DISSONANCE, SEX AND NOISE: (RE)BUILDING (HI)STORIES OF

Miguel Álvarez Fernández Universidad de Oviedo Departamento de Historia del Arte y Musicología

ABSTRACT 2. DISSONANCE This article presents a reflection on some ideological problems that surround the creation of a history of One of these histories roots itself at the middle of the electroacoustic music. The analysis of the role and last century, with its center at the WDR studios in evolution of a musical concept through the history of a Cologne. Names such as Robert Beyer, Herbert Eimert, musical tradition can show the strategies used in the Werner Meyer-Eppler or Karlheinz Stockhausen appear creation of a historical narration. As an example of at the beginning of this history. Of course we could these rhetoric devices, the article briefly tracks the track at least part of its origins in Paris during the presence of dissonance and noise in diverse musical previous years, but that period can be also thought of as traditions through the last century. Thus, two parallel only the preparation of what was going to born in historical narrations are presented. Some apparent Germany some time later. differences between them are questioned when the concepts of dissonance and noise are regarded as ‘the Part of this history of electroacoustic music, as other’ for each respective musical tradition. An analogy it was explained before, is constituted by the history of connecting music and sex (as different ways for the aesthetical approach to music present in the work of contacting ‘the other’) is also discussed. The concept of the aforementioned. This particular approach is strongly ‘the other’, standing for what is and must be usually associated to serialism, and we can find a very good hidden and repressed, works as a limit for the identity of testimony of the close relationship between serialist any ideological construction, including the Western thought and these early electroacoustic practices in the subject. The analysis of ‘the other’ and how it is first number of die Reihe journal [10]. repressed or emancipated can therefore reveal important aspects of the identity of a musical tradition. Serialism was not only an aesthetical approach to electroacoustic music. It had begun in the domain of 1. INTRODUCTION what we could name today as composition with ‘traditional’ instruments. Since 1948, it had its center at Thinking about the history of electroacoustic music the Summer Courses of Darmstadt (where most of the demands the definitions of the concepts of history and authors mentioned before met each other), and it electroacoustic music. The former would exceed the nurtured many instrumental pieces and musical purposes of this article, but some reflections on this thoughts. issue will be pointed out. Regarding the latter, such a definition involves not only an idea of technology but There is one aspect of the serialist approach to also (and as far as we don’t include this into the concept composition, and to music in general, that gains special of technology) an aesthetical approach to music. Then importance for the purposes of this article. It has to do by analysing the history of each of these ideas about with the relationship between new music and history. technology1, or the history of each of these aesthetical For the most representative composers of this approaches to music, we can find different histories of movement, new music was somehow detached from electroacoustic music. history. The serial procedures permitted to compose

following completely different rules than the ones that It’s possible to trace one history of constituted tonality (which, by the way, could only be electroacoustic music through the analysis of the role considered as a system after the appearance of played by dissonance in its development. We can also serialism). And tonality was, according to this history, use the concept of noise as a guide through the evolution the core of the Western classical tradition. From this of the music that makes use of electroacoustic point of view, serial music could be easily seen as technologies. Two different histories may appear, with something “out of history” or, if we prefer, a new “zero their own different pasts. And from each of these pasts, point” in history. we may be able to foresee even more diverse futures.

From our growing historical perspective we cannot avoid questioning these ideas. Strong connections bind the serial approach to music with previous musical practices. Serialism, through its extreme interpretation of some aspects of Webern’s 1 As Jonathan Sterne does in [16].

work, not only inherited many ideas about music from himself pointed out4. This phenomenon could be the Second Viennese School, but also many elements understood as an intrinsic transformation operated in that Webern, Berg and Schoenberg themselves had this particular musical tendency, or as the result of a received from their tradition. Between these general historical process. Following the second, assumptions we can underline, for example, a strong adornian interpretation, this process would have influence of the idea of absolute music [9], or a increased ‘culture industry’s’ capacity for making us characteristic understanding of the idea of progress in understand everything (including ‘the other’ in the form art. of dissonance) as a commodity.

The idea of progress involved in the notion of 3. SEX music that these first electroacoustic composers took Music (and art in general) can be regarded as a medium over was closely associated with the concept of between ourselves and ‘the other’ (or, if we prefer, ‘our dissonance, as it has been developed by Adorno2. other’). Sex can also be considered, in a similar way, as According to him, what modern music offers is not another access to ‘the other’ or ‘our other’. This ‘other’ sensuous pleasure but dissonance, caused by the perhaps has found its best conceptualization through the convergence of the immanent dynamic of art and the Freudian notions of unconscious and subconscious, and external reality, or by the inclusion of the non- it’s remarkable that these ideas were born in the same integratable in the process of artistic integration. For Vienna-fin-de-siècle where Schoenberg radically Adorno and for his musical tradition, dissonance, as an transformed the concept of dissonance. expression of negativity, plays the role of ‘the other’. It represents the empirical ‘other’, strange to the concept Following this conception, both in sex and of (absolute) music. Modern music, to avoid being music ‘the other’ would represent what is and must fetishized, constantly negates its artistic confine and remain hidden, unknown and alien to our world, to maintains the mobility between itself and this empirical ourselves. And in both cases our different ways to ‘other’. approach to ‘the other’ evoke words like repression,

domination or tolerance5. Coming back to Freud, this Dissonance was ‘the other’ for classical ‘other’ can always reveal itself through the error, the Western music, and so it was for the electroacoustic lapsus. Searching for what ‘error’ means in the context music that, as we have seen, followed a particular of a specific musical practice can thus help to uncover branch of that tradition. This process took place in a this music’s ‘other’. historical moment when dissonance was already

‘emancipated’, but this fact didn’t affect dissonance’s It’s even possible to establish an analogy about important role. The dialectic relationship between how changes in our conception of ‘the other’ tend to consonance and dissonance inherited by the serial music happen in the domains of sex and music. In this regard, composed for traditional instruments was merely we can remember how Spanish composer Agustín transposed to the music composed with electronic González Acilu (born in 1929), describes the media. transformation that his sensibility experimented when

his traditional music background (deeply root in The decades that followed the appearance of tonality) was firstly confronted to the composition of this new music constitute a period that, borrowing the atonal music. He describes this process as a change in expression from Georgina Born, we could designate as his “auditory morals” (“moral auditiva”) [8], and “the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde” [4]. compares his increasing tolerance to the phenomenon of The main aspects of the musical thought that has been dissonance with the acceptance that Spanish society was analysed extended, during the second half of the last meanwhile beginning to show for the bikini swimsuit. century, to some of the most important centers of music It’s also interesting to note the strong presence of the education and research in Europe and the United idea of progress both in the thought of the musicians States3. that expanded the concept of dissonance and in the

social acceptance of different sexual behaviours (usually As a result, the value of dissonance as ‘the regarded as a matter of ‘social progress’). other’ in the growing context of electroacoustic post- serial music was strongly diminished, as Adorno 4. NOISE

2 And discussed in [2]. Tracking the presence of noise in different musical 3 Remarkable manifestations of these issues can be find in [4] and [12], manifestations could lead us to another possible history 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 by Schoenberg 4 Cf. [17], p. 36. when declaring that his discovery of the twelve-tone composition method 5 Tolerance, as a concept that we can only apply to ‘the other’, can be would “ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred understood as just the other side of the same coin represented by years” (cf. [18], p. 234) repression or domination.

of electroacoustic music. Again, the starting point of system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, this history is movable, though the beginning of the last quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer century seems like a good possibility. Parallel to the sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to conception of Schoenberg’s musical revolution, some of incorporate into their music” [5]. While in Western the earliest electroacoustic devices (such as radio, classical music the error produced dissonance, in post- phonographs or the first technical attempts of digital music the error generates noise. introducing sound in cinema) started to spread. Many composers (dissonant or not!) remained deaf to the The error, the musical lapsus, is a common implications of these new technologies on the ideas of way for ‘the other’ to emerge. And noise appears as ‘the sound and music, but for many artists (not necessarily other’ all through the history of these musical practices. musicians) they represented a turning point in the Following Freud’s theories, the lapsus linguae can histories of sound and music. guide us to the unconscious [11]. Masami Akita, an artist whose background comes mainly from popular The concept of noise was specially affected by music expresses his view about the relationship between the artistic use of these technologies. Maybe we could music and noise in a brief sentence: “Noise is the borrow the idea of ‘emancipation’ in order to describe unconsciousness [sic] of music” [1]. what happened to noise through the work of the Futurists (mainly after Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’), or As it was shown before, some strategies of composers like Varèse or Cowell. But the presence of approaching ‘the other’ are shared by sex (understood as noise in music doesn’t describe a straight line (like the a Western cultural production) and the musical tradition one that the history of dissonance tended to draw). Its that takes dissonance as its ‘other’. But we can find very evolution doesn’t only pass through the names of similar means for referring to ‘the other’ through the composers, but it also crosses the work of (sound) poets history that tracks the presence of noise in music. Henry and inventors (as Schoenberg would define John Cage). Cowell evokes in these words a common strategy, Noise occupies as well a very important place in the repression: “Although existing in all music, the noise- field of popular music, through its different shapes element has been to music as sex to humanity, essential (blues, jazz, rock & roll, rock…), each one of them to its existence, but impolite to mention” [6]. presenting a more or less direct connection with the classical Western musical tradition. Repression is a characteristic way of approaching ‘the other’ in our culture. As Jacques Attali In the last decades, and thanks to the wrote, “Not an essential myth which does not call upon increasing access to computer technology and audio the musician as a protection against the noise, perceived production tools, new forms of popular music (such as everywhere as a threat from which it is necessary to be techno, house, ambient…) have appeared. It’s difficult protected. Not a myth which does not describe the music to find many features shared by all these different forms like the shaping, the domestication, the ritualisation of of music, but we can affirm that dissonance has not the noise (…)” [3]. Even the visionary Russolo, in his played the same role in them as it did in the tradition of “Art of noises”, shows his desire of disciplining noises, Western classical music. In a certain way, noise assigning pitches to them and, by so, making them fit substituted dissonance in its relationship with music. into a norm: “We want to give pitches to these diverse And, from this point of view, the tolerance to noises, regulating them harmonically and rhythmically” dissonance that contemporary classical music has [14]. Murray Schafer also tells us about the repressive progressively developed would be comparable to the attitude of our musical tradition when writes that increasing acceptance of distorted guitars and grainy “Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore” [15]. voices6 showed by popular music. As another example, the desire for reaching This phenomenon is especially clear in some newer limits or extreme aspects of ‘the other’ can also forms of popular music that have built an aesthetic be found in different sexual and musical practices. In approach from their link with noise. Glitch, post-digital, the interview quoted before, Akita refers to or simply noise are some terms coined for practices and (his own recording name) in the following terms: “If styles of music that use a technology inherited from music was sex, Merzbow would be pornography”7. what was used in Cologne during the fifties. And, as Pornography, by showing what is usually hidden, expressed in a well known article devoted represents a form of transgression. In this sense, its to the “Aesthetics of Failure”, “(…) more specifically, it evolution can be described as a constant search for new is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new limits, a conquest of uncharted territories. These are not work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, very different goals than the ones pursued in the works of Merzbow, nor in Schoenberg’s compositions. 6 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 Kristin Hersh, Tim Buckley, Prince, Michael Jackson”. 7 Cf. [1], p. 60.

5. CONCLUSIONS estéticas musicales del siglo XX”, available at http://www.tallersonoro.com/espaciosonoro/04/Artic ‘The other’ always represents a focus for our fears and a ulo1.htm. menace to our identity. Being one of the limits of this identity, ‘the other’ is indispensable in order to define it [3] Attali, J. Bruits. Fayard, Paris, 2001. (the Latin word definire reveals this aspect). [4] Born, G. Rationalizing Culture. IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the We can therefore define a musical tradition by Musical Avant-Garde. University of California describing its ‘other’. Concepts such as dissonance or Press, Berkeley, 1995. noise have played this role in different Western musical practices. An analysis of the different strategies implied [5] Cascone, Kim “The Aesthetics of Failure: in the relationships between these traditions and their ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary ‘others’ shows similarities that transcend categories like Computer Music”, Computer Music Journal, high/low culture and help to redefine concepts such as vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 12-18, Winter 2000. ‘progress’, ‘emancipation’ or ‘transgression’. [6] Cowell, H. “The Joys of Noise”, in Audio Culture. Readings in Modern Music (C. Cox These different ways of approaching ‘the other’ and D. Warner, eds.), pp. 22- 24 Continuum, not only appear in different musical traditions, but also New York, 2004. in other cultural productions like our conceptions about sex. Probably repression is the most common [7] Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds.) Audio Culture. mechanism that mediates between us and our ‘other’, Readings in Modern Music. Continuum, New just like between a musical tradition an its ‘other’. From York, 2004. this point of view, when this ordinary practice of [8] Cureses, M. Agustín González Acilu. La repression fails, in the form of an error, ‘the other’ estética de la tensión. ICCMU, Madrid, 2001. appears. So the concept of error can be useful to distinguish which elements are considered [9] Dahlhaus, C. La idea de la música absoluta manifestations of ‘the other’ for a particular subject or (translation by Ramón Barce), Idea Books, tradition. Barcelona, 1999. [10] Eimert, H., Boulez, P., Stockhausen, K., Dissonance and noise have been constantly Meyer-Eppler, W. and others die Reihe, I repressed and expressed through processes that (English version), Theodor Presser, London, constitute the histories of two different musical 1958. traditions. It’s possible to identify in both traditions moments in which ‘the other’ is not repressed but [11] Freud, S. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. integrated. This process of integration normally implies W. W. Norton, New York, 1989. depriving ‘the other’ of all its particularities, or [12] Holztman, S. Digital Mantras. MIT Press, annihilating all the conditions of possibility for ‘the Cambridge, MA., 1994. other’ to exist. [13] Reynolds, S. “Noise”, in Audio Culture. As a result of such a process, dissonance stops Readings in Modern Music (C. Cox and D. being ‘dissonant’ (as it happens in serial music), and Warner, eds.), pp. 55-58. Continuum, New noise cannot be ‘noisy’ anymore (as it is clear when York, 2004. listening to some of the new musical styles mentioned [14] Russolo, L. L’Arte dei rumori. Edizioni before). This may be understood as a possible end for Futuriste di “Poesia”, Milano, 1916. the different histories previously presented, or as a new starting point for new histories that wait to be told. [15] Schafer, R. M. The Soundscape. Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. 6. REFERENCES Destiny Books, Rochester 1994. [16] Sterne, J. The Audible Past. Cultural Origins [1] Akita, M., “The Beauty of Noise: An Interview of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press, with Masami Akita of Merzbow”, in Audio Durham, 2003. Culture. Readings in Modern Music (C. Cox and D. Warner, eds.), pp. 59-61. Continuum, [17] Stockhausen, K. and R. Maconie Stockhausen New York, 2004. on Music. Marion Boyars, London - New York, 1989. [2] Álvarez Fernández, M. “Disonancia y emancipación: comodidad en/de algunas [18] Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Schönberg. Vida, contexto, obra. Alianza, Madrid, 1991.