Noise Music: A History by Paul Hegarty Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Noise Music: A History
Book Review: The best in theory and a wide open gate to musical skies
Summary: 5 Stars
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
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