part three

Many of the modes and strategies within contemporary sound composition and sonic paradigms, 57 most of them, can be, one way or another, traced to several of the seeds planted within the so-called "music History" at least in the past one hundred years or so. Or in other words, many of the current thematic, structural and combinatory aspects of music as we know it today, 58 deal with thematic, structural and combinatory patterns 59 formulated, one way or another, in many past experiences. And this independently from any idea of voluntary and pragmatical consecution and consequentiality among the "parts". Of course this is a very partial view of a development of music, if any development can be traced, as it only deals with a specific areal condition of music, i.e. those forms of sound organization pertaining to the western cultural world. 60 Many of these seeds, therefore, aren't and cannot be taken just as pure steps into a linear evolutional trajectory, but are sections and sequences, which latitude correlates with attractions from different cultures as well as their own. So that any idea ofprogress, of development, crushes against the inevitable view that on a purely "social science" scale, musics are culture-specific, in that they rely on semantics and semiotics pertaining to the single cultural evolutions. In this view the idea, as we will somehow underline later, that noise is some kind of "gained" structure within music, is necessarily a condition strictly part of a history of western world, and specifically of that history devised within academies and their "secular" surroundings. Noise 61 already is, has been and most probably will be, part of the "language" of many different cultural forms, of many music histories, both within western worlds 62 and within many other cultures in the whole world. 63 But such seeds are mostly only signs to many authors of nowadays, within the strongly post-modernist attitude they nevertheless imply in their work; an attitude devoted to signs as if they were natural objects. In many instances, most current instances, these seeds 64 have actually led to differentiated forms of approach to sound matters, which rely on their sedimental nature as to some paratactical or paragraphical idea of sound architecture. They look more into form as a linguistic syntax, 65 than to form as structure, something also Boulez himself somehow declared66 All the more, many times these forms still rely on reductive, "hindered" ideas of sound and its modules, on notional categories pertaining to and derived from Mensuralist and Modalist forms of sound taxonomy, which have so strongly influenced and guided European musics of the past six centuries. After all it seems that the basic notions of a dialectics 67 between sound and noise still persists nowadays mostly unconstrained, notwithstanding assorted different naïve statements we encounter so often. We can look at current implications within contemporary sound activities as signs remained after the XX century's cultural dissipation, 68 and when we can encounter authors who can treat sound as a phenomenological morphology, and not as a referential sign, they seem to be fortunate isolated cases, rather than part of some specific current.
To have a more proper view of this debate, we should at least explore a little short history (one possible history) of the persistence/resurgence of a notion like "noise," 69 as this can give us some idea of the fundamental courses of action that music has taken in the past few decades, after all. But more than the simple notion of noise as formulated by many musical currents and the scientific world, we are interested in looking at those experiences, where noise has been considered in its morphological nature and which have worked with the consequences of this nature, as opposed to notions of noise as a drama element. 70

Academic history tends to teach us music as another object of Natural History. So the history of music is basically traced back to monodic chant of early Middle Ages, 71 and through several evolutions of forms and structures, contents and themes, 72 this tracing leads us, by steps and "progresses," up to the various contemporary trends. As it is more than obvious, 73 this line of evolution only takes care of one realm of musics, namely the one pertained to schools, be them within monasteries in the beginning, or academies subsequently. Though within this geographically and methodologically reductive view, 74 noise entered the realm of music basically with Russolo's Intonarumori in 1913. 75 It was the first time within "institutionalized" music that noise was conceived as a sonic form in itself, though in the ingenuous and didactic view of Futurists. Around that "early step," 76 noise gained relentlessly some preeminent position within sound composition, opening the formal discourse to instability, though it is only rather recently that this has proliferated into a value in itself. 77

From a socio-historical point of view, noise in itself represents the introduction into music of a "disruptive" sign, 78 of the unpitched against a traditional measurable sign's system. 79 Since then, noise in itself shouldn't represent any longer simply a timbral feature added to the orchestral colours. 80 This condition, this rupture implied a
subsequent rupture within the apparatus of music compositional and performative attitudes. The introduction of the "instability" of noise into music has determined several "reactions" and "actions", due to the necessity of aligning the systems to the "new sign." 81 We can notice these alignments for the very first time within the atonal and "serialist" schools, 82 where this instability has had to be somehow domesticated, or displaced, via a progressive domination of number over the sonic matter. Though numbers have always been part of music history, we can just think of Pythagoras and Aristoxenos e.g. and their influence over the whole Ancient Greek modes, 83 with serialism numbers have been assigned a status of absolute rationale behind composition itself. Of course this was nothing but the natural consequence of Romantic and post-Romantic ideas of sound as sentimental sign, which after its Impressionistic convulsions, 84 reemerged, in its serial representation, into structure as "sentimental" norm. 85 Music notions and patterning emerged during those early stages of the introduction of noise are, of course, part of questions still open today; they still retain the gross of their value, at least in that such questions have shown how sound can be exposed to noise 86 without loosing the threads of structure as continuity of action. 87 Though many of the experiences appeared in those early times of noise "epiphanies", were strongly encumbered with obsessions into the musicological realm, 88 and though to a "stoical" listening 89 they show so much of their limits, at the same time they convey many topics within the noise discourse, which have a large part in nowadays theoretical questioning. 90

Subsequently, 91 in a very innocent and rather illusory way, noise was taken as "progenitor" to the idea of indeterminacy 92 and "improvisation" as freer strategies to conceal sound behind noise. 93 Though improvisation is anything but new, as we easily see in much of the "folk" approach to music practice, within the academical discourse this was actually a way to reestablish a change in the course of musicological realm, by introducing 94 a practice from an ideological standpoint: the "individual freedom" of the musician, 95 as opposed to the inhibited role of the classic instrumentalist. 96

Almost all these "steps" have inevitably formed, and primed, the various parallel developments in music that since the 1960s have been spreading over different generational and intra-generational currents. But each current has tried, all the same, to conceal such steps within their own merits, building up some form of "etiquette" 97 with an ever increasing dependency of noise from stereotyped conceptions of its structure, and into that amnemonic paradigm I have tried to sketch out. Obviously
such "gradients" cannot be simply expunged from the body of music practice. They constantly show up within works, even though often unrecognized by the "hands" of those treating them. They appear as relative backgrounds to many of the "theoretical" presuppositions more or less voluntarily exposed in works; it is sometime rather pathetic to see authors displaying their array of "novelties", which often only speak for already exposed and misplaced ideas, and most of the time structural as well as sonic consumed notions.

When in the '60s the forms of the musical edifice grew up above the sound itself 98 as a further gradient from the serialist explosion of signs, 99 some unorthodox authors, out of a divergent attitude to time and structures, and attentive in gathering knowledge from different fields, started demonstrating to academies as well as the whole art-world, that sound is not aparadigm of history. As an historical form, sound manifests its backgrounds, yet being at the same time phenomenological form, its relation to culture 100 is of a "biological" nature. These authors, not being a movement, expanded through the different fields, gaining spaces as they flourished, together with the proliferation of the obvious corollary of "decadent" forms of mannerism and "parrotry." 101 All this happened outside the academies as well as within them, at least within the less orthodox and parochial sectors. And it happened partly despite the very results many of these authors have been able to convey. 102 Of course the conditions "leading" 103 these authors to elaborate and purport such principles, were clearly visible in the society of their time, still fibrillating around idealistic, though not yet hunchbacked, thrusts to renovation. 104 They were sufficiently aware of the conditions history was "revealing", and they have been able to supply history with variables, which gained to history a non-semiotic notion of sound, abolishing the abstract division between sound and noise. If I can mention some name I would think of Kluster e.g. 105 In the messy scene of late '60s German underground, the very many surfaces, coming up from the various several notional ambivalences present at that time, 106 melted into various muddled sound experiences and forms. Kluster focused their work into a clear path, which naturally owes something to its intrinsic past, though working with fundamentally heretical divergent strategies. 107 In Kluster the electrification of the sound sources, especially via contact microphones, was part of the process of noise unconcealment within musical structures and functional to it, quite unlike the exhibition of possibilities and associative probabilities of someone like Cage 108 or Kagel. 109 In this way noise started to enter music practice from non-academic realms, opening the art-world to new forms of research and their consolidation into equidistant worldwide experiences, which since late '70s constantly propagated into the present experimental musics. 110

After and within the "caesura" operated by atonality to the uniformity of "western music history", 111 no shared landmarks were present within the academic and populist cultural bodies, to enable the listener to deal with some sonic matter devoted more to its materiality than to "pseudo-social" needs. 112 Such absence of canonic precepts within the new experiences, has somehow been a limit, though an inevitable one. In such an absence the experiments bore within themselves a lot of residual mass and residual energy. This residue was no structural part of the "new" notions, but seemed to be all the same implied, as a kind of key stone to the comprehensibility of those sonic actions, both for the listener and the authors' sociology, if I can say so. Undoubtedly many of the experiences occasioned during these time "gradients", were experiments in the true sense of the word, and as such most of the time they reveal much of the naïvety and "inoffensiveness" of being just experiments, rather than cultural forms.

Similar was also the case for the early "pioneers" in the field, as we can easily understand by analyzing the concerts for Intonarumori of Futurists from 1913 till 1921, 113 or closely observing Pierre Schaeffer's early experiments of 1948-52. Though Schaeffer himself affirmed to be more interested in approaching "natural" sounds 114 not as referential and evocative signs of a naturalistic character, but as pure 'sound objects', he anyway created small sonic results which were more sketches of possible compositions than compositions themselves (as he himself subsequently noted). 115 In a same vein, though on another path, Edgar Varèse early approaches to music compositions started with a well declared intention of absorbing into the music body the sounds and noises from reality, 116 though avoiding the "naturalistic" or picturesque effects of some of his contemporaries, like Charles Ives or Georges Antheil. 117 But his results were very much anchored to the tone behind noise, and his practice strongly hindered by the "orchestral waste." 118

During the early XX century, alongside with the atonal and dodecaphonic school, the rather peripheral microtonal schools 119 tended as well, in their historical contingency, to move away from, or to enlarge the diatonic forms, by exploring the tone in its monadic nature, and in this following suggestions coming from folkloric or other culture's experiences with different musical systems - pentatonal, esatonal and generically microtonal, of course. Though the results were vaguely nostalgic, 120 this "concern" still appears as an open question to many contemporary artists, who mostly seem not to realize the effects of such an idea, 121 and its limits. 122 In many cases, like in the 'Just Intonation' movement, 123 the final result is of a certain obsession with microtonality, as a purist approach 124 to music cultures and to a naïve belief about the "naturality" of certain scales or certain tunings over others. Likewise other "pioneers", or rather "pseudo-pioneers" exploited, within an "entertainment" aesthetic, 125 those early experiments with noise and tones and their relative cultural currents. They employed the heretical notions at hand, 126 and above all the suggestions taken from such notions, into a cosmetic, conservative and illusory exercise of noise. And from the very early examples, 127 this was a "trend" spreading, or better retained into a body of musics, also of a more recent appearance, arrogating themselves some hypothetical role within a panorama of "noise advocacy." 128 Western musical rhetoric, with all its habits and procedures, was still very active within all those music works. They still reflected the whole bunch of its dogmas, and not in marginal aspects. But those early experiments, together with subsequent developments in electronic and electroacoustic musics, 129 were all the same seeds to the introduction, within the body of musical composition, of truly heterodox notions of sound matter itself, and in this sense they liberated noise into music, so to say.
Trying to have a look at the present situation of the contemporary musics, something we could "label" experimental musics or electroacoustic musics, 130 thus to the situation of these last two decades, 131 we can constantly see how the procedural path of noise as structure within music forms, scattered among many differentiated and almost nuclear currents. Something like a heterogeneous mosaic made up of single grains, juncture points, groups, galaxies, sometime herds, clans, even castes. And more than often these, in part or in flocks, seem to rarely recognize their "true" predecessors, 132 mostly relying on the last marketed epigones of those experiments, on their popularized forms or on the more "suggestive" images portrayed by much of the literature around the subject. What we unfortunately see in many chances, are single authors, at times small movements, at times parades, more devoted to reestablish the dichotomous hierarchy between sound as a phenomenological morphology and sign as a socio-cultural dynamics. 133 At the same time they practice the reevaluation, or consolidation, of the
ontology of expression 134 against and over the historical attributes, 135 using of the noise only the vocabulary, not the morphology itself. 136 In this way, a reduction of noise to form and custom is accomplished. Such process 137 more than often has been conducive to a reemergence of those notional categories, which were to be reasonably effective within the pre-atonal systems; 138 beaten notions like rhythm, harmony and melody, in themselves historically determined cultural and musical categories, levitating once again as "natural conditions" of sound.
This inscription, within the body of music, of systems simply differentiated in measures, can only produce anagrammatic shifts in a syntax, which is still retained as it was in the last centuries. Shifts of an "exotic" character, so to say, not affecting the perceptual categories of so many "inattentive" listeners and unfortunately, most of the time, authors as well. So, in a certain way, many of the "noise" movements in music, arrived after the '50s "rupture," and investing many realms of music practice, but mostly the non-academic worlds, have been formally involved with all those seeds. But, while some authors were moving along personal and structurally elaborated maps, 139 in several cases many of those movements projected the very surface of "noise" onto a basically populist compass, 140 most of the times just revolving around the very idea of dramatized noise, 141 where the nature of noise was just enslaved to some social paraphrastic criticism. During the early and mid-'80s, some of these currents progressively moved outside this early "sociology of noise." In the worst cases this idea was just reexposed under various counterfeits: some authors repeatedly embracing neo-tonal mannerisms, veiled by many esoteric revivals; others reheating and rehashing "hardcore" experiences in some kind of "post-bruitist" intonation. 142 Fortunately however, some other author followed post-structuralist or post-constructivist inferences, in some cases growing into mature and theoretically "evolved" forms. 143 After some sort of stagnation of late '80s, where the structure of noise mostly remained just a matter of illusion within the many "revivalists" of this or that area, 144
early to mid-'90s have seen, together with more interesting personal paths, 145 the development of various undercurrents, ranging from "post-tonality" to "post-digitalism," 146 involving noise as ingrained district of sonic architectures, though too often "ornamented" with lots of neo-impressionist and neo-naturalistic intentionalities. Due to these reserves of nineteenth century perceptual and gravitational norms, in several cases many of these evolving ground motives, flowed into some of the most luxuriant and vapid recent trends, 147 where the tropes of noise and "informal" paradigms have almost been just a way to "embellish" an otherwise vacant groundwork, wholly coiled around a technological fetishism, bordering the dynamics of fashion world. 148
notes:
57 meant in its large implications. back
58 and by reason of logical conclusions I am largely speaking of experimental, electroacoustic musics. back
59 models and theoretical approximations. back
60 I have adopted the strategy of remaining within the boundaries of the western historical patterns, because an analysis, which had also included all the developments of "non-western" musics (all musics of the whole world), and their primary or secondary influences, would have brought this text into a quite different path, obscuring in part the reasons behind it. In any case it should be taken for granted (and discussed elsewhere, when possible), that many western musics owe as much of their structural and ideological evolution to some "non-western" realms (namely India, China, Middle East, Africa especially), as these owe to western music itself. And it should be taken for granted that many of the "conquests" of western music represent common experiences in other cultures (especially those of more marginal areas), making for a very relative image of "development." back
61 a notion of noise is undoubtedly culture-specific. English noise is from Lat. nausea < Gr. nausía 'sea-sickness' e.g., with an elementary notion of disturbance. Unlike e.g. Italian rumore from Lat. rumor 'a rustle, murmur, vague sound' (from which English rumour), connected to Greek ôruô 'to howl' and orumagdos 'din, loud noise' and related to Sanskrit root ru- 'roar' and ravas 'uproar'. Noise, scientifically speaking, can be defined as an elastic oscillation of the air with no constant frequency and intensity. As it is clear, anyway, this elementary level of the notion can be applied to most complex sounds including common musical ones. So it is only coupled with the notion of disturbance that it entered the various fields (electrical, electromagnetic, information, juridical etc., musical as well). And in this sense it is a mistaken notion. back
62 musics from non-academic and non-popular realms, like the so-called and badly called "traditional musics" or "folk musics," where noise e.g. in the form of unpitched instruments has been alive for centuries if not millennia. back
63 and I am not speaking only of "percussions" as source of noise into music, of course. back
64 and seeds are not lines. back
65 despite some naïve statements of the contrary. back
66 though mostly only declared, see also his Eventuellement text. back
67 of a bipolar, dichotomous and not dialogic relation. back
68 this was only partially a disruption. The various modern schools, from dodecaphony onward, have mainly scattered the formal discourse into some myriad possibilities, though too often coming back to the tonal pivot and academic paradigms. Their musics contain much of the previous historical procedures, though altered within the "new" principles. back
69 at least within western musical history, as we have said above (see note 60). back
70 of noise as a sign. back
71 sacred musics to a large extent (of course after a "protohistory and prehistory" of music, to which ancient cultures were confined). back
72 from monody to antiphony, polyphony (from organum and diaphony, to counterpoint), to dodecaphony... etc. Of course not so simplistic. back
73 is it? back
74 the reasons behind this "reduced" view can be found in note 60. back
75 this was a natural conglomeration of the various conceptual turmoils of those pre-war times, and noise took onto itself not only its acoustic consequences, but also all the sociological standpoints behind Futurist (and then Dadaist) vitalistic "revolt." It is also true that it was not "technology" itself that strictly motivated changes in music practice and theory. Though of course the advent of the "machine" in daily and productive life was one "motor" for the consideration of noise as soundand phonograph technology, magnetic tapes, and then digital sampling have been incorporated in music practice and have partly originated some specific context, it is also true that this has happened not "chez Technology," not just after technology availability, but only when technology gained reasons for its use within music (see Kahn's first two chapters, pp. 301 - 308, of his otherwise questionable Audio Art in the Deaf Century). All the more the "advent" of noise and reasonings about it, sprang up also from changes in perspective concerning sound itself, derived from the anthropological notions of man, which from Lamarck and Darwin were entering "common sense," also through the seminal treatise On the Sensations of Tone (1875) by H. von Helmholtz. back
76 previously, as it happened in some Romantic or Post-Romantic exponent, a truly occasional use of "noise" (basically oleographic expedients) was intended as a mere timbral cosmetic, an element of suggestion and evocation. An "image" more than a sound. back
77 this could almost be true even in its "unconscious" use within some recent musical trend, which, by reason of a commercial logic, has been taken too often more seriously than it deserved, since it actually shows more of a Romantic attitude (see previous note), than even of a modernistic one. back
78 at least as conceived in early '50s theoretical discourse and the socio-historiographic point of view of academic and post-academic western music cultures, of course (see Adorno). back
79 unpitchable and for this reason unmeasurable. back
80 noise had been "progressively" expelled from the sonic palette available to the "orchestra" through various repeated "reductions" in the orchestral instrumentarium (both traditional, institutionalized and enlarged), only to be "recently" regained therein, as a cosmetic impressionistic procedure, to drape and primp standards. back
81 in fact a "non-sign." back
82 from Schönberg, Webern and the idea of non-hierarchy within the tonal system around 1908-15 (subsequently institutionalized within the dodecaphonic norm, during 1920s), to Boulez, Stockhausen etc. and the serial and "electronic" ideas of matrices as structure, mostly around 1948-60. back
83 Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian and "by-products." back
84 for example in Debussy, especially around 1892-1902. back
85 abstraction taken as a new mystical myth. back
86 and 'sound as periodical structure' to 'noise as non-periodical structure.' back
87 of structure as morphological unfolding. back
88 engagement with "measures". back
89 "stoical" in its original value, i.e. detached from passion, from pathos. back
90 or so it should be. Questions related to the nature of sonic perception (Fourier-based vs. stochastic analysis, or reductionist vs. gestalt perception), to the informational vs. morphological stability of systems, to the role of instability (local discontinuities) within complex forms, to the analytical vs. synthetical forms of listening, to the role of mesostructures within sound organization, to the relation between sound and sound-source, between sound and sound-field, and so on. back
91 and partly coevally. back
92 a Cageian idea, it is usually said, though he is "just" the one who brought and applied it into the populist realm of the concert market. back
93 or in other words, to hide noise into sound. back
94 reintroducing it, of course. back
95 the "interpreter." back
96 as Griffiths writes: «where improvisation, in Globokar's terms, is about self-discovery and self-assertion, Stockhausen's stated concern was with finding music outside the self: it is the difference between autobiography and prayer». Griffiths, p. 205. The "improvisation" instances are in many cases also a result of issues pertaining to painting, as represented e.g. in the early work of Georges Mathieu. back
97 more than some form of "style". back
98 when the "conceptual dogma" was the norm within the art world, either in Fluxus or minimal art or conceptual art etc. back
99 with the almost contemporaneous explosion of "graphism" in scores, see e.g. Earle Brown's score for December 1952, or Sylvano Bussotti's Per tre sul piano (1959), or Cornelius Cardew's Treatise (1963-7). back
100 meant in its anthropological notion. back
101 within the information explosion which literally invested western cultures, at least initially. back
102 as it often happens, the maturity of a work is a rare object, which deals with time (with histories) as a form. Many works tend to grasp to their present, both in terms of "technological" and formal vogue. back
103 and enabling. back
104 probably the last thrusts of modernism. back
105 around 1969 Hans Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius and Konrad Schnitzler created the ensemble Kluster, which together with several "concerts" (closer to events of "free" sounds and noise, than any "avant-garde" concert), realized 3 albums till 1971. Then Schnitzler went on his own career and Roedelius and Moebius moved into Cluster and their subsequent and parallel activities (with M. Rother in Harmonia, 1973-76, with B. Eno, 1976-78, and solo careers). back
106 happening, improvisation, conceptual art, electronic music, minimal art and so on, with people like Joseph Beuys e.g. (Schnitzler was a former student of him). back
107 Kluster state this legacy, and their role within it, on the liner notes to their albums. See for instance Klopfzeichen (1970): «The ensemble Kluster is a progressive Pop-Group. It embodies perhaps the most radical German underground-music. Its playing technique is related to those of Stockhausen and "Gruppo Nuova Consonanza". [...] It consists of a teasing, hoarse and gross-structured noise-continuum», in a typical manifesto-like language. Direct reference, even something more than on the mere "technical" side of the question, could easily be made to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I (1964). back
108 for example in Cartridge Music (1960), or in the Variations series (1963-68). back
109 in Acustica (1968-70), in Staatstheater (1967-70) etc. back
110 obviously full of many manneristic and parrotistic behaviours as before (and in scale!). back
111 to the "regularity" of western musics. A regularity reemerging in the ever-topical nostalgia of pastoral and accommodating diatonic and measured forms, constantly reappearing to the surface of music practice. back
112 of course academies and markets dealt with their own "codices," and tried and still try to lead the different unorthodox approaches (practices and theories) back to the established norms. The same is still occurring in ethnomusicology, with other culture's musics. And the same is generally occurring to many aspects pertaining to cultural questions. Reduction to one's own (visual, hearing, cultural etc.) models as a form of "natural behaviour." back
113 these were unfortunately ineffectual and innocuous events for the morphology of music practice, apart from their socially provocative results, too often closer to circus than to sound (despite the intentions of some of those Futurists, see Russolo's manifesto). back
114 sounds actually taken from the sound-effect gramophone-discs archives of R.T.F. back
115 see the interview (dated 2.5.1986) to Pierre Schaeffer by T. Hodgkinson, in RRQuarterly magazine. back
116 see Varèse, The Liberation of Sound. back
117 we can just compare Varèse's Ionisation (1924), with Ives's The Unanswered Question (1911), with Antheil's Ballet Mecanique (1927), for instance. back
118 though they were certainly not simple sketches. back
119 Alois Hába and Ivan Wyschnegradsky around 1917, quite independently from each other. Somehow anticipated by the enharmonic instances in Francesco Balilla Pratella, e.g. back
120 and definitely tonal all the same, though Wyschnegradsky ideal was "pansonority," i.e. a sound continuum within the full frequency spectrum. back
121 opening out the polarization of tones, instead of opening out their structure, as in atonal music. back
122 opening out the tone, by inscribing this opening within tone itself, as a fundamental unit of measure. back
123 'Just Intonation' refers basically back to Harry Partch (mid-'20s), as a starting point, though it really became something like a "philosophical" movement (see the Californian Just Intonation Network) around late '70s (of course with many predecessors, e.g. La Monte Young in early '60s). For reference see Doty, The Just Intonation Primer, especially the introduction. back
124 even somehow moralist and "politically correct." back
125 this the very first and last time I use the notion of "Aesthetics" within this text. I won't go into details, which you can find scattered in other works of mine, but suffice it to say that I use this notion here, as representative of the Aesthetic school of thought, i.e. of a school devoted to a deterministic taxonomy of the work of art, which doesn't fall within my intentions and presuppositions. Its use in this context is specifically "ironic"... Also, the use of the word "entertainment" in this same context, has to do with what e.g. Pop-Art did (later on) within the visual media, i.e. the pseudo-sociological approach to the material and the oleographic use of the norms of "avant-garde". back
126 not always consciously and sometime even ingeniously. back
127 Charles Ives, George Antheil, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, often Cage himself. back
128 to exemplify the dynamics and modalities of these developments, I largely quote from Dorfles's book. Though referred to painting, it can perfectly fit the music field, with the necessary and easy changes of terms: «While, thus far, the burst of Pollock had been able to liberate the stream of colours, turning these to unexplored timbral universes, while the signical compositions by Tobey had meant the opening of new horizons of asemantic writings still unknown to western art, in Fautrier's case, on the contrary - as in the even more evident examples of many French, Italian, Spanish informalists, sprouted all of a sudden - we could ascertain the coming back of nineteenth-century modes, most of the times naïvely adopted by the artists themselves in the conviction to be à la page. It is perhaps also this fact, that might explain the unusual and quick success, blessing these informal experiments: the public was suddenly exposed to a painting passed off as "modern", but much easier, more catchy, of the one being "modern" some years before. Not only, but most of the times these pseudo-informal pictures could be "read" by resorting to the same perceptual technique that was effective for certain nineteenth-century landscapist paintings». (Dorfles, pp. 46-47). These musics constantly and again rely on diatonic "templates", or at least some sort of microtonal kaleidoscopic simulated dissonance; or some type of "squared" and aphoristically trite rhythmical patterns brought back to pre-atonal agogic lines, without questioning their exponentially counterfeit difference from mainstream or "corporate" musics, and «where the mysterious fascination of never heard sounds is associated, with disarming naïvety, to the sphere of mysticism, of the unconscious and the like (listening of an impressionistic kind, with esoteric-symbolist temptations)», Gentilucci, Introduzione alla Musica Elettronica, p. 6. back
129 experiments coming both from within the various schools of electronic musics (from Köln to Paris, Milan, Warsaw, Stockholm etc.) by people like Stockhausen, Eimert, Pousseur, Berio, Maderna, Schaeffer, Ferrari, Mâche, Hambraeus etc., and outside them, from the fringes of the above mentioned schools to independent paths, with people like Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, Nuova Consonanza, AMM, Lachenmann, Christou, Mumma, Lucier etc., with all the obvious variety of results, in terms of qualities and positive "influences." back
130 all the old diatribe around definitions and names... What I'd like to underline, is that my labelling is just for the sake of "peaceful relationships"... Many market labels have been applied to this or that "movement" for the sake of commercial needs, falling prey to the ever evocative (and marketable) genre mechanism, as anyone can understand, and the use of yet another label could be nothing but a mere reduction into those market logics. Nevertheless, though I would simply call it music, I understand that some minor direction within the panorama of nowadays musics, can have a profitable result in discriminating, one way or another, the objects of the discourse. And only within this very heuristic perspective I am here using such labels. back
131 from about late '70s onward. back
132 at least in the structural, theoretical and often also practical aspects of the works and background relations. Many times this is especially manifest, due to the lack of a theoretical discourse proposed by the authors themselves. back
133 with sign over sound (and noise as well): a non-sense per sé. in many instances, this ontology is restricted to the expression of the single self of the author, and his/her/its bombastic image is the game. back
134 in many instances, this ontology is restricted to the expression of the single self of the author, and his/her/its bombastic
image is the game. back
135 the "phylogenetic continuity." back
136 i.e. the instability processes behind noise structures. back
137 or processes. back
138 and in fact they are still used because of that. I mean that only within a well established system of shared codes this type of approach can work and «it worked. But it worked only as long as tonal and atonal were strictly separate categories, implying a similarly strict separation between ancient and modern. Once composers began re-establishing tonality, and working again in traditional genres (...), such quotations as Crumb's lost the shock, the inadmissibility, on which their sentimental effect depended» (Griffiths, p. 162). Of course what is here related to Crumb's methodology is valid for all the other methodologies implying the same or similar conceptual strategies. back
139 I think that the names of note
56 could give an idea of the different "idioms." back
140 originating within the body of "post-rock'n'roll" (the various "underground" scenes of late '60s/early '70s, from "psychedelia" to "Krautrock" etc.), movements like the so-called "industrial music" of late '70s (Throbbing Gristle as a primary source) to late sequential copies, mostly flavoured the typically measured lines of orthodox conventionalism with harmonic and timbral corollaries of noise kin. On the contrary, at those same times (late '70s to early '80s), people like Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, Maurizio Bianchi, though somehow partly gravitating around similar or contiguous areas, were much more positively influential on "noise" proliferation within music. back
141 of noise as "calligraphic" sign of the "machine era", mistaking the Futurist (and Dadaist) manifestos and their vitalistic anti-sociological and anti-mimetic ferments, for a nihilistic and declamatory mimicry of naturalistic lineage. back
142 we can easily think of the post-industrial movements, from early Psychic TV to the rather large array of "neo-pagan" musicians (early Current 93 e.g.) together with the several minor subcurrents of grotesque "neo-industrialists", to the myriads epigones of Whiteouse, Ramleh and Merzbow, and their various shallow replicas. back
143 organizations like Selektion, e.g. back
144 we could also add to note 142 the various "post-Fluxus" and "neo-conceptual" audio-artists e.g. I am now quite confident that the extant manifested intentions within the most "up-to-date" forms of sonic intervention, both from the so-called "avant-garde/underground/alternative" scenes and the mainstream ones could be, by now, easily reconciled under the flag of "global revival!" back
145 some ongoing experience and some new name (e.g. Mnortham basically started in this period). back
146 with "post-tonality" I'd like to point to the many distinct "drone"-based musics starting regularly to appear in late '80s (basically after Organum experience e.g.), and spreading to a whole set of different currents from mid-'90s (some of which mingling with already existing movements, like the already mentioned Just Intonation one). Whereas with "post-digitalism" I would call the "home-digital" era, after the "computer-music" of academies (L. Hiller, G.M. Koenig, J.-C. Risset etc., since
late '50s) and the mass availability of digital means and softwares, which has been flourishing since mid-'90s, with Bernhard Günter as an example of the "lyrical" side, and some Japanese author (like M. Sato and T. Tsunoda) for the "neo-positivist" side. One of the very positive aspects of all these undercurrents has been the symplectic integration, within the structural core of the composition, of the field-recording discourse, though even this soon turned, in many cases, into some sort of "landscapism." back
147 growing around late '90s, like the by now posh and invasive "glitch music", of which I may just mention Pan Sonic or R. Ikeda as very vivid examples. back
148 I can well understand that such barbed opinions could be rather disturbing for those who "believe" in those musical systems I seem to "vilify". And perhaps also to those who think that a much more "open" acceptance of musical thoughts should be more reasonable and more respectful. While of course I accept responsibility for my opinions and I cannot but underline that this is my own "historical" discourse, which obviously includes my own view of culture principles, I think that supplying those who will read this text (and those whom this text will be reported to), with something like a "personal" (though not unjustified) line, could be nothing but useful to deal with the many knowledge and circumstances a full (or even a random) relation with our contemporary musical (and cultural) currents and undercurrents can involve and imply. I can of course beg pardon to those being offended by my "generalizations" (though movements generalize by themselves, as a principle) and erosions (and perhaps many absences), but I would see no reason in following a rule (post-modernistic or what) I do not believe in and sincerely find mostly hypocritical. I may be depicted as "hypercritical" perhaps, though I hope at least honest. And within this idea I have also decided to avoid more direct references to a lot of more or less recent authors and their strategies on the basis of two reasons: on one side I did want to avoid entering the realm of journalistic chronicle, which was not within the scope of this text (hence the rather sketchy part regarding these last two decades); on the other side I have thought that a mere list of "goods" or "bads" would have only impoverished the basically theoretical approach I have tried to apply to this text. (In this sense I did avoid making references to all the things falling under a general label of "techno," which I really see having no reason for even the minimum ground to be taken into some consideration within my discourse). Appreciable or not, results are what you read... back