[composition performance]
What's the difference between music and sound? What sounds are acceptable for music? Are some sounds more musically suitable than others? Is noise musical? Is the musical experience simply a listening experience, or is it something more? These questions lie at the intersection of critical musical thought and the practical problems of generating and organizing musical material. They are some the most profound and difficult questions we face as composers today, and they distinguish our situation from that of the classical composers. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Wagner (to drop a few names) could take for granted that a violin is a musical instrument, and that a crumpled piece of paper is not; today, we cannot be so sure. Experimental composition can help us define for ourselves the difference, if any, between music and sound as such; but in addition to our personal creative work, it's useful to understand the historical context of the problem, and the role that music technology plays in framing it. In this lecture, I'll focus on three of the readings from last week---Russolo, Schaeffer and Lachenmann---to shed some historical light on the matter.
We begin, yet again, with the moment when sound and image split into two separate data streams.
Before the invention of recorded sound, an act of listening was also an act of seeing. When live performance was music's only option, listeners watched musicians play their instruments. Musicians, of course, kept their eyes open to read the sheet music in front of them.
Today, more than a century after the invention of the phonograph, we listen to much of our music through a technological blindfold. As engineers learned to inscribe sound waves, they also learned to erase the image of the performing musicians. Fundamentally, a stream of audio data is not a stream of visual data, and, given only one, we can not reconstruct the other. When we hear a recording of a singer-songwriter, we can only imagine the shape of the mouth, the color of the guitar, and the movement of the fingers. We see in our mind's eye what we cannot see with our real eyes. Studio magic exploits our blindness, tricking us into seeing what may not have been there in the first place.
Kittler argues that the power of the gramophone was its power to record what he designates as "the real": that is, the noise inaccessible to symbolic representation. The gramophone, unlike music notation or the alphabet, did not distinguish meaningful sounds from meaningless ones; it equalized all sounds into a flow of data. Of course, this had a profound impact on musical thought and production. Kittler would argue that the gramophone was the technological precondition for a sort of listening that was impossible in the age of music notation, while others (Jacque Rancière, for instance, whose work we will read later) might argue that the gramophone simply embodied a perceptual shift that was already in the making. One way or another, we may say that musicians learned to listen like the gramophone listens; that is, they themselves tuned into the noise of the world, becoming indifferent to the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sounds. By imagining one's ears as the indifferent, all-embracing horn of a gramophone, the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds begins to fade; indeed, the distinction between music---as a specialized category of sonic experience---and sound in general becomes a bit more hazy.
The Italian futurists, active roughly from 1900 through the mid-twenties, were the first to develop an aesthetic of noise and data flows appropriate for twentieth-century media technics. The futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti makes a brief appearance in Kittler's "Gramophone." As the author of a Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature in 1912, Marinetti "proclaimed that crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons are more exciting than the smiles or tears of a woman" (50). The futurist glorification of velocity, pure energy, and electrical noise extended beyond literature to embrace music as well, as is evident from Luigi Russolo's "Art of Noises", one of the assigned readings. Russolo criticized the conventional orchestra for its limited sound-options and over-reliance on "pure sounds," that is, pitches. He wrote:
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.
The orchestra could no longer sustain the interest of futurists listening for sonic thrills. Violins and bassoons yielded to the infinite noise of machines and the masses. Russolo continues:
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”.
At the end of "The Art of Noises," Russolo proposed a mechanical Futurist orchestra with six "families of noises" to replace the string, wind, and brass sections of the nineteenth-century orchestra. Russolo developed his fantasy of explosions, snorts, gurgles, screeches, percussive skin sounds, and groans (to take but one noise from each noise family) into an ensemble of homemade noise instruments, which he called intonarumori. On YouTube, that archive of noises new and old, we find a recording from 1913 demonstrating Russolo's work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHLmitA3o6g&feature=related
Building new instruments is one way to realize the futurist dream of noise music. But there is another, perhaps more elegant way: namely, to bypass the orchestral model entirely and exploit sound recording technology itself as a metainstrument that can parrot any of the world's noise, whether the sounds of Russolo's instruments or the crowds and motors that inspired it.
And yet, the early history of sound recording is a history of music as traditionally conceived, not of futurist noises. Russolo never actually recorded crowds and motors. Although there are early films of factories and public spaces---for example, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), London's Trafalgar Square (1890), the train at La Ciotat (1895), and San Francisco's Market Street just before the 1906 fire (1906)---there are no comparable sound recordings to document the sounds of turn-of-the-century streets or industry. Think of the gramophone recordings we've heard so far: Handel's "Israel in Egypt", an out-of-tune major scale, and a Brahms violin sonata. If we heard noise, it was unintentional: the limits of the medium's resolution, or its degradation over time. Kittler is a bit sneaky about this fact: the gramophone, despite being able to inscribe acoustic noise for the first time in history, tried to avoided noises as much as possible.
[A link between futurist aesthetics and the aesthetics of musique concrète: short ad lib]
It took a new generation and a new sound medium to realize Russolo's dream of noise-music from the perspective of technology itself. Roughly forty years and two world wars separate Luigi Russolo from Pierre Schaeffer, the French sound engineer who not only listened to the world's noise, but also recorded it, and called his recordings compositions. Whereas Russolo had only thought of trains as musical instruments, Schaeffer actually used them as such:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9pOq8u6-bA
Of course, Schaeffer was not listening with the ears of the gramophone, but rather the tape recorder. This means that he was attuned not only to the world's noises, but also to the possibility of transforming and manipulating these noises. Schaeffer was one of the first to hear the possibilities of non-linear editing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ea0sBrw6M
It is worth reading Schaeffer's "Acousmatics" article in the light of Russolo and Varèse, to understand the ways in which Schaeffer's aesthetic of musique concrète, or concrete music, developed the futurist aesthetic, and the ways in which he broke with it. Like futurism, musique concrète is, fundamentally, an aesthetic of data flows---more specifically, one that posits a radical division between seeing and hearing. Schaeffer elevates the blindness of recording technology to an aesthetic ideal. The fundamental principle of Schaeffer's "acousmatic music" is that one does not see the source of the sounds; the term acousmatic, we learn from Schaeffer, designated the disciples of Pythagoreans who "listened to his teachings while he was hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, while observing a strict silence" (77). What was once a physical blindfold is now a technological one.
But musique concrète differs from futurism in that it is not only an aesthetic of sonic material, but also of heightened perception. Schaeffer takes pains to distinguish acoustics from acousmatics (77): Those who listen acoustically simply listen to "frequencies, durations, amplitudes"; in short, they listen as the gramophone listens, as a medium that equalizes its data and is indifferent to it. But those who listen acousmatically listen to the sound of their own perception. From a technological perspective, this means hearing the transformations of magnetic tape itself: hearing, beyond sounds themselves, their possibilities of transformation.
...
As many of your compositions demonstrate, we still live in the age of musique concrète. Although the computer has replaced the tape recorder, the new medium has borrowed the editing techniques of the old. A waveform editor like Audacity is essentially a digital emulation of a tape recorder; the messy labor of splicing is now possible with a few clicks, but it is still splicing. Our listening is generally acousmatic: those of us who make recordings are used to concealing our sources, and to having them concealed as we listen.
But perhaps this is not the sort of listening appropriate to music; perhaps music is more than a flexible acoustic data flow; perhaps sound is only a by-product of a non-sonic musical essence that recording technology necessary filters out. This, at least, is the objection of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, whose instrumental music stands as a sharp critique of musique concrète.
Lachenmann interview:
The original musique concrète, as developed by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, uses life’s everyday noises or sounds, recorded and put together by collage. I tried to apply this way of thinking, not with the sounds of daily life, but with our instrumental potentialities. Thinking that way, the conventional beautiful philharmonic sound is the special result of a type of sound production, not of consonance or dissonance within a tonal system. In that context, I had to search for other sound sources, to bring out this new aspect of musical signification.
I am working with the energetic aspect of sounds. The pizzicato note C is not only a consonant event in C major or a dissonant event in C-flat major. It might be a string with a certain tension being lifted and struck against the fingerboard. I hear this as an energetic process. This way of perception is normal in everyday life. If I hear two cars crashing—each against the other—I hear maybe some rhythms or some frequencies, but I do not say ‘Oh, what interesting sounds!’ I say, What happened?’ The aspect of observing an acoustic event from the perspective of ‘What happened?’, this is what I call musique concrète instrumentale.