This is the closing quotation from the accompanying booklet to the recent 2CD comp An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936-2003, by the Belgian label, Sub Rosa (can't tell who the author is (I suspect Guy at Sub Rosa) but it's translated from the French by Michael Novy):
"After the Industrial Revolution machines became louder: in earlier times, violence and noise came principally from war, the sound of battle. Some noises are now heard everywhere: car engines were never designed to create sound, like pianos or violins: their noise is due to their materials. We live today in a world of clamour and noise, so bruitiste elements logically took their place in music composed under those specific historical conditions. This concept of noise is usually associated with revolt or at least with the idea of the destructive (or jubilatory) power."
"Noise - an undesirable disturbance additional to the signal and useful data, in the transmission channel of a data processing system. Noise a set of unharmonious sounds."
"This sends us back to the definition of harmony - but harmony in a specific historical context. We see at once how difficult it is to speak simply and plainly about such familiar concepts. By noise is meant essentially our perception of it. In a sense, there is no adequate definition of noise."
"John Coltrane's Ascension, in 1965 dismissed as undifferentiated noise, is now seen as a more subtle form of harmony that combines chaotic material and an ascending movement. Ascension broke with the old view of noise."
"When audiences of the '50s and '60s first heard Varese, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Beriio, Ussachevsky, Yuasa, Dockstader or Mumma, what did they feel?"
"Perhaps a break, an epistemological break, like it must have been for the first audience of Monteverdi's Orfeo (in Mantua, Italy, on 24 February 1607). They left the auditorium completely stunned, because they had never heard anything like it."
I was fortunate to witness the Kirov ballet perform Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the Royal Opera House, London, a couple of months ago - the first time that this had been performed as intended by Nijinsky since it famously caused a riot on its debut in a Paris opera house in 1913. The combination of visual and aural deconstruction was still shocking and challenging when I saw it, 90 years later, lending it a sense of 'history in the making' - exactly the same feeling that the electronic music of the 50s and 60s must have caused. As with Coltrane's majestic Ascension. As with that debut of the first real opera, Monteverdi's Orfeo. The shock of the new sound.
