… The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device.
This is from Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn (1999). As I noted in my first post from this book, this material can be read as analogous to photography (after a sonic to visual translation):
… Within the history of Western art music, noises were not intrinsically extramusical; they were simply the sounds music could not use. The determination of extramusicality rested not in a hard and fast materiality but in the power of musical practice and discourse to negotiate which sonorous materials will be incorporated from a world of sounds, including the sounds of its own making, and how.
… Although increasingly alienated from one another, acoustics and Western art music were both in the business of determining what was music and what was noise. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they did not, but even in disagreement they were usually complementary. Two lines played an important role in this determination — the graphic line, whether visible or figurative, inscribed by hand, mind, machine, and nature, and the conceptual dividing line between noise and music, between sound and musical sound.
The line between sound and musical sound stood at the center of the existence of avant-garde music, supplying a heraldic moment of transgression and its artistic raw material, a border that had to be crossed to bring back unexploited resources, restock the coffers of musical materiality, and rejuvenate Western art music. To make extramusical material musical, the sounds of the world were processed in numerous ways. First, the sounds of the world were to be themselves categorized, explicitly or implicitly, into referential sounds and areferential noises, such that a noise could be incorporated into the areferential operations of music. … Second, these privileged noises of the sphere of extramusicality would align themselves with already existing musical attributes and elements, such as dissonance, timbre, and percussion.
[paragraph break added here by me to make this easier to read online] Third, these noisy correspondences within music were emphasized as themselves bearing traces of the world of true extramusicality; this was the basis of what I call the practice of resident noises. Fourth, sounds were technologically selected or manipulated to render them suitable as musical material, as in phonographic practices such as musique concrète, and finally, sounds were processed through the operations of aurality, a feature of John Cage’s dictum to hear sounds in themselves. The underlying presumption of all these was that the nature of music was sonic, thereby the importation of worldly sounds into music meant diminishing or eradicating sounds that were too significant. Most important, this process displaced significance to music itself, such that the most common way to make noise significant was to make it music, but by doing so the significance of sounds was rendered insignificant.
Resolve against the mimetic ran up against the changed conditions of aurality in the latter half of the nineteenth century represented most significantly by phonography, the mimesis machine that incorporated all classes of sounds. … Phonography was associated with a number of crucial developments: it foregrounded the parameters of a sound and all sound, presented the possibility of incorporating all sound into cultural forms, shifted cultural practices away from a privileging of utterance toward a greater inclusion of auditon, placed the voice of presence into the contaminated realm of writing, and linked textuality and literacy with sound through inscriptive practices. The promise of phonography, before and after the actuality of the phonograph, added another player to older discourses and practices based on musical technologies, and when it pointed more toward the production and not the reproduction of music, phonography necessarily invoked the world of all sound. The pressure of worldly sound brought to bear on musical practice was exacerbated in the 1920s with the marked development of auditive technologies and institutions — particularly improvements in microphony and the phonograph and the development of sound film — as practiced within music, radio, and cinema. It was within this complex that dramatically new approaches to sound began to materialize.
To make my way through the entanglements of Western art music, noise, and phonography, I concentrate on the inscriptive practices involved through the concentrated figure of the line. The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device. The line can also inhere the world of all sound, the most familiar instance being the intensification of the world packed into the jagged phonographic line, replaying what it has heard to make the world thicker with sound. Or the line can do both, remaining within music or demarcating music from the world while being suffused with its own plenitude.
My most recent previous post from Kahn’s book is here.
-Julie
