1910 some years before Futurist interest in music Moreover, he experimented with noises as music he developed a notation system for noises and wrote on the problems of the instrumentation of noise music It is not known however, whether he was a forerunner of or if he formed later relationships with the Futurists.
Prieberg adds no further information. We know nothing more about Carol-Bérard and the Symphony of Mechanical Forces has not been found.
Noise, according to this new definition, has two essential musical uses:
1 an onomatopoeic function as a signal which has precise connotations;
2 as a structural element in composition, and therefore a further toral evolution in certain ways tied to late 19th century symphonism
The first of these uses developed out of the Futurists Poesia sonora (Sound Poetry), such as Battaglia di Adrianopoli (Battle of Adrianople) by Mannetti, or Onomatolingua (Onomata-Language) by Fortunato Depero. The second use was taken up by Russolo. In a manifesto of March 11, 1911 he says:
It will not be through a series of lifelike noises but through the fantastic associations of these various tones and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and new sound emotions Thus every instrument will have to be able to vary its tone and will have to extend its range to some degree
In writing music of the city of the present and future, Russolo uses descriptive techniques which are somewhat similar to Debussy's realizations of pre-Raphaelite / Symbolist / Impressionist compositions which evoke mood by ''stopping'' time, Russolo's noise of the city is different from Debussy's dreaminess but it is nonetheless still a dream-the myth of the machine. Russolo's work has always been examined and judged by comparing the theories of the "Arte dei rumori'' (Art of Noises) with the only existing document of noise-intoners, the 78 rpm recording, His Master's Voice, R6919120 which contains two passages, Corale and Serenata. But these two compositions are by Antonio Russolo Luigi Hussolo's brother, a professional musician who used the noise-intoners together with other instruments. The record is misleading because the noise-intoners are used tamely, giving the impression of a commercial operation using his invention like at Bal Tabarin, which is harmful to Luigi's reputation (The various scores that Luigi wrote have all been "lost or perhaps misplaced" by his brother Antonio, whose own work, on the other hand, has survived.)
I say this after having partially reconstructed seven bars of Risveglio di una citta (Awakening of a City) from the ''Rete dei rumori" (Network of Noises) which Luigi Russolo published in 1914 in the magazine Lacerba. In 1977 when the Historic Archives of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale organized an exhibition of Russolo's work, the curator, Gian Franco Maffina, had five noise-intoners reconstructed for the occasion. (Russolo's original instruments had all been destroyed during the Second World War.) This permitted me to partially perform the fragment written by Russolo, "partially" because I was unable to use all nine types of noise-intoners indicated in his score. With a multi-track tape recorder I was able to realize only eight of the 12 "voices,'' and yet despite this, and in spite of living in the '80s, after electronic music, the impact of the sound + emotion which had previously been expressed only theoretically in the manifestoes, was impressive. (The comparison to Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, published in 1913, is inevitable. While they are quite different in realization and expressiveness, these two pieces of music have analogous intentions. The noise-intoners must have had an incredible effect on the average listener of 1913, perhaps even stronger than that provoked by the Sacre.)
Just how can critics presume to judge these works without having ever heard even those 25 infernal seconds of Risveglio di una citta, confusing the works of Antonio with those of Luigi? And ignoring the fact that Luigi's "Spirali di rumori'' (Spirals of Noises), was the first noise-intoners concert probably introducing a practice of improvisation guided by outline? This practice, one of the fundamental tenets of Futurist esthetics, is the form that comes closest to achieving the art of events in progress, of extemporaneous and unrepeatable gesture.
The 1921 manifesto of Bartoccini and Mantia represents the first theoretical enunciation of the idea of improvisation in music, and opened the way for this practice, which has become so widespread in the last 30 years. In a report to the 1924 Futurist Congress Franco Casavola stated:
As song and rhythm, music rises out of an improvised intoxication Also in current music, the necessity of playing it imposes upon the performer a collaboration with the author in such a way that the performance envelops a necessary integration of the musical idea. The Futurist ideal is to identify the performer with the creator, to bring improvisation to everyone. The extemporaneous ingenious element of music, conceived as being the real art of eloquence, frees music from traditional forms and modes.
These statements, together with those of Russolo, are probably the most important of the Futurist esthetic. The three theoretical manifestoes by Pratella, which gave impetus to so much else, contain more passionate judgments than conceptual innovation (with the exception of the third manifesto, in which the discussions of rhythm touch upon an important theoretical aspect of music).
It is interesting to quote what Guido M. Gatti has said about Pratella's manifestoes:
The distruzione defla quadratura (destruction of the framework) of 1912, which is almost Pratella's war cry, emerges immediately after the more general manifestoes, and is directed, more than anything else, toward teaching and artistic conventions. Let us immediately say that everything in these pages can be accepted without fear of excommunication: in the year of our Lord nineteen-nineteen we have seen considerably more daring work in the musical avant garde. So much so that Pratella's manifesto is not Futurism at all, but merely the recognition of a rhythmical freedom which every musician, from Wagner on, has achieved day by day, shedding his habits and his mental atavisms."
Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Paris and Vienna, other composers accomplished much more profound transformations of the compositional method. Pratella, however, retains the distinction of having started a new vision of the musical esthetic in Italy with his first manifesto of 1910.
In Futurist music, the "implosion/explosion'' evident in the paintings of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla was attempted, but the energizing of space and the sense of speed, the simultaneity and interaction. found no suitable equivalent in the music. Polyrhythmics sound like just another rhythmic composition, the result of the sum of the partial rhythms which constitute it; sound fragments, because of their linear nature, offer the listener "sequential'' development, giving the impression of a series rather than the action of sounds. Silvio Mix's short Profilo sintetico musicale di F.T. Marinetti (Synthetic Musical Profile of F. T. Marinetti), 1924, is one example. The 36 bars are made up of 10 different parts. The execution of the passage does not give a clear sense of the interactiorl of fragments, but rather, the impression of an alogical, surreal juxtaposition. The Profilo sintetico musicale is an example of what must have been the kind of improvisations which Mix often did at Futurist soirees. Antonio Marasco, a Florentine Futurist painter and a friend of Mix's, referred to one of them:
I organized Futurist evenings at the Salone Materazzi in Via Martelli, and at Botto's in Via Cavour, or else I participated in those of the bookseller/publisher Ferrante Gonnelli who opened the first Permanent Futurist Gallery. During the exhibition Silvio Mix made extemporaneous interventions at the piano, improvising on themes dictated by the public On some occasions there were three pianos and another friend of Mix's from Trieste would participate, along with Maestro Boghen, the Professor at the Conservatory. a strange sort of artist always under an enormous hat. When these ''improvisations'' were held the public bought admission tickets which paid for everyone's dinner-a more lavish one for Professor Boghen, while Mix invariably ate rice and milk.
The system of musical collage and polyrhythm took a different form of realization with Darius Milhaud and George Antheil. The latter did not have direct relations with the Italian Futurists, although his Jazz Symphony, 1925, and Ballet m6chanique (the sound-track of Fernand Leger's film), are compositions which fit in perfectly with the Futurist esthetic. The answer to this unsuccessful attempt to free musical timing is based on the belief in the myth of "isochrony'' (contemporaneity), the symbol for the perfection of the new industrial world, which Prieberg called the ''romanticism of the machine." The infuriating repetitiveness of the rhythm was meant to shock, to cause the "intoxication'' described by Casavola, something that certainly occurs in Maurice Ravel's composition Bolero, 1928.
The most famous work deriving from the esthetic of the machine is Pacific 231, 1923, by Arthur Honegger, an orchestral composition which describes in music the movements of a locomotive.
A brief but intense period of theatrical, ballet and pantomime activity opened with the advent of mechanistic music. The stage had been set for it by years of utopian literature and science fiction, and the new civilization of the machine appeared, mysterious, monstrous and transcendental. by comparison with human, biological rhythms. Unfortunately, although we know of the existence of such works as the Angoscia della macchina (Anguish of the Machine) by Silvio Mix to the text of Ruggero Vasari, which appears to have preceded Fritz Lang's famous film Metropolis, 1926, no examples of this activity have survived.
As in science fiction. futuristic worlds relate to the beginnings of the history of man. Images of archaic civilizations, prehistoric upheavals, suggest a journey through time, as do the innovations of the technological age. Along with the Angoscia defla macchina and Astrale by Mix, or the Ballet Méchanique by Antheil, there is Le Sacre du printemps, by Stravinsky, Création by Milhaud, and Tides of Manaunaun by Henry Dixon Cowell, another musician who was not in direct contact with the Futurists but who was very close to them.
The fact remains that the provincialism of Italian culture at that time, maintained by a middle class which supported Fascism, staunchly prevented the normal interchange of artistic information and experiences. This was manifested as a return to "traditionalism.'' Russolo strongly felt this involution, but saw no escape, and Casavola, after a lengthy interest in jazz. retreated in the face of censorship and actually destroyed all his own Futurist work.
The most important example of Italian mechanistic music is an orchestral page from Cavalli + Acciaio (Horses + Steel), mechanicavalcade for large orchestra, by Luigi Gral a composer whom we otherwise know only by name. (A piano transcription by the composer was published in 1935.) This composition, like Ravel's Bolero. develops by means of a rhythmical structure, insistently repeats from start to finish and is made up of blocks of chords. The musical tempo indicated is matto (crazy).
Marinetti, the poet-animator of all Futurism, was the first to realize noise scores, preceding by many years Pierre Schaeffer's Concrete Music and Cage's compositions and anticipating the use of wireless sets. His Cinque sintesi per il teatro radiofonico (Five Syntheses for the Radjophonic Theater), is an application of the theories expressed in the "Radia" manifesto, and is composed of verbal scores which indicate the types and durations of sounds. Noises are assembled into a collage in which silence is an integral part. One of these syntheses includes a silence of three mil utes-a completely new concept: a theater for radio, to be performed in a manner which suggests the existence of imagined space-this, 20 years before Cage's 4'33".
Futurist music did not have composers of the stature of Alban Berg. Schoenberg and Webern because, except for Pratella no ''professional 'musician of any importance supported Marinetti s ideas which were too advanced for the official musical climate of the day. As we know Russolo was a painter, Mix a talented self-taught musician: Casavola. the professional. suffered a crisis and destroyed his Futurist scores in 1927. Virgilio I was briefly a Futurist. as the improvisor in the Teatro della sorpresa (Theater of Surprise) and as the composer of the amusing Foxtrot del teatro della sorpresa. Although he is often classified as a Futurist (insofar as he was Modernist), Alfredo Casella, the musician who in some people's eyes could today be considered perhaps the most important figure of Italian music in the 20th century. in fact never adhered to the Futurist movement. Pratella states in his essay, Musica per pianoforte italiana. March 19. 1916:
If even on the surface Casella s music seems harmonically and esthetically more daring than Futurist music. one must nevertheless not mistake it for Futurist music since it is substantially removed from this, as indeed it is from the music of the French or Russian avant-garde.
Casella's work is still within the realm of impressionism and the exceptional effort of sensitivity the music in flux. starts out from an intimate musical state of mind stimulator of a lyrical deformation and a purely musical and not programmatic and coloristic construction By this I do not mean to lessen the intrinsic worth of Casella s music I mean only to define and to distinguish it.
Casella lived in Paris during the years 1910-15 and there breathed a freer cultural climate than that of Italy. His Trois pieces pour pianola. 1917. is one of the most important expressions which, in large part derive from Futurist theories.
Russolo and the other Futurists, with the advent of Fascism, were restricted, not so much by Marinetti s artistic choices, but because the regime, from 1922 on, favored a policy of historic self-justification and put the mechanics of tradition into motion, attempting officially to tie musical experimentation to the schools and to categorize precisely defined styles which concentrated on reviving academicism. The Corpol delle Nuove Musiche (Corporation of New Music) was founded in Rome in 1923, with Gabriele D Annunzio, G. Francesco Malipiero and Alfredo Casella as its directors and Bernardino Molinari and Ildebrando Pizzetti as advisors. The numerous aims of the corporation were the complete antithesis of Futurist theories. In the course of time Fascism supported precisely those musicians like Franco Alfano. Casella Malipiero, Pizzetti and Ottorino Respighi who forged a compromise between past and future with works and themes which lay within the linguistic and semantic boundaries that the Fascist regime did not deem dangerous. These musicians were responsible for the systematic elimination of all traces of Futurism, and Russolo's noise-intoners paid the price. The musical spectacles with which the Futurists experimented were totally replaced by sweet little operas and cumbersome grand operas that tried to align themselves with the kind of ''sacred values that were slowly reduced to a mockery in travertine architecture.
Russolo's decompositive attitude was an easy target for charges of dilettantism while Respighi's FountaIns of Rome and Pines of Rome, although works of unquestionable value, could be used by the Fascists as evidence of ''quality' and of the value of the "new Italian musical style'' which these musicians championed.
In La prora (The Prow), Casella ends his essay with:
Besides. the future will sooner or later have its say, and it will know how to brilliantly set apart the few real ''creators' of today-for whom the new sound technicalities are nothing more than simple means which are indispensable for reaching unknown forms of beauty-from the innumerable false revolutionaries, who use these same means in a clumsy and naive way with the sole aim of achieving immediate and ephemeral celebrity.
The reference to the Futurists is clear enough, even though Casella's tactic, followed by most of the others was systematically to ignore all artistic activities which stemmed from Futurism.
As early as 1911, Pratella's manifestoes had been checked to the extent that Pizzetti wrote to Malpero:
Regarding what you wrote me concerning the necessity of having faith in a better future for the fortunes of us young Italian musicians, and concerning the need to unite in a compact group, acting for the common interest, /-I repeat-am somewhat skeptical As regards myself, I am and shall always be ready to give of myself, with my own energy and with my own work, to do everything of which I am capable, but who else will know how to do the same? Will you be there? All right, I believe you will Will Bastiani be there? Very well we shall be three. And then? Just think my friend, against us there are already musicians like Zandonai and Pratella-that is, sly profiteers and crafty ignoramuses dozens of them' And we I at least, we are naive compared to them!
In essence, Futurism grew so weak that it disappeared with the advent of Fascism. which favored the kinds of artistic expression that would consolidate its power. It is also true that among the Futurist musicians there was no one figure who managed to establish himself or the esthetics of Futurist music by producing anything of truly great significance. The poet Francesco Cangiullo wrote in his autobuography:
…apropos the musicians Casavola and I (whose names have only been touched upon In this book but can be found in the last Futurist lists) and the painters Deperc, and Prampolini, that Casavola and Mortari musicians of unquestionable value, in reality never did know how to compose what might have been Futurist music, nor did Baililla Pratella The unsurpassed innovative composer of that period was Stravinsky.
Daniele Lombardi
(Artforum, translated by Meg Shore)
Discussions of Futurist music have been incorrect and misleading because after the period, musicians and critics have known only a concept of the music, which has been modified by subsequent theorizing and interpretation. Everything that does not fit into the theories has been regarded with suspicion, considered not to be music, and "relegated'' to the domain of the visual arts or theater. History needs to be reevaluated in terms of avant-garde movements such as Futurism so that those attempts that have opened the path to later artistic activity may be distinguishable from those which have fallen back on themselves, and have therefore failed to connect with the evolution of artistic thought.
Early in the 20th century the Italian musical world was characterized by the persistence of the late Romantic tradition, The curtain had already come down many times on Parsifal and on "program music'' but the "season" continued (with inferior imitations). During this time one figure stands out as the initiator of a new musical concept (one that can be located at the root of Futurism and other avant-garde movernents) Ferruccio Busoni, who was also one of the greatest pianists of his time. Seeds of all the ideas that were later enthusiastically expressed by the Futurists Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo can be found in Busoni's essay, Entwurf einer neuen Astetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Esthetic of the Art of Sound), 1907, published in Trieste by Schmidl.
Busoni speaks of "renewal" through a re-reading and synthesizing of the past, In contrast to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Let's destroy the museums and libraries,'' Busoni believed in the importance of tradition:
The transitory qualities of a work constitute the "modern'' ' those qualities which are immutable preserve it from becoming "old fashioned.'' In the ''modern'' as in the ''old there is the good and the bad, the authentic and the false. In an absolute sense, the modern does not exist-in art there is only that which is born earlier and that which is born lateri that which flowers for a long time and that which soon withers. There has always been the modern and there has always been the old.
This relationship to history is all that differentiates Busoni's programmatic principles from those of the Futurists, Coinciding with Busoni's concept of renewal but more importantly revealing the relationship between Futurism and anti-traditionalism, Pratella begins his second manifesto with:
All innovators have, logically, been Futurists in relation to their times, Palestrina would have judged Bach mad, as Bach would have judged Beethoven, and as Beethoven would have judged Wagner.
The significance of Busoni's essay lies in his statement that traditional instruments were "tired." His intuitive recognition of new tonal possibilities allowed him to believe " …in abstract sound in technique without obstacles: in the limitlessness of sounds.
Every effort, therefore, must lead toward a fresh source, a new beginning, "Six years later Russolo applied himself to this process of innovation, writing: "We must break this restricted circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds." (This, also in order to come to terms with Beethoven and Wagner but not through Busoni's solution of continuity.)
Microtonal research-which Busoni deals with amply (as do Charles Ives, Alois Hába and the later proponents of electronic sound) is the basis for the application and practice of this new musical concept which Russolo put into effect by constructing intonarumori or "noise-intoners." This decompositive process first explored by early Futurists, then adopted by the Dadaists, to finally become a characteristic of all the historical avant-gardes, is what really lies on the threshold between the 19th and 20th centuries. A sharp change had occurred in the definition of the nature of a musical work, now understood as a structure of sounds.
It is no accident that John Cage was one of the first musicians to be interested in Futurism and in Russolo's experiments. In 1946, when he had already created works for a prepared piano, he wrote:
In several of its important aspects, modern music of the twenties is known only by hearsay. The Italian ''Art of Noise'' established by Luigi Russolo has totally disappeared, in memory it is mistakenly associated with Marinelli. The work done with speech orchestras, divisions of the half-tone and electrical instruments is, for the most part, forgotten Many composers exist today only as names.
Cage was absolutely correct; musicians like George Antheil are little-known, and the history of 20th-century music ought to be rewritten, giving a greater emphasis to the many artistic experiments of musicians who were neither appreciated nor encouraged during their lives.
Contemporary music owes Busoni and the Futurists considerably more than has been acknowledged. They are responsible for fundamental innovations which were later developed in numerous ways throughout the 20th century:
1 Noise-sound, tone-research which led to the introduction of noise as a musical possibility
2 Micro-spacing, research which has since been adopted by electronic music
3 Improvisation, practiced since Russolo by most Futurist musicians and set out as a theory in a manitesto written in 1921 by Bartoccini and Vantia
4 Simultaneity, an attempt at interweaving sound fragments at the time this was an attitude parallel to and contemporary with that of Claude Debussy and Anton von Webern, although pointing in a contrary direction.
5 Interdisciplinary activity, a theatrical concept whereby the music flows and combines with mixed-media, taking forms other than traditional grand opera and ballet
6 Mechanization, the myth of industrial society and of the machine, expressed by insistent isochronal rhythmic structures
One of the first music critics in Italy to be interested in Futurist music was Luigi Pestalozza who: in a lengthy preface to the Antologia della rassegna musicae (Anthology of Musical Reviews), placed Pratella and Russolo in the broader context of Italian music.
Beyond any other consideration the originality of the Futurists was in having caught the mechanistic and therefore technological spirit of the century the rise of a superindustrialized mass society This had notable musical repercussions, although the Futurist contributions of Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo in this field were, above all, theoretical.
In an essay published in 1971 that discusses the relationship between Futurism and post-Second World War musicians, the composer Armando Gentilucci gives special attention to Pratella's L'Aviatore Dro (Dro, the Aviator). 1920, which he defines as ''Future Expressionist. 'Although this long opera contains all the calls for spectacle of the early manifestoes (total action-theater of lights, colors, sounds, etc.) it still suffers from Pratella's provincialism and his idiosyncratic choices. His revolution was a storm in a teacup. (It is important to note that Pratella had studied under Mascagni.) Although L'Aviatore Dro did introduce aviation as a theme-one that continued on in such works as Luigo Dallapiccola's Volo dl notte (Night Flight), 1940-it is only an example of realism and popular entertainment.
Gentilucci asks: ''Is there a relationship, a thread, which connects the post-war experimental avantgarde with Futurism? " He answers that one can assume a connection, citing Karlheinz Stockhausen, Cage and Luigi Nono as exponents of three different attitudes which he claims are all, in some way, related to the work of Pratella and Russolo. One could also answer his question by mentioning Fluxus or the many performances in the 60s and 70s, which were defined by the participants themselves as neo-Futurist. Pestalozza is absolutely right in saying: "Russolo's experiments avoided the problems of modern music and outshone them in every sense by proposing questions which were far too dangerous to handle." Russolo's background was that of a visual artist. rather than a professional musician. He was. therefore, quite far removed from the linguistic studies of the Conservatory composition classes and was the first to have the courage to create something like noise-intoners even if the kind of precedent as cited by Fred Prieberg in Musica ex machina did already exist:
The close relationship between exotic music and noise was made public for the first time in the work of Carol-Bérard who was born in 1885 and was a pupil of Isaac Albeniz He not only studied and was influenced by primitive music and instruments, he also composed a Symphony of Mechanical Forces in 1910 some years before Futurist interest in music Moreover, he experimented with noises as music he developed a notation system for noises and wrote on the problems of the instrumentation of noise music It is not known however, whether he was a forerunner of or if he formed later relationships with the Futurists.
Prieberg adds no further information. We know nothing more about Carol-Bérard and the Symphony of Mechanical Forces has not been found.
Noise, according to this new definition, has two essential musical uses:
1 an onomatopoeic function as a signal which has precise connotations;
2 as a structural element in composition, and therefore a further toral evolution in certain ways tied to late 19th century symphonism
The first of these uses developed out of the Futurists Poesia sonora (Sound Poetry), such as Battaglia di Adrianopoli (Battle of Adrianople) by Mannetti, or Onomatolingua (Onomata-Language) by Fortunato Depero. The second use was taken up by Russolo. In a manifesto of March 11, 1911 he says:
It will not be through a series of lifelike noises but through the fantastic associations of these various tones and rhythms that the new orchestra will obtain the most complex and new sound emotions Thus every instrument will have to be able to vary its tone and will have to extend its range to some degree
In writing music of the city of the present and future, Russolo uses descriptive techniques which are somewhat similar to Debussy's realizations of pre-Raphaelite / Symbolist / Impressionist compositions which evoke mood by ''stopping'' time, Russolo's noise of the city is different from Debussy's dreaminess but it is nonetheless still a dream-the myth of the machine. Russolo's work has always been examined and judged by comparing the theories of the "Arte dei rumori'' (Art of Noises) with the only existing document of noise-intoners, the 78 rpm recording, His Master's Voice, R6919120 which contains two passages, Corale and Serenata. But these two compositions are by Antonio Russolo Luigi Hussolo's brother, a professional musician who used the noise-intoners together with other instruments. The record is misleading because the noise-intoners are used tamely, giving the impression of a commercial operation using his invention like at Bal Tabarin, which is harmful to Luigi's reputation (The various scores that Luigi wrote have all been "lost or perhaps misplaced" by his brother Antonio, whose own work, on the other hand, has survived.)
I say this after having partially reconstructed seven bars of Risveglio di una citta (Awakening of a City) from the ''Rete dei rumori" (Network of Noises) which Luigi Russolo published in 1914 in the magazine Lacerba. In 1977 when the Historic Archives of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale organized an exhibition of Russolo's work, the curator, Gian Franco Maffina, had five noise-intoners reconstructed for the occasion. (Russolo's original instruments had all been destroyed during the Second World War.) This permitted me to partially perform the fragment written by Russolo, "partially" because I was unable to use all nine types of noise-intoners indicated in his score. With a multi-track tape recorder I was able to realize only eight of the 12 "voices,'' and yet despite this, and in spite of living in the '80s, after electronic music, the impact of the sound + emotion which had previously been expressed only theoretically in the manifestoes, was impressive. (The comparison to Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps, published in 1913, is inevitable. While they are quite different in realization and expressiveness, these two pieces of music have analogous intentions. The noise-intoners must have had an incredible effect on the average listener of 1913, perhaps even stronger than that provoked by the Sacre.)
Just how can critics presume to judge these works without having ever heard even those 25 infernal seconds of Risveglio di una citta, confusing the works of Antonio with those of Luigi? And ignoring the fact that Luigi's "Spirali di rumori'' (Spirals of Noises), was the first noise-intoners concert probably introducing a practice of improvisation guided by outline? This practice, one of the fundamental tenets of Futurist esthetics, is the form that comes closest to achieving the art of events in progress, of extemporaneous and unrepeatable gesture.
The 1921 manifesto of Bartoccini and Mantia represents the first theoretical enunciation of the idea of improvisation in music, and opened the way for this practice, which has become so widespread in the last 30 years. In a report to the 1924 Futurist Congress Franco Casavola stated:
As song and rhythm, music rises out of an improvised intoxication Also in current music, the necessity of playing it imposes upon the performer a collaboration with the author in such a way that the performance envelops a necessary integration of the musical idea. The Futurist ideal is to identify the performer with the creator, to bring improvisation to everyone. The extemporaneous ingenious element of music, conceived as being the real art of eloquence, frees music from traditional forms and modes.
These statements, together with those of Russolo, are probably the most important of the Futurist esthetic. The three theoretical manifestoes by Pratella, which gave impetus to so much else, contain more passionate judgments than conceptual innovation (with the exception of the third manifesto, in which the discussions of rhythm touch upon an important theoretical aspect of music).
It is interesting to quote what Guido M. Gatti has said about Pratella's manifestoes:
The distruzione defla quadratura (destruction of the framework) of 1912, which is almost Pratella's war cry, emerges immediately after the more general manifestoes, and is directed, more than anything else, toward teaching and artistic conventions. Let us immediately say that everything in these pages can be accepted without fear of excommunication: in the year of our Lord nineteen-nineteen we have seen considerably more daring work in the musical avant garde. So much so that Pratella's manifesto is not Futurism at all, but merely the recognition of a rhythmical freedom which every musician, from Wagner on, has achieved day by day, shedding his habits and his mental atavisms."
Elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Paris and Vienna, other composers accomplished much more profound transformations of the compositional method. Pratella, however, retains the distinction of having started a new vision of the musical esthetic in Italy with his first manifesto of 1910.
In Futurist music, the "implosion/explosion'' evident in the paintings of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla was attempted, but the energizing of space and the sense of speed, the simultaneity and interaction. found no suitable equivalent in the music. Polyrhythmics sound like just another rhythmic composition, the result of the sum of the partial rhythms which constitute it; sound fragments, because of their linear nature, offer the listener "sequential'' development, giving the impression of a series rather than the action of sounds. Silvio Mix's short Profilo sintetico musicale di F.T. Marinetti (Synthetic Musical Profile of F. T. Marinetti), 1924, is one example. The 36 bars are made up of 10 different parts. The execution of the passage does not give a clear sense of the interactiorl of fragments, but rather, the impression of an alogical, surreal juxtaposition. The Profilo sintetico musicale is an example of what must have been the kind of improvisations which Mix often did at Futurist soirees. Antonio Marasco, a Florentine Futurist painter and a friend of Mix's, referred to one of them:
I organized Futurist evenings at the Salone Materazzi in Via Martelli, and at Botto's in Via Cavour, or else I participated in those of the bookseller/publisher Ferrante Gonnelli who opened the first Permanent Futurist Gallery. During the exhibition Silvio Mix made extemporaneous interventions at the piano, improvising on themes dictated by the public On some occasions there were three pianos and another friend of Mix's from Trieste would participate, along with Maestro Boghen, the Professor at the Conservatory. a strange sort of artist always under an enormous hat. When these ''improvisations'' were held the public bought admission tickets which paid for everyone's dinner-a more lavish one for Professor Boghen, while Mix invariably ate rice and milk.
The system of musical collage and polyrhythm took a different form of realization with Darius Milhaud and George Antheil. The latter did not have direct relations with the Italian Futurists, although his Jazz Symphony, 1925, and Ballet m6chanique (the sound-track of Fernand Leger's film), are compositions which fit in perfectly with the Futurist esthetic. The answer to this unsuccessful attempt to free musical timing is based on the belief in the myth of "isochrony'' (contemporaneity), the symbol for the perfection of the new industrial world, which Prieberg called the ''romanticism of the machine." The infuriating repetitiveness of the rhythm was meant to shock, to cause the "intoxication'' described by Casavola, something that certainly occurs in Maurice Ravel's composition Bolero, 1928.
The most famous work deriving from the esthetic of the machine is Pacific 231, 1923, by Arthur Honegger, an orchestral composition which describes in music the movements of a locomotive.
A brief but intense period of theatrical, ballet and pantomime activity opened with the advent of mechanistic music. The stage had been set for it by years of utopian literature and science fiction, and the new civilization of the machine appeared, mysterious, monstrous and transcendental. by comparison with human, biological rhythms. Unfortunately, although we know of the existence of such works as the Angoscia della macchina (Anguish of the Machine) by Silvio Mix to the text of Ruggero Vasari, which appears to have preceded Fritz Lang's famous film Metropolis, 1926, no examples of this activity have survived.
As in science fiction. futuristic worlds relate to the beginnings of the history of man. Images of archaic civilizations, prehistoric upheavals, suggest a journey through time, as do the innovations of the technological age. Along with the Angoscia defla macchina and Astrale by Mix, or the Ballet Méchanique by Antheil, there is Le Sacre du printemps, by Stravinsky, Création by Milhaud, and Tides of Manaunaun by Henry Dixon Cowell, another musician who was not in direct contact with the Futurists but who was very close to them.
The fact remains that the provincialism of Italian culture at that time, maintained by a middle class which supported Fascism, staunchly prevented the normal interchange of artistic information and experiences. This was manifested as a return to "traditionalism.'' Russolo strongly felt this involution, but saw no escape, and Casavola, after a lengthy interest in jazz. retreated in the face of censorship and actually destroyed all his own Futurist work.
The most important example of Italian mechanistic music is an orchestral page from Cavalli + Acciaio (Horses + Steel), mechanicavalcade for large orchestra, by Luigi Gral a composer whom we otherwise know only by name. (A piano transcription by the composer was published in 1935.) This composition, like Ravel's Bolero. develops by means of a rhythmical structure, insistently repeats from start to finish and is made up of blocks of chords. The musical tempo indicated is matto (crazy).
Marinetti, the poet-animator of all Futurism, was the first to realize noise scores, preceding by many years Pierre Schaeffer's Concrete Music and Cage's compositions and anticipating the use of wireless sets. His Cinque sintesi per il teatro radiofonico (Five Syntheses for the Radjophonic Theater), is an application of the theories expressed in the "Radia" manifesto, and is composed of verbal scores which indicate the types and durations of sounds. Noises are assembled into a collage in which silence is an integral part. One of these syntheses includes a silence of three mil utes-a completely new concept: a theater for radio, to be performed in a manner which suggests the existence of imagined space-this, 20 years before Cage's 4'33".
Futurist music did not have composers of the stature of Alban Berg. Schoenberg and Webern because, except for Pratella no ''professional 'musician of any importance supported Marinetti s ideas which were too advanced for the official musical climate of the day. As we know Russolo was a painter, Mix a talented self-taught musician: Casavola. the professional. suffered a crisis and destroyed his Futurist scores in 1927. Virgilio I was briefly a Futurist. as the improvisor in the Teatro della sorpresa (Theater of Surprise) and as the composer of the amusing Foxtrot del teatro della sorpresa. Although he is often classified as a Futurist (insofar as he was Modernist), Alfredo Casella, the musician who in some people's eyes could today be considered perhaps the most important figure of Italian music in the 20th century. in fact never adhered to the Futurist movement. Pratella states in his essay, Musica per pianoforte italiana. March 19. 1916:
If even on the surface Casella s music seems harmonically and esthetically more daring than Futurist music. one must nevertheless not mistake it for Futurist music since it is substantially removed from this, as indeed it is from the music of the French or Russian avant-garde.
Casella's work is still within the realm of impressionism and the exceptional effort of sensitivity the music in flux. starts out from an intimate musical state of mind stimulator of a lyrical deformation and a purely musical and not programmatic and coloristic construction By this I do not mean to lessen the intrinsic worth of Casella s music I mean only to define and to distinguish it.
Casella lived in Paris during the years 1910-15 and there breathed a freer cultural climate than that of Italy. His Trois pieces pour pianola. 1917. is one of the most important expressions which, in large part derive from Futurist theories.
Russolo and the other Futurists, with the advent of Fascism, were restricted, not so much by Marinetti s artistic choices, but because the regime, from 1922 on, favored a policy of historic self-justification and put the mechanics of tradition into motion, attempting officially to tie musical experimentation to the schools and to categorize precisely defined styles which concentrated on reviving academicism. The Corpol delle Nuove Musiche (Corporation of New Music) was founded in Rome in 1923, with Gabriele D Annunzio, G. Francesco Malipiero and Alfredo Casella as its directors and Bernardino Molinari and Ildebrando Pizzetti as advisors. The numerous aims of the corporation were the complete antithesis of Futurist theories. In the course of time Fascism supported precisely those musicians like Franco Alfano. Casella Malipiero, Pizzetti and Ottorino Respighi who forged a compromise between past and future with works and themes which lay within the linguistic and semantic boundaries that the Fascist regime did not deem dangerous. These musicians were responsible for the systematic elimination of all traces of Futurism, and Russolo's noise-intoners paid the price. The musical spectacles with which the Futurists experimented were totally replaced by sweet little operas and cumbersome grand operas that tried to align themselves with the kind of ''sacred values that were slowly reduced to a mockery in travertine architecture.
Russolo's decompositive attitude was an easy target for charges of dilettantism while Respighi's FountaIns of Rome and Pines of Rome, although works of unquestionable value, could be used by the Fascists as evidence of ''quality' and of the value of the "new Italian musical style'' which these musicians championed.
In La prora (The Prow), Casella ends his essay with:
Besides. the future will sooner or later have its say, and it will know how to brilliantly set apart the few real ''creators' of today-for whom the new sound technicalities are nothing more than simple means which are indispensable for reaching unknown forms of beauty-from the innumerable false revolutionaries, who use these same means in a clumsy and naive way with the sole aim of achieving immediate and ephemeral celebrity.
The reference to the Futurists is clear enough, even though Casella's tactic, followed by most of the others was systematically to ignore all artistic activities which stemmed from Futurism.
As early as 1911, Pratella's manifestoes had been checked to the extent that Pizzetti wrote to Malpero:
Regarding what you wrote me concerning the necessity of having faith in a better future for the fortunes of us young Italian musicians, and concerning the need to unite in a compact group, acting for the common interest, /-I repeat-am somewhat skeptical As regards myself, I am and shall always be ready to give of myself, with my own energy and with my own work, to do everything of which I am capable, but who else will know how to do the same? Will you be there? All right, I believe you will Will Bastiani be there? Very well we shall be three. And then? Just think my friend, against us there are already musicians like Zandonai and Pratella-that is, sly profiteers and crafty ignoramuses dozens of them' And we I at least, we are naive compared to them!
In essence, Futurism grew so weak that it disappeared with the advent of Fascism. which favored the kinds of artistic expression that would consolidate its power. It is also true that among the Futurist musicians there was no one figure who managed to establish himself or the esthetics of Futurist music by producing anything of truly great significance. The poet Francesco Cangiullo wrote in his autobuography:
…apropos the musicians Casavola and I (whose names have only been touched upon In this book but can be found in the last Futurist lists) and the painters Deperc, and Prampolini, that Casavola and Mortari musicians of unquestionable value, in reality never did know how to compose what might have been Futurist music, nor did Baililla Pratella The unsurpassed innovative composer of that period was Stravinsky.
The art of noise/Luigi Russolo
The Art of Noises
Luigi Russolo
from "die wiener gruppe: a moment of modernity 1954-1960 / the visual works and the actions", edited by Peter Weibel (SpringerWien New York), La Biennale di Venezia, 1997
RELATED RESOURCES:
"The Aesthetics of Noise" Torben Sangild
Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.
Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.
And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.
The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.
The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.
At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.
To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards “noise sound” was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.
On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.
This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.
Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.
We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.
Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.
Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!
It’s no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.
It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.
To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.
Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.
Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:
“every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing...”
We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.
To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.
Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.
Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.
Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.
Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.
Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises.
Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:
1
Rumbles
Roars
Explosions
Crashes
Splashes
Booms
2
Whistles
Hisses
Snorts
3
Whispers
Murmurs
Mumbles
Grumbles
Gurgles
4
Screeches
Creaks
Rumbles
Buzzes
Crackles
Scrapes
5
Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.
6
Voices of animals and men:
Shouts
Screams
Groans
Shrieks
Howls
Laughs
Weezes
Sobs
In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.
Conclusions
Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.
Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.
The musician’s sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.
Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.
The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.
The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.
The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.
We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.
Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.
Luigi Russolo
from "die wiener gruppe: a moment of modernity 1954-1960 / the visual works and the actions", edited by Peter Weibel (SpringerWien New York), La Biennale di Venezia, 1997
RELATED RESOURCES:
"The Aesthetics of Noise" Torben Sangild
Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.
Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.
And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.
The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists’ most complicated polyphonies.
The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.
At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.
This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.
To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards “noise sound” was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.
On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.
This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered.
Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.
We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.
Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.
Away! Let us break out since we cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality, with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face, discarding violins, pianos, double-basses and plainitive organs. Let us break out!
It’s no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear.
It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.
To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.
Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.
Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:
“every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing...”
We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.
To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.
Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.
Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.
Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.
Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.
Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist’s inspiration will extract from combined noises.
Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:
1
Rumbles
Roars
Explosions
Crashes
Splashes
Booms
2
Whistles
Hisses
Snorts
3
Whispers
Murmurs
Mumbles
Grumbles
Gurgles
4
Screeches
Creaks
Rumbles
Buzzes
Crackles
Scrapes
5
Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.
6
Voices of animals and men:
Shouts
Screams
Groans
Shrieks
Howls
Laughs
Weezes
Sobs
In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.
Conclusions
Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.
Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.
The musician’s sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.
Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.
The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.
The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.
The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.
We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.
Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.
The Aesthetics of Noise/Torben Sanglid
The Aesthetics of Noise
Torben Sangild
Published by DATANOM
Edited by Pelle Krøgholt
ISBN 87-988955-0-8
Copyright 2002 by Sangild & DATANOM
All rights reserved
Contact: datanom@datanom.com
Link to Publisher: DATANOM
Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.
Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay. To give an exhaustive explanation of it, though, is not only beyond the limits of an essay, but seems to be fundamentally impossible due to the evasiveness of the matter.1 There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it. It is my hope that the following reflections are nevertheless able to sketch out an approach to understanding the important part noise plays in the music of today.
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After defining noise and giving a brief history of noise in music, I will take a closer look at Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Merzbow and Curd Duca as four very different aesthetic approaches to noise. Ranging from aggressive ecstasy to soft intimacy, from melodic sweetness to abstract hard-core noise, from the guitar to the computer, these examples serve to indicate the variety of noise in both rock music and electronica. Reflecting these in a broader perspective I will then turn to philosophical concepts such as the sublime, the Dionysian, multiplicity, and the abject.
What is noise?
Etymologically, the term "noise" in different Western languages (støj, bruit, Geräusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that the word "noise" comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but also to seasickness, and that the German Geräusch is derived from rauschen (the sough of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music.
A single definition of noise is not possible; instead I will provide three basic definitions: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition.
A. Acoustic noise
In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic
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metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that 'white noise' is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called "colored noise," ranging from "violet noise" (a bias on the high frequencies) to "purple noise" (a bias on the low frequencies).
B. Communicative noise
In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like "fuzztone", "overdrive", and "distortion" as an easy way to obtain the same effect.
In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier.
When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.
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C. Subjective noise
"Unpleasant sounds" – this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are very few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation.
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance. Artists, who deal with noise in their music, as well as their audience, have a different approach to white noise, no longer considering it a nuisance.
One might conclude from this that the subjective definition is not relevant to the aesthetic use of noise in music. But, as I have already suggested, that would be a hasty dismissal of the important tension you get from infusing the formerly negative. To reach a point where a harsh, white noise is not considered unpleasant demands a training of the senses to the point of being familiar with this expansion of musical sounds. Reaching that point, noise will still contain a certain power due to the tension of listening to what used to be dismissed as repulsive (cf. below on the abjective character of noise).
The history of noise – a brief sketch 2
The origin of music was in principle a process of purifying certain sounds by filtering out the irregular sounds, the noise. The church music of the Middle Ages was an extreme in this
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respect, allowing only the pure sound of the male voice and considering the interval of the third (today essentially consonant) a dissonance. The classical, Western tradition has (generally speaking) fostered instruments of pure sounds and maintained the exclusion of the impure, with some exceptions for dramatic effects (thunder, canons etc.). During the 19th century music became increasingly complex and dramatic, and at the same time the orchestra began to include more percussion instruments that were considered noisy. They were nevertheless far from what is today considered noise.
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto "The Art of Noise" in 1913. He constructed the so-called "intonarumori" (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.
Edgar Varèse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varèse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varèse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and
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hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises. This vision is still a long way from fulfillment.
After the Second World War musique concrète evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael König, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period. Since then, numerous composers have worked with acoustic as well as electronic noise.
Rock music and guitar noise
Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.
The deliberate use of these effects can be traced back to Link Wray's "Rumble" (1958), but it was garage bands like The Kingsmen, The Kinks and especially The Who, who made it an integral part of their sound. The great innovator, however, was undoubtedly Jimi Hendrix, who constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions.
Aesthetically, however, the influence on noise rock came not from Hendrix, but rather The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts. On tracks like "European Son" and "Sister Ray," the noise is
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alarming in ways that has made Velvet Underground a reference point for all noise rock.
In the 70s The Stooges continued the noisy garage tradition, combining it with free jazz elements, and paving the way for the punk rock movement. Lou Reed made his outstanding concept album Metal Machine Music (1975) – four vinyl sides of sheer guitar noise and nothing else, made partly as a provocation directed at the record company, the record has gained a reputation as a place for weird, noisy beauty. I will also mention Pere Ubu's legendary first single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (1975), one of the most disturbing pieces of rock music ever made, and the provocative Throbbing Gristle debut 2nd Annual Report (1977).
The term "noise rock" (in Danish: støjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called "the heterogeneous". This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. Post-punk thus tries to distance itself from the smoothness and cheerfulness of pop, though mostly without discarding its melodic qualities.
One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom. It began in New York under the label of "No Wave" in the late 70's and in Germany with Einstürzende Neubauten and other bands centered around "Die Geniale Dilletanten" around 1980. In the UK, actual noise rock did not emerge before 1985, when The Jesus & Mary Chain created the
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British, more melodic, variant.
It is not within the limits of this essay to give an overview of the noise rock and electronica scene and all its different sub-categories, but I will mention some of the most influential styles and names: Sonic Youth took off from guitar composer Glenn Branca to create their very own harmonic style and guitar techniques (see example below). Bands like Swans and Big Black used noise as a dark, hellish force in their aggressive, Gothic tales. Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. and others bridged the gap between post-punk and the impending grunge scene with their straightforward use of noisy guitars. My Bloody Valentine (see example below), A.R. Kane, Lush, Ride and many other British bands used guitar noise to create a more poetic, dreamy atmosphere, labeled 'dreampop' or "shoegazer". Band of Susans made a minimal, mantra-like use of guitar noise with a British equivalent in bands Loop and Spacemen 3. Young Gods and Ministry, among others, used the sampler as a noise generator. In Japan, a noise scene grew out of the 70's free jazz environment of Tokyo, featuring Keiji Haino, High Rise, The Boredoms, Merzbow and others.
By 1991 the development of guitar noise seemed to come to an end, culminating with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a worthy climax. Guitar noise had gone mainstream with blockbusters like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and the sound possibilities seemed permanently exhausted. The place for noise exploration was no longer to be found on the rock scene but rather in electronic music.
Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is "glitch", where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck. Oval is probably the most convincing glitch-artist, crea-
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ting a blurred atmosphere not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine. Only few electronic artists, such as Merzbow (see below), deal exclusively with noise.
Four music examples
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth made their debut at the so-called Noise Festival in New York, 1981, an event that marked the end of No Wave and the beginning of something new. With guitar composer Glenn Branca as their father figure, they set out to 'reinvent the guitar', considering the guitar a far richer instrument than normally acknowledged, containing a wide range of possibilities.
The guitar can be used as a percussion instrument, beating the strings with a broken drumstick, a screwdriver, or what-ever is at hand. Combining this effect with feedback, Sonic Youth created a bell-like, pealing sound. Every possibility of the instrument - the guitar, the pick-ups, the amplifier, even the electric plugs - were explored, and, as their most original characteristic, the strings were tuned differently, creating a new, more dissonant (sometimes even microtonal) harmonics, far from the general rock idiom. Sonic Youth developed an arsenal of more than 40 guitars each with its own tuning; often the two guitarists play with each their tuning at the same time.
A characteristic trait is what I shall call "the maelstrom of noise," in which the tune and rhythm break off into a whirl of noise, gradually intensifying tempo and volume, absorbing the listener into its ecstatic black hole. This chaotic vortex is in opposition to the structural, formal elements of music, exceeding the boundaries of the senses, although still controlled on a higher level. The maelstrom is at the same time an explosion of energy and an implosion of meaning, turning away from the distinct and semantic into the sublime and ecstatic.
The common effect of noise in music is the aggressive,
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raging expression also found in the maelstrom of Sonic Youth. Noise is a vehement means, reflecting inner and outer chaos and conflict. But, as the next example will show, noise can also be used to evoke a very different experience.
My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine also had the ambition of reinventing the guitar, albeit with entirely different means and effects than Sonic Youth. In their music, noise is not aggressive, but low-key. Noise becomes introvert, dreamy, almost languidly erotic. This especially goes for the album Loveless and the related ep's Glider and Tremolo.
Listening to My Bloody Valentine one encounters a diffuse blurred harmonics. The guitar chords are gliding, swimming in a muddy sea of distortion. The guitarists' strokes are cut off in the mixing process, so that every sound seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. My Bloody Valentine extract all kinds of sound from the guitar, manipulating it in different ways, also by means of the sampler, so that, for instance, feedback can be transformed into a whistling, melodic instrument. The vocals are placed in the background of the sound stage on the same level as the other sounds, making the words almost undecipherable. The noise on Loveless is extraordinarily integrated in the music, not as a distinct layer of sound and not placed in opposition to an otherwise structural clarity.
All these effects put together with the sleepy motion and sweet, dreamy tunes, form an unreal, disorienting sound picture, "the-not-quite-really-there-sound", as they themselves have called it. The dense sound makes no illusion of an acoustic space. It is claustrophobic; almost like being in an infinitely intimate place. There, the music affects you like the most coveted, yet vulnerable, states: tenderness, love, sex. You have to get very close, to immerse yourself in the
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web of noises to be able to let the vocals whisper sweet words in your ear. The blurriness of My Bloody Valentine's sound is like the blurriness of getting so close to an object that you lose the outlines of it. And this object is as soft as a tender body.
But the disorientation takes the experience even further than a concrete sexual encounter, towards a more abstract, impersonal intimateness. There is not really an I-you-relation (as in a normal pop song), there is no room for such a distance; the intimacy is overwhelming, ambivalent and transgressive of any subjectivity, suggesting something akin to an incestuous, narcissistic or pre-oedipal relation.
My Bloody Valentine has made a new psychedelia without turning to the effects of the old; a psychedelia of noise. At their live concerts the band experimented with ending the performance with a sustained dose of sheer noise. They developed this stunt to perfection, culminating on the Loveless tour 1992, where a piercing, dazzling white light was thrown out into the faces of the audience while the pure noise took on new dimensions in volume and lasted for more than 15 minutes. This was a stark contrast to the soft, colorful preceding concert and provoked two different reactions: half of the audience left in protest or aural pain, while the other half stayed to find out what this would bring. And the experiences were very special. People underwent different ecstatic states, all pertaining to the trans-individual or pre-subjective: out-of-body-experiences, nirvana-like states, visions of being swallowed up by a giant vagina; and my own: hearing phantom lullabies that I've never heard before – very detailed and continuing to play in my head when I got home in bed. These experiences are not only an effect of an overload of the nervous system but are also inextricably tied up to the preceding concert, opening the mind towards the most intimate feelings.
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Merzbow
Under the name of Merzbow, Tokyo based Masami Akita has produced pure noise music since 1979, and especially in the 90's he has released a staggering number of electronically based releases, culminating in the 50 CD (+ artwork and CD-ROM) set Merzbox, a giant compilation of his finest work. Not only very productive, but also very consistent, he is constantly operating close to the limit of what can meaningfully be called music. Starting from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, considered by many a terminal point for music, he exploits the varieties of noise without supplying it with any melodic material. Merzbow's music is an ear-splitting assault on the body, at least, that is, until the nervous system is allowed to gradually relax from the state of alarm and enter the world of sensing extreme noise as music.
The name Merzbow is derived from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau (aka Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a work in progress built by the use of found garbage material. If noise is the trash of music, the sounds that we traditionally discard as non-musical, then Merzbow is a trash artist, tirelessly seeking odd and convulsive beauty in the garbage cans of sonic waste. And, like Schwitters, Merzbow's art is essentially urban, reacting to the overload of sensuous impressions in the big city. As a sort of apotropaic3 shield he throws the noise of Tokyo back into our ears, transforming it into an aesthetic experience.
No specific phenomena are recognizable, though. The Merzbow noise is abstract, minimal, deprived of mimetic content. Its effect is immediate, an overload of the nervous system, not being able to sort out the information into categories of relevant and irrelevant – hence the normal reaction of fear and discomfort when confronted with Merzbow noise. "Noise is the unconsciousness of music", Merzbow states, in the same way as his other main interest, pornography and
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bondage, is the unconsciousness of sex.
Merzbow noise is linked with fear, conflict and aggression as in rock music, but defying any melodies, the pure noise does not incite the listener to ecstatic bliss, but remains hard and somewhat conceptual to most of its audience.4
Curd Duca: Touch
Curd Duca's "Touch" (1999)5 is a recent example of communicative noise, continuing a tradition of cut-up vocals that can be traced back to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). A female voice sings a line with a keyboard in the background, but we never hear it as a line, it sounds like the CD is damaged, causing it to stutter for a while and then jump to another stutter. The message is disturbed, almost indecipherable. The word "touch" is clear, though, several times manifest in its full length followed by a few notes before it collapses into the ongoing fragmentation. It is almost like a cubistic painting, a fractured view seeing things from different angles, constantly shifting its focus.
The music of this radical sample collage is beautiful. The vocal is gentle and sensually affectionate, singing the few notes of the sample in a longing way, as if reaching out to touch someone. Actually, after a reconstruction, the words seem to be "you'd be like heaven to touch". This message, this gesture, is too disturbed to be communicated. The disturbance is, of course, not really a device error, but it hints at the familiar sound of a CD player not being able to read the digital information on the disc.
A work like this could be seen as a reflection of a cultural situation in which clear communication is disturbed and direct exchange of affections is threatened. The undamaged sample would risk being too sentimental, too pathetic to survive as more than a cliché in a postmodern world of information overload. Cutting it into pieces and transforming its banal state-
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ment into a more disturbing beauty actually makes it more authentic by virtue of alienation.
In this piece, noise is not a certain acoustic quality, as in the other examples, but a distortion of the message and of the melody by use of malfunction-like effects
Towards an aesthetics of noise
In various ways, noise as a sensual, aesthetic phenomenon points out of the field of the subject as a divided entity, towards what could be called the transsubjective, that which transgresses the individual. This applies to the explosive ecstasy as well as the implosive intimacy. This transsubjective point is also bridging the gap between rock music, normally considered subjective, and electronica, normally considered objective. With noise, rock turns away from its standard focus of a subject expressing his/her feelings, towards a more anonymous state. This was manifested on stage by My Bloody Valentine, having no focus on the band members, who appear only as shadows in front of a big screen with abstract psychedelic films projected on it. The following reflections on noise as Dionysian ecstasy and as abjectal intimacy points in this direction.
The Dionysian and the sublime
The ecstasy of noise is predominantly aggressive and vehement, as the maelstrom of noise in Sonic Youth. This is often an aesthetization of violence and suffering, the noise being an ingredient in what one might call a Dionysian aesthetic. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Friedrich Nietzsche described the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two principles of aesthetic attitudes toward suffering, working together in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.
Apollo represents appearance, form, individuality, beauty and dream; the Apollonian aesthetics is an embellishment of suffering, a self-conscious lie, a veiling of
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cruelty by use of form and elegance, a semblance of beauty. Dionysus, on the other hand, represents ecstasy, being, will, intoxication and unity; the Dionysian aesthetics is a direct confrontation with the terrible foundation of being, an absurd will driving us all in our meaningless lives. In the Dionysian ecstasy individuality is transgressed6 in favor of identification with the universal will - a frightening yet blissful experience. Frightening, that is, because it is a death-like giving up of the Ego, if only for a few seconds; blissful in letting go of the responsibilities of being a subject. The Dionysian experience is a "metaphysical comfort", knowing that suffering is a necessary part of the effects of the eternal will – the destruction of things in order to create anew. In the Dionysian ecstasy one is no longer concerned with one's individual suffering, seeing instead things from the universal point of view.
In music, the ecstasy of noise is undoubtedly a Dionysian effect, as opposed to the Apollonian melody and form.7 As mentioned above, the German words Rausch (ecstasy) and Geräusch (noise) are related, pointing towards this fact. The Dionysian is that which is not totally controlled or formed, e.g. screams and noises. The Apollonian elements are seductive, inciting the listener to enter the ecstatic bliss of the Dionysian, enabling the listener to dare the confrontation with the dreadfulness of existence. Therefore, Nietzsche says, the Dionysian needs the Apollonian.
Merzbow is so demanding exactly because he refuses this; he does not soften the harshness of noise with any Apollonian elements. Listening to Merzbow is thus a very different experience from the Sonic Youth maelstrom.
One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity
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of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable.
Abject noise
As mentioned above, noises are the sounds that are discarded as being impure, unmusical. Music traditionally expurgates the dirty noise and fosters the pure tones. But noise belongs to the same pool of sounds from which music stems. Ideally, music is thus defining itself by a detachment from its origin. This is abjection, using the term coined by Julia Kristeva.
The abjects, in Kristeva's sense, are the rejections from the body: stool, sperm, spittle, snot, nail clippings etc., considered dirty and repulsive. The reason why we are (more or less) repelled by the abject is that it threatens our individuality, being neither subject nor object, but something in-between, confusing our delimitation as individuals. The bodily cleansing process is a way of upholding one's individuality, fearing the blur between the objective surroundings and ourselves. To confront ourselves with the abject is strongly ambivalent, a combination of pleasure and fear, reminding us at the same time of the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother and of death, the end of individuality.
Taking noise back, music confronts itself with its abject, plays with it, like a child playing with its stool, metaphorically speaking. This is perhaps a reason for the effects of My Bloody Valentine's music, combining extreme intimacy and noise into something very sweet, but also implementing the fear of this (almost incestuous) closeness.
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Noise as multiplicity
In his book Genèse the French philosopher Michel Serres develops an idea of the ultimate being-in-itself as noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive) is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude, an analogue to white noise. All concepts, all understanding of the world is an ordering of this chaos,8 this multiplicity, "noise." Serres uses the term "noise" with two meanings: the English (noise) and the old French word "noise," meaning quarrel. He also hints at the Greek, maritime origin, "nausea" (see above). The multiplicity is conflict-ridden and noisy.
Noise and conflict are normally closely related in music as well. This aspect of noise is the reason why it is often used to express anger, fear and violence. Noise in music belongs, of course, to the phenomenal world, but exists at the limits of our senses, pointing metonymically towards a more fundamental noise, the chaos of the pre-phenomenal world. When we are confronted with a massive dose of noise, we often create our own sounds in our heads, "phantomic sounds", as a desperate way of relating to the audible chaos.
There is also, I think, a more sociological perspective to this. In today's society it is impossible to take in all the information that surrounds us; we are constantly forced to sort out loads of information to be able to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. Information society is verging on noise society, a state in which the information, meant to convey knowledge, ends up losing the ability to speak at all. Our culture becomes taciturn without being silent, moving towards a noisy muteness.
So what?
I have often been asked whether noise is subversive. I tend towards the answer "no, not directly, but it has a critical poten-
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tial." If subversion is what punk imagined itself to be, a riot that shocks bourgeois culture, I do not see any such possibilities in music. It might even be questioned whether punk really had that kind of effect. In the present historical situation, youth culture riots are verging on kitsch. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most visible being that rebel youth has become a lifestyle segment in commercial marketing.
Noise does not have a fixed, aesthetic meaning. Its phenomenological character depends on the musical as well as institutional context in which it is integrated. As we have seen above, noise is for instance not always aggressive and loud. Still, there are some common features: noise tends to abandon subjectivity, individuality, rationality, homogeneity and control in favor of the objectively irrational, the pre- or non-subjective sublime, something unstable and complex. This is a marginal phenomenon and not a permanent realm for anyone to enter. Still, it has (or has had) the potential of being critical of smooth calculation, ascetic rationality and habitual life. Such a critique does not come automatically with noise, of course, but only when reflecting a historical situation and at the same time embodying what is culturally repressed.
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Notes:
(1) This brief essay is partly based on my comprensive research in Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(2) For an unfolding of the composed music part and especially the rock part, see Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(3) Apotropaism is a ritual way of warding off evil by depicting it, for instance by making an image of some evil threat. This is one of the most ancient motivations of art.
(4) Sometimes the hard-core noise audience experiences a certain trance effect, though.
(5) From the album "Elevator Music 2" (Mille Plateaux 1999).
(6) The word Ecstasy (derived from Greek) means "standing out (from oneself)".
(7) I am not following Nietzsche's connection of the Apollonian with poetry and the (metric) rhythm in music, making melody a Dionysian element. For an unfolding of the argument, see Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(8) Serres does not use the word chaos, lest being associated with chaos theory.
Literature:
Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror, 1982.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872.
Torben Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik 1996/97. Unpublished. (www.datanom.com/noise)
Michel Serres: Genèse, 1982.
Torben Sangild
Published by DATANOM
Edited by Pelle Krøgholt
ISBN 87-988955-0-8
Copyright 2002 by Sangild & DATANOM
All rights reserved
Contact: datanom@datanom.com
Link to Publisher: DATANOM
Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.
Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay. To give an exhaustive explanation of it, though, is not only beyond the limits of an essay, but seems to be fundamentally impossible due to the evasiveness of the matter.1 There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it. It is my hope that the following reflections are nevertheless able to sketch out an approach to understanding the important part noise plays in the music of today.
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After defining noise and giving a brief history of noise in music, I will take a closer look at Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Merzbow and Curd Duca as four very different aesthetic approaches to noise. Ranging from aggressive ecstasy to soft intimacy, from melodic sweetness to abstract hard-core noise, from the guitar to the computer, these examples serve to indicate the variety of noise in both rock music and electronica. Reflecting these in a broader perspective I will then turn to philosophical concepts such as the sublime, the Dionysian, multiplicity, and the abject.
What is noise?
Etymologically, the term "noise" in different Western languages (støj, bruit, Geräusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that the word "noise" comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but also to seasickness, and that the German Geräusch is derived from rauschen (the sough of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music.
A single definition of noise is not possible; instead I will provide three basic definitions: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition.
A. Acoustic noise
In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic
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metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that 'white noise' is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called "colored noise," ranging from "violet noise" (a bias on the high frequencies) to "purple noise" (a bias on the low frequencies).
B. Communicative noise
In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like "fuzztone", "overdrive", and "distortion" as an easy way to obtain the same effect.
In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier.
When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.
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C. Subjective noise
"Unpleasant sounds" – this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are very few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation.
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance. Artists, who deal with noise in their music, as well as their audience, have a different approach to white noise, no longer considering it a nuisance.
One might conclude from this that the subjective definition is not relevant to the aesthetic use of noise in music. But, as I have already suggested, that would be a hasty dismissal of the important tension you get from infusing the formerly negative. To reach a point where a harsh, white noise is not considered unpleasant demands a training of the senses to the point of being familiar with this expansion of musical sounds. Reaching that point, noise will still contain a certain power due to the tension of listening to what used to be dismissed as repulsive (cf. below on the abjective character of noise).
The history of noise – a brief sketch 2
The origin of music was in principle a process of purifying certain sounds by filtering out the irregular sounds, the noise. The church music of the Middle Ages was an extreme in this
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respect, allowing only the pure sound of the male voice and considering the interval of the third (today essentially consonant) a dissonance. The classical, Western tradition has (generally speaking) fostered instruments of pure sounds and maintained the exclusion of the impure, with some exceptions for dramatic effects (thunder, canons etc.). During the 19th century music became increasingly complex and dramatic, and at the same time the orchestra began to include more percussion instruments that were considered noisy. They were nevertheless far from what is today considered noise.
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto "The Art of Noise" in 1913. He constructed the so-called "intonarumori" (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.
Edgar Varèse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varèse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varèse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and
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hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises. This vision is still a long way from fulfillment.
After the Second World War musique concrète evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael König, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period. Since then, numerous composers have worked with acoustic as well as electronic noise.
Rock music and guitar noise
Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.
The deliberate use of these effects can be traced back to Link Wray's "Rumble" (1958), but it was garage bands like The Kingsmen, The Kinks and especially The Who, who made it an integral part of their sound. The great innovator, however, was undoubtedly Jimi Hendrix, who constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions.
Aesthetically, however, the influence on noise rock came not from Hendrix, but rather The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts. On tracks like "European Son" and "Sister Ray," the noise is
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alarming in ways that has made Velvet Underground a reference point for all noise rock.
In the 70s The Stooges continued the noisy garage tradition, combining it with free jazz elements, and paving the way for the punk rock movement. Lou Reed made his outstanding concept album Metal Machine Music (1975) – four vinyl sides of sheer guitar noise and nothing else, made partly as a provocation directed at the record company, the record has gained a reputation as a place for weird, noisy beauty. I will also mention Pere Ubu's legendary first single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (1975), one of the most disturbing pieces of rock music ever made, and the provocative Throbbing Gristle debut 2nd Annual Report (1977).
The term "noise rock" (in Danish: støjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called "the heterogeneous". This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. Post-punk thus tries to distance itself from the smoothness and cheerfulness of pop, though mostly without discarding its melodic qualities.
One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom. It began in New York under the label of "No Wave" in the late 70's and in Germany with Einstürzende Neubauten and other bands centered around "Die Geniale Dilletanten" around 1980. In the UK, actual noise rock did not emerge before 1985, when The Jesus & Mary Chain created the
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British, more melodic, variant.
It is not within the limits of this essay to give an overview of the noise rock and electronica scene and all its different sub-categories, but I will mention some of the most influential styles and names: Sonic Youth took off from guitar composer Glenn Branca to create their very own harmonic style and guitar techniques (see example below). Bands like Swans and Big Black used noise as a dark, hellish force in their aggressive, Gothic tales. Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. and others bridged the gap between post-punk and the impending grunge scene with their straightforward use of noisy guitars. My Bloody Valentine (see example below), A.R. Kane, Lush, Ride and many other British bands used guitar noise to create a more poetic, dreamy atmosphere, labeled 'dreampop' or "shoegazer". Band of Susans made a minimal, mantra-like use of guitar noise with a British equivalent in bands Loop and Spacemen 3. Young Gods and Ministry, among others, used the sampler as a noise generator. In Japan, a noise scene grew out of the 70's free jazz environment of Tokyo, featuring Keiji Haino, High Rise, The Boredoms, Merzbow and others.
By 1991 the development of guitar noise seemed to come to an end, culminating with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a worthy climax. Guitar noise had gone mainstream with blockbusters like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and the sound possibilities seemed permanently exhausted. The place for noise exploration was no longer to be found on the rock scene but rather in electronic music.
Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is "glitch", where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck. Oval is probably the most convincing glitch-artist, crea-
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ting a blurred atmosphere not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine. Only few electronic artists, such as Merzbow (see below), deal exclusively with noise.
Four music examples
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth made their debut at the so-called Noise Festival in New York, 1981, an event that marked the end of No Wave and the beginning of something new. With guitar composer Glenn Branca as their father figure, they set out to 'reinvent the guitar', considering the guitar a far richer instrument than normally acknowledged, containing a wide range of possibilities.
The guitar can be used as a percussion instrument, beating the strings with a broken drumstick, a screwdriver, or what-ever is at hand. Combining this effect with feedback, Sonic Youth created a bell-like, pealing sound. Every possibility of the instrument - the guitar, the pick-ups, the amplifier, even the electric plugs - were explored, and, as their most original characteristic, the strings were tuned differently, creating a new, more dissonant (sometimes even microtonal) harmonics, far from the general rock idiom. Sonic Youth developed an arsenal of more than 40 guitars each with its own tuning; often the two guitarists play with each their tuning at the same time.
A characteristic trait is what I shall call "the maelstrom of noise," in which the tune and rhythm break off into a whirl of noise, gradually intensifying tempo and volume, absorbing the listener into its ecstatic black hole. This chaotic vortex is in opposition to the structural, formal elements of music, exceeding the boundaries of the senses, although still controlled on a higher level. The maelstrom is at the same time an explosion of energy and an implosion of meaning, turning away from the distinct and semantic into the sublime and ecstatic.
The common effect of noise in music is the aggressive,
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raging expression also found in the maelstrom of Sonic Youth. Noise is a vehement means, reflecting inner and outer chaos and conflict. But, as the next example will show, noise can also be used to evoke a very different experience.
My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine also had the ambition of reinventing the guitar, albeit with entirely different means and effects than Sonic Youth. In their music, noise is not aggressive, but low-key. Noise becomes introvert, dreamy, almost languidly erotic. This especially goes for the album Loveless and the related ep's Glider and Tremolo.
Listening to My Bloody Valentine one encounters a diffuse blurred harmonics. The guitar chords are gliding, swimming in a muddy sea of distortion. The guitarists' strokes are cut off in the mixing process, so that every sound seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. My Bloody Valentine extract all kinds of sound from the guitar, manipulating it in different ways, also by means of the sampler, so that, for instance, feedback can be transformed into a whistling, melodic instrument. The vocals are placed in the background of the sound stage on the same level as the other sounds, making the words almost undecipherable. The noise on Loveless is extraordinarily integrated in the music, not as a distinct layer of sound and not placed in opposition to an otherwise structural clarity.
All these effects put together with the sleepy motion and sweet, dreamy tunes, form an unreal, disorienting sound picture, "the-not-quite-really-there-sound", as they themselves have called it. The dense sound makes no illusion of an acoustic space. It is claustrophobic; almost like being in an infinitely intimate place. There, the music affects you like the most coveted, yet vulnerable, states: tenderness, love, sex. You have to get very close, to immerse yourself in the
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web of noises to be able to let the vocals whisper sweet words in your ear. The blurriness of My Bloody Valentine's sound is like the blurriness of getting so close to an object that you lose the outlines of it. And this object is as soft as a tender body.
But the disorientation takes the experience even further than a concrete sexual encounter, towards a more abstract, impersonal intimateness. There is not really an I-you-relation (as in a normal pop song), there is no room for such a distance; the intimacy is overwhelming, ambivalent and transgressive of any subjectivity, suggesting something akin to an incestuous, narcissistic or pre-oedipal relation.
My Bloody Valentine has made a new psychedelia without turning to the effects of the old; a psychedelia of noise. At their live concerts the band experimented with ending the performance with a sustained dose of sheer noise. They developed this stunt to perfection, culminating on the Loveless tour 1992, where a piercing, dazzling white light was thrown out into the faces of the audience while the pure noise took on new dimensions in volume and lasted for more than 15 minutes. This was a stark contrast to the soft, colorful preceding concert and provoked two different reactions: half of the audience left in protest or aural pain, while the other half stayed to find out what this would bring. And the experiences were very special. People underwent different ecstatic states, all pertaining to the trans-individual or pre-subjective: out-of-body-experiences, nirvana-like states, visions of being swallowed up by a giant vagina; and my own: hearing phantom lullabies that I've never heard before – very detailed and continuing to play in my head when I got home in bed. These experiences are not only an effect of an overload of the nervous system but are also inextricably tied up to the preceding concert, opening the mind towards the most intimate feelings.
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Merzbow
Under the name of Merzbow, Tokyo based Masami Akita has produced pure noise music since 1979, and especially in the 90's he has released a staggering number of electronically based releases, culminating in the 50 CD (+ artwork and CD-ROM) set Merzbox, a giant compilation of his finest work. Not only very productive, but also very consistent, he is constantly operating close to the limit of what can meaningfully be called music. Starting from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, considered by many a terminal point for music, he exploits the varieties of noise without supplying it with any melodic material. Merzbow's music is an ear-splitting assault on the body, at least, that is, until the nervous system is allowed to gradually relax from the state of alarm and enter the world of sensing extreme noise as music.
The name Merzbow is derived from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau (aka Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a work in progress built by the use of found garbage material. If noise is the trash of music, the sounds that we traditionally discard as non-musical, then Merzbow is a trash artist, tirelessly seeking odd and convulsive beauty in the garbage cans of sonic waste. And, like Schwitters, Merzbow's art is essentially urban, reacting to the overload of sensuous impressions in the big city. As a sort of apotropaic3 shield he throws the noise of Tokyo back into our ears, transforming it into an aesthetic experience.
No specific phenomena are recognizable, though. The Merzbow noise is abstract, minimal, deprived of mimetic content. Its effect is immediate, an overload of the nervous system, not being able to sort out the information into categories of relevant and irrelevant – hence the normal reaction of fear and discomfort when confronted with Merzbow noise. "Noise is the unconsciousness of music", Merzbow states, in the same way as his other main interest, pornography and
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bondage, is the unconsciousness of sex.
Merzbow noise is linked with fear, conflict and aggression as in rock music, but defying any melodies, the pure noise does not incite the listener to ecstatic bliss, but remains hard and somewhat conceptual to most of its audience.4
Curd Duca: Touch
Curd Duca's "Touch" (1999)5 is a recent example of communicative noise, continuing a tradition of cut-up vocals that can be traced back to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). A female voice sings a line with a keyboard in the background, but we never hear it as a line, it sounds like the CD is damaged, causing it to stutter for a while and then jump to another stutter. The message is disturbed, almost indecipherable. The word "touch" is clear, though, several times manifest in its full length followed by a few notes before it collapses into the ongoing fragmentation. It is almost like a cubistic painting, a fractured view seeing things from different angles, constantly shifting its focus.
The music of this radical sample collage is beautiful. The vocal is gentle and sensually affectionate, singing the few notes of the sample in a longing way, as if reaching out to touch someone. Actually, after a reconstruction, the words seem to be "you'd be like heaven to touch". This message, this gesture, is too disturbed to be communicated. The disturbance is, of course, not really a device error, but it hints at the familiar sound of a CD player not being able to read the digital information on the disc.
A work like this could be seen as a reflection of a cultural situation in which clear communication is disturbed and direct exchange of affections is threatened. The undamaged sample would risk being too sentimental, too pathetic to survive as more than a cliché in a postmodern world of information overload. Cutting it into pieces and transforming its banal state-
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ment into a more disturbing beauty actually makes it more authentic by virtue of alienation.
In this piece, noise is not a certain acoustic quality, as in the other examples, but a distortion of the message and of the melody by use of malfunction-like effects
Towards an aesthetics of noise
In various ways, noise as a sensual, aesthetic phenomenon points out of the field of the subject as a divided entity, towards what could be called the transsubjective, that which transgresses the individual. This applies to the explosive ecstasy as well as the implosive intimacy. This transsubjective point is also bridging the gap between rock music, normally considered subjective, and electronica, normally considered objective. With noise, rock turns away from its standard focus of a subject expressing his/her feelings, towards a more anonymous state. This was manifested on stage by My Bloody Valentine, having no focus on the band members, who appear only as shadows in front of a big screen with abstract psychedelic films projected on it. The following reflections on noise as Dionysian ecstasy and as abjectal intimacy points in this direction.
The Dionysian and the sublime
The ecstasy of noise is predominantly aggressive and vehement, as the maelstrom of noise in Sonic Youth. This is often an aesthetization of violence and suffering, the noise being an ingredient in what one might call a Dionysian aesthetic. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Friedrich Nietzsche described the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two principles of aesthetic attitudes toward suffering, working together in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.
Apollo represents appearance, form, individuality, beauty and dream; the Apollonian aesthetics is an embellishment of suffering, a self-conscious lie, a veiling of
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cruelty by use of form and elegance, a semblance of beauty. Dionysus, on the other hand, represents ecstasy, being, will, intoxication and unity; the Dionysian aesthetics is a direct confrontation with the terrible foundation of being, an absurd will driving us all in our meaningless lives. In the Dionysian ecstasy individuality is transgressed6 in favor of identification with the universal will - a frightening yet blissful experience. Frightening, that is, because it is a death-like giving up of the Ego, if only for a few seconds; blissful in letting go of the responsibilities of being a subject. The Dionysian experience is a "metaphysical comfort", knowing that suffering is a necessary part of the effects of the eternal will – the destruction of things in order to create anew. In the Dionysian ecstasy one is no longer concerned with one's individual suffering, seeing instead things from the universal point of view.
In music, the ecstasy of noise is undoubtedly a Dionysian effect, as opposed to the Apollonian melody and form.7 As mentioned above, the German words Rausch (ecstasy) and Geräusch (noise) are related, pointing towards this fact. The Dionysian is that which is not totally controlled or formed, e.g. screams and noises. The Apollonian elements are seductive, inciting the listener to enter the ecstatic bliss of the Dionysian, enabling the listener to dare the confrontation with the dreadfulness of existence. Therefore, Nietzsche says, the Dionysian needs the Apollonian.
Merzbow is so demanding exactly because he refuses this; he does not soften the harshness of noise with any Apollonian elements. Listening to Merzbow is thus a very different experience from the Sonic Youth maelstrom.
One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity
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of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable.
Abject noise
As mentioned above, noises are the sounds that are discarded as being impure, unmusical. Music traditionally expurgates the dirty noise and fosters the pure tones. But noise belongs to the same pool of sounds from which music stems. Ideally, music is thus defining itself by a detachment from its origin. This is abjection, using the term coined by Julia Kristeva.
The abjects, in Kristeva's sense, are the rejections from the body: stool, sperm, spittle, snot, nail clippings etc., considered dirty and repulsive. The reason why we are (more or less) repelled by the abject is that it threatens our individuality, being neither subject nor object, but something in-between, confusing our delimitation as individuals. The bodily cleansing process is a way of upholding one's individuality, fearing the blur between the objective surroundings and ourselves. To confront ourselves with the abject is strongly ambivalent, a combination of pleasure and fear, reminding us at the same time of the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother and of death, the end of individuality.
Taking noise back, music confronts itself with its abject, plays with it, like a child playing with its stool, metaphorically speaking. This is perhaps a reason for the effects of My Bloody Valentine's music, combining extreme intimacy and noise into something very sweet, but also implementing the fear of this (almost incestuous) closeness.
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Noise as multiplicity
In his book Genèse the French philosopher Michel Serres develops an idea of the ultimate being-in-itself as noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive) is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude, an analogue to white noise. All concepts, all understanding of the world is an ordering of this chaos,8 this multiplicity, "noise." Serres uses the term "noise" with two meanings: the English (noise) and the old French word "noise," meaning quarrel. He also hints at the Greek, maritime origin, "nausea" (see above). The multiplicity is conflict-ridden and noisy.
Noise and conflict are normally closely related in music as well. This aspect of noise is the reason why it is often used to express anger, fear and violence. Noise in music belongs, of course, to the phenomenal world, but exists at the limits of our senses, pointing metonymically towards a more fundamental noise, the chaos of the pre-phenomenal world. When we are confronted with a massive dose of noise, we often create our own sounds in our heads, "phantomic sounds", as a desperate way of relating to the audible chaos.
There is also, I think, a more sociological perspective to this. In today's society it is impossible to take in all the information that surrounds us; we are constantly forced to sort out loads of information to be able to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. Information society is verging on noise society, a state in which the information, meant to convey knowledge, ends up losing the ability to speak at all. Our culture becomes taciturn without being silent, moving towards a noisy muteness.
So what?
I have often been asked whether noise is subversive. I tend towards the answer "no, not directly, but it has a critical poten-
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tial." If subversion is what punk imagined itself to be, a riot that shocks bourgeois culture, I do not see any such possibilities in music. It might even be questioned whether punk really had that kind of effect. In the present historical situation, youth culture riots are verging on kitsch. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most visible being that rebel youth has become a lifestyle segment in commercial marketing.
Noise does not have a fixed, aesthetic meaning. Its phenomenological character depends on the musical as well as institutional context in which it is integrated. As we have seen above, noise is for instance not always aggressive and loud. Still, there are some common features: noise tends to abandon subjectivity, individuality, rationality, homogeneity and control in favor of the objectively irrational, the pre- or non-subjective sublime, something unstable and complex. This is a marginal phenomenon and not a permanent realm for anyone to enter. Still, it has (or has had) the potential of being critical of smooth calculation, ascetic rationality and habitual life. Such a critique does not come automatically with noise, of course, but only when reflecting a historical situation and at the same time embodying what is culturally repressed.
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Notes:
(1) This brief essay is partly based on my comprensive research in Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(2) For an unfolding of the composed music part and especially the rock part, see Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(3) Apotropaism is a ritual way of warding off evil by depicting it, for instance by making an image of some evil threat. This is one of the most ancient motivations of art.
(4) Sometimes the hard-core noise audience experiences a certain trance effect, though.
(5) From the album "Elevator Music 2" (Mille Plateaux 1999).
(6) The word Ecstasy (derived from Greek) means "standing out (from oneself)".
(7) I am not following Nietzsche's connection of the Apollonian with poetry and the (metric) rhythm in music, making melody a Dionysian element. For an unfolding of the argument, see Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik.
(8) Serres does not use the word chaos, lest being associated with chaos theory.
Literature:
Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror, 1982.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872.
Torben Sangild: Støjrock og støjens æstetik 1996/97. Unpublished. (www.datanom.com/noise)
Michel Serres: Genèse, 1982.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
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