DISSONANCE,SEXANDNOISE:(RE)BUILDING(HI)STORIESOFELECTROACOUSTICMUSIC

Miguel Álvarez Fernández

Universidad de OviedoDepartamento de Historia del Arte y Musicología

ABSTRACT

This article presents a reflection on some ideological problems that surround the creation of a history of electroacoustic music. The analysis of the role andevolution of a musical concept through the history of amusical tradition can show the strategies used in thecreation of a historical narration. As an example of these rhetorical devices, the article briefly tracks the presence of dissonance and noise in diverse musicaltraditions through the last century. Thus, two parallelhistorical narrations are presented. Some apparentdifferences between them are questioned when theconcepts of dissonance and noise are regarded as ‘theother’ for each respective musical tradition. An analogyconnecting music and sex (as different ways for contacting ‘the other’) is also discussed. The concept of ‘the other’, standing for what is and must be usuallyhidden and repressed, works as a limit for the identityof any ideological construction, including the Westernsubject. The analysis of ‘the other’ and how it isrepressed or emancipated can therefore reveal importantaspects of the identity of a musical tradition.

1. INTRODUCTION

Thinking about the history of electroacoustic musicdemands the definitions of the concepts of history andelectroacoustic music. The former would exceed the purposes of this article, but some reflections on thisissue will be pointed out. Regarding the latter, such adefinition involves not only an idea of technology butalso (and as far as we do not include this into theconcept of technology) an aesthetical approach tomusic. Then by analysing the history of each of theseideas about technology

, or the history of each of theseaesthetical approaches to music, we can find differenthistories of electroacoustic music.It is possible to trace one history of electroacoustic music through the analysis of the role played by dissonance in its development. We can alsouse the concept of noise as a guide through theevolution of the music that makes use of electroacoustictechnologies. Two different histories may appear, withtheir own different pasts. And from each of these pasts,we may be able to foresee even more diverse futures.

2. DISSONANCE

One of these histories roots itself in the middle of thelast century, with its center at the WDR studios inCologne. Names such as Robert Beyer, Herbert Eimert,

As Jonathan Sterne does in [16].

Werner Meyer-Eppler or Karlheinz Stockhausen appear at the beginning of this history. Of course we couldtrack at least part of its origins in Paris during the previous years, but that period can be also thought of asonly the preparation of what was going to be born inGermany some time later.Part of this history of electroacoustic music, asit was explained before, is constituted by the history of the aesthetical approach to music present in the work of the aforementioned. This particular approach is stronglyassociated to serialism, and we can find a very goodtestimony of the close relationship between serialistthought and these early electroacoustic practices in thefirst number of

die Reihe

journal [10].Serialism was not only an aesthetical approachto electroacoustic music. It had begun in the domain of what we could name today as composition with‘traditional’ instruments. Since 1948, it had its center atthe Summer Courses of Darmstadt (where most of theauthors mentioned before met each other), and itnurtured many instrumental pieces and musicalthoughts.There is one aspect of the serialist approach tocomposition, and to music in general, that gains specialimportance for the purposes of this article. It has to dowith the relationship between new music and history.For the most representative composers of thismovement, new music was somehow detached fromhistory. The serial procedures permitted one to composefollowing completely different rules than the ones thatconstituted tonality (which, by the way, could only beconsidered as a system after the appearance of serialism). And tonality was, according to this history,the core of the Western classical tradition. From this point of view, serial music could be easily seen assomething “out of history” or, if we prefer, a new “zero point” in history.From our growing historical perspective wecannot avoid questioning these ideas. Strongconnections bind the serial approach to music with previous musical practices. Serialism, through itsextreme interpretation of some aspects of Webern’swork, not only inherited many ideas about music fromthe Second Viennese School, but also many elementsthat Webern, Berg and Schoenberg themselves hadreceived from their tradition. Between theseassumptions we can underline, for example, a stronginfluence of the idea of absolute music [9], or a

characteristic understanding of the idea of progress inart.The idea of progress involved in the notion of music that these first electroacoustic composers took over was closely associated with the concept of dissonance, as it has been developed by Adorno

.According to him, what modern music offers is notsensuous pleasure but dissonance, caused by theconvergence of the immanent dynamic of art and theexternal reality, or by the inclusion of the non-integratable in the process of artistic integration. For Adorno and for his musical tradition, dissonance, as anexpression of negativity, plays the role of ‘the other’. Itrepresents the empirical ‘other’, strange to the conceptof (absolute) music. Modern music, to avoid beingfetishized, constantly negates its artistic confine andmaintains the mobility between itself and this empirical‘other’.Dissonance was ‘the other’ for classicalWestern music, and so it was for the electroacousticmusic that, as we have seen, followed a particular branch of that tradition. This process took place in ahistorical moment when dissonance was already‘emancipated’, but this fact did not affect dissonance’simportant role. The dialectic relationship betweenconsonance and dissonance inherited by the serialmusic composed for traditional instruments was merelytransposed to the music composed with electronicmedia.The decades that followed the appearance of this new music constitute a period that, borrowing theexpression from Georgina Born, we could designate as“the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde” [4].The main aspects of the musical thought in questionextended, during the second half of the last century, tosome of the most important centers of music educationand research in Europe and the United States

.As a result, the value of dissonance as ‘theother’ in the growing context of electroacoustic post-serial music was strongly diminished, as Adornohimself pointed out

. This phenomenon could beunderstood as an intrinsic transformation operated inthis particular musical tendency, or as the result of ageneral historical process. Following the second,adornian interpretation, this process would haveincreased ‘culture industry’s’ capacity for making usunderstand everything (including ‘the other’ in the formof dissonance) as a commodity.

And discussed in [2].

Remarkable manifestations of these issues can be found in [4] and[12], the latter representing a great summary of the implications of structuralism in electroacoustic music. Maybe we can also observe this phenomenon as an inheritance from the desires expressed bySchoenberg when declaring that his discovery of the twelve-tonecomposition method would “ensure the supremacy of German musicfor the next hundred years” (cf. [18], p. 234)

Cf. [17], p. 36.

3. SEX

Music (and art in general) can be regarded as a medium between ourselves and ‘the other’ (or, if we prefer, ‘our other’). Sex can also be considered, in a similar way, asanother access to ‘the other’ or ‘our other’. This ‘other’ perhaps has found its best conceptualization through theFreudian notions of unconscious and subconscious, andit is remarkable that these ideas were born in the same

Vienna-fin-de-siècle

where Schoenberg radicallytransformed the concept of dissonance.Following this conception, both in sex andmusic ‘the other’ would represent what is and mustremain hidden, unknown and alien to our world, toourselves. And in both cases our different ways toapproach to ‘the other’ evoke words like repression,domination or tolerance

. Coming back to Freud, this‘other’ can always reveal itself through the error, the

lapsus

. Searching for what ‘error’ means in the contextof a specific musical practice can thus help to uncover this music’s ‘other’.It is even possible to establish an analogy abouthow changes in our conception of ‘the other’ tend tohappen in the domains of sex and music. In this regard,we can remember how Spanish composer AgustínGonzález Acilu (born in 1929) describes thetransformation that his sensibility experimented whenhis traditional music background (deeply root intonality) was firstly confronted to the composition of atonal music. He describes this process as a change inhis “auditory morals” (“moral auditiva”) [8], andcompares his increasing tolerance to the phenomenon of dissonance with the acceptance that Spanish societywas meanwhile beginning to show for the bikiniswimsuit. It is also interesting to note the strong presence of the idea of progress both in the thought of the musicians that expanded the concept of dissonanceand in the social acceptance of different sexual behaviours (usually regarded as a matter of ‘social progress’).

4. NOISE

Tracking the presence of noise in different musicalmanifestations could lead us to another possible historyof electroacoustic music. Again, the starting point of this history is movable, though the beginning of the lastcentury seems like a good possibility. Parallel to theconception of Schoenberg’s musical revolution, some of the earliest electroacoustic devices (such as radio, phonographs or the first technical attempts of introducing sound in cinema) started to spread. Manycomposers (dissonant or not!) remained deaf to theimplications of these new technologies on the ideas of sound and music, but for many artists (not necessarilymusicians) they represented a turning point in thehistories of sound and music.

Tolerance, as a concept that we can only apply to ‘the other’, can beunderstood as just the other side of the same coin represented byrepression or domination.

The concept of noise was specially affected bythe artistic use of these technologies. Maybe we could borrow the idea of ‘emancipation’ in order to describewhat happened to noise through the work of theFuturists (mainly after Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’), or composers like Varèse or Cowell. But the presence of noise in music does not describe a straight line (like theone that the history of dissonance tended to draw). Itsevolution not only passes through the names of composers, but it also crosses the work of (sound) poetsand inventors (as Schoenberg would define John Cage). Noise occupies as well a very important place in thefield of popular music, through its different shapes(blues, jazz, rock & roll, rock…), each one of them presenting a more or less direct connection with theclassical Western musical tradition.In the last decades, and thanks to theincreasing access to computer technology and audio production tools, new forms of popular music (such astechno, house, ambient…) have appeared. It is difficultto find many features shared by all these different formsof music, but we can affirm that dissonance has not played the same role in them as it did in the tradition of Western classical music. In a certain way, noisesubstituted dissonance in its relationship with music.And, from this point of view, the tolerance todissonance that contemporary classical music has progressively developed would be comparable to theincreasing acceptance of distorted guitars and grainyvoices

showed by popular music.This phenomenon is especially clear in someforms of popular music that have built an aestheticapproach from their link with noise. Glitch, post-digital,or simply noise are some terms coined for practices andstyles of music that use a technology inherited fromwhat was used in Cologne during the fifties. And, asKim Cascone expressed in a well known article devotedto the “Aesthetics of Failure”, “(…) more specifically,it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that thisnew work has emerged: glitches, bugs, applicationerrors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion,quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composersseek to incorporate into their music” [5]. While inWestern classical music the error produced dissonance,in post-digital music the error generates noise.The error, the musical

lapsus

, is a commonway for ‘the other’ to emerge. And noise appears as ‘theother’ all through the history of these musical practices.Following Freud’s theories, the

lapsus linguae

canguide us to the unconscious [11]. Masami Akita, anartist whose background comes mainly from popular music expresses his view about the relationship between music and noise in a brief sentence: “Noise isthe unconsciousness [

sic

] of music” [1].

The reference to Barthes and the genotext also appears in [13], p. 58:“Maybe we should listen out for the noise in the voices of KristinHersh, Tim Buckley, Prince, Michael Jackson”.

As it was shown before, some strategies of approaching ‘the other’ are shared by sex (understoodas a Western cultural production) and the musicaltradition that takes dissonance as its ‘other’. But we canfind very similar means for referring to ‘the other’through the history that tracks the presence of noise inmusic. Henry Cowell evokes in these words a commonstrategy, repression: “Although existing in all music, thenoise-element has been to music as sex to humanity,essential to its existence, but impolite to mention” [6].Repression is a characteristic way of approaching ‘the other’ in our culture. As Jacques Attaliwrote, “Not an essential myth which does not call uponthe musician as a protection against the noise, perceivedeverywhere as a threat from which it is necessary to be protected. Not a myth which does not describe themusic like the shaping, the domestication, theritualisation of the noise (…)” [3]. Even the visionaryRussolo, in his “Art of noises”, shows his desire of disciplining noises, assigning pitches to them and, byso, making them fit into a norm: “We want to give pitches to these diverse noises, regulating themharmonically and rhythmically” [14]. Murray Schafer also tells us about the repressive attitude of our musicaltradition when he writes that “Noises are the sounds wehave learned to ignore” [15].As another example, the desire for reachingnewer limits or extreme aspects of ‘the other’ can also be found in different sexual and musical practices. Inthe interview quoted before, Akita refers to Merzbow(his own recording name) in the following terms: “If music was sex, Merzbow would be pornography”

.Pornography, by showing what is usually hidden,represents a form of transgression. In this sense, itsevolution can be described as a constant search for newlimits, a conquest of uncharted territories. These are notvery different goals than the ones pursued in the worksof Merzbow, nor in Schoenberg’s compositions.

5. CONCLUSIONS

‘The other’ always represents a focus for our fears and amenace to our identity. Being one of the limits of thisidentity, ‘the other’ is indispensable in order to define it(the Latin word

definire

reveals this aspect).We can therefore define a musical tradition bydescribing its ‘other’. Concepts such as dissonance or noise have played this role in different Western musical practices. An analysis of the different strategies impliedin the relationships between these traditions and their ‘others’ shows similarities that transcend categories likehigh/low culture and help to redefine concepts such as‘progress’, ‘emancipation’ or ‘transgression’.These different ways of approaching ‘the other’not only appear in different musical traditions, but alsoin other cultural productions like our conceptions aboutsex. Probably repression is the most common

Cf. [1], p. 60.