Product Description

Noise/Music looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can become acceptable as music, and that in many ways the idea of noise is similar to the idea of the avant-garde.

While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book's main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect primer for anyone interested in the louder side of experimental music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53992 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 221 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780826417275
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Can silence be "noisy"? Why do punk bands downplay their musical abilities? What do 37 minutes of ceaseless feedback and squawking birds tell us about the human experience? Calling upon the work of noted cultural critics like Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno, philosophy and visual culture professor Hegarty delves into these questions while tracing the history of "noise" (defined at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness") from the beginnings of 18th century concert hall music through avant-garde movements like musique concrete and free jazz to Japanese noise rocker Merzbow. Ironically, it is John Cage's notorious 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence," that represents the beginning of noise music proper for Hegarty; the "music," made up entirely of incidental theater sounds (audience members coughing, the A/C's hum), represents perfectly the tension between the "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music, from Satie to punk. Hegarty does an admirable job unpacking diverse genres of music, and his descriptions of the more bizarre pieces can be great fun to read ("clatters and reverbed chickeny sounds... come in over low throbs"). Though his style tends toward the academic (the "dialectic of Enlightenment" and Heidegger appear frequently), Hegarty's wit and knowledge make this an engaging read.
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Review
"Hegarty does an admirable job unpacking diverse genres of music...Hegarty's wit and knowledge make this an engaging read." -- Publishers Weekly, August 27, 2007

About the Author
Paul Hegarty teaches Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork, in Ireland. He is the author of books on Bataille and Baudrillard. He jointly runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic, and occasionally performs in the noise "bands" Safe, and Working With Children.

Customer Reviews

Where's the musician?
First off, this book is long overdue; however, what undermines Hagerty's project is his theoretically dry and unconvincing writing (something the editor should have caught, unless the press wanted to publish the philosophical meanderings of the author). Thus, the reader is bombarded with concepts at the expense of offering insights into the production of noise (by actually interviewing the artists in question). This is a major problem with ethnomusicology and musicology in general-waxing and waning about the supposed post-modern qualities about music at the expense of the musician in favor of a totalizing reading of the subject.

Here's some examples: If Japanese noise is zen, then it is also rope bondage (134). -That's really academically lazy, I might add.

On John Zorn, "If he and others are some sort of neo-anthropologists, or exorcists, they are ethnographers of a future culture, and in the meantime, engage in neither the ethno-or the-graphy (137). - Am I'm supposed to be impressed with semantics here or what?

All in all, it will satiate the need to fill the gap; however, the many gaps within this text will hopefully be filled in the near future before many of our contemporary "noise" artists are dead.

Entertaining AND informative
Sometimes the writing tends to be a tad dry, but this is a serious work of scholarship regarding the "noise" movement through the history of music so one wouldn't expect a page turner. There is a whole chapter devoted to Japanese Noise music, as well as one specifically on Merzbow, who is like the god of noise. I appreciated the fact that in the introduction the author did mention that he only touches on Coil, Nurse With Wound, and Current 93 b/c they have their own book ("England's Hidden Reverse" by David Keegan). Several mentions of Throbbing Gristle are made as well, though the book "Wreckers of Civilization" by Simon Ford is an excellent read on that wacky troupe. I was entertained by the author's description of listening to specific pieces of music, and he raised my interest in several artists I wasn't familiar with. This was a gift, but I would have gladly paid full price for this excellent book.

The best in theory and a wide open gate to musical skies
One of the books we had been longing for and dreaming of for a long, very long time, since the time when Pierre Schaeffer or Pierre Henry invented concrete music in the early 1940s. Finally out and so rich. Noise music is an old, very old human activity but it is finding a new vital energy in our modern world. There is no real difference between noise and music. Both have to be listened to to be heard and eventually appreciated in a way or another. If you don't listen you won't hear the thunder and you may miss the warning it may represent to us. And yet it is only noise. The only difference between noise and music is that music is noise that has been worked upon to create a rhythm and a harmony that did not exist originally in the noise itself and had to be worked into the noise. But any noise, any sound in the world is potential music. It only takes one composer to transform the noise of a rattle into music, or the noise of a washboard into music. The second idea of importance is the change of the general meaning of noise and music in our world over the last twenty-five centuries. It used to be only (was it really true) some dressing up of rites, mainly religious rites and rituals, but also military or festive rituals or actions. Little by little it became a pure entertainment (but is it only that) in our modern world with the invention of concert halls, theaters, museums, and particularly the radio that enabled jazz and some other types of music to emerge and impose themselves as pure entertainment. And television, not to speak of the Internet, Youtube or Myspace Music or the iPod. The final essential idea is that the world has completely changed technically. The radio was only the very beginning of that revolution. The final phase is that of digitalized music, sampling and virtual composition and performing. And that goes along with the change it all brings to the younger generations. They live today in a constant musical world and they develop new capabilities. The hearing band is getting wider. The sense and feeling of rhythm and harmony have completely changed in intensity and concerns so many more people than just twenty years ago, not to speak of two centuries ago. And now our modern machines and their tools, computers and digital music software enable everyone who is not deaf to gather sounds, then to sample them, then to build some kind of architecture that used to be called composition. That revolution leads more and more young people who live in continuous sound to reject the old discrimination between noise and music and they start using noise, plain ordinary everyday sonic pollution (meaning sounds that are produced as a collateral side-effect of some motivated and profitable activity), in order to produce music, to transform it into music. And that's exactly what the author tries to explain and explore, at times a little bit theoretically and not enough musically. But it sure is a rich and enticing introduction to what we used to call concrete music and is today called noise music.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines