jean pierre de la porte on the mystique around noise
there is an entire mystique around noise. cage was interested in ridding music of intention- not in using noise constructively. his focus is contingency and to this end he carefully used notation as well as maps and diagrams in a very duchampian way as indexical signs. there is a total aversion to improvisation in cage who is among the most literal of composers. Improvisation is the an orphaned resource today - i used to slip into la trinite to listen to messiaen improvising and this great composer steeped in talas and nonmetric plainchant seemed to be playing composition sketches. Stockhausen culminates process pieces like plus-minus with intuitive music like “aus den sieben tagen” but as jerome kohl shows they are fantastically closely designed (http://www20.brinkster.com/improarchive/jk_7t.pdf)
folk instruments often don’t aim at high amplitudes and so don’t have the pressure chambers or string and bow tensions of their 19 c descendants- this means articulate stabilisations around intervals take second place to noticeable slides from noise to pitch, making folk instruments models of the phoneme in their reliance on consonant transitions.
acoustically the noise-pitch distinction is void- extreme upper partials hardly belong in the pitches when you transpose them down and time base manipulating uses dc pulses or square waves which are as totally non periodic as clicks to make pitches and glissandi - look at the famous transition in kontakte from tapping to pitch lines drawn in no more than the speed of pulses. with the granular synthesis of gabor and xenakis the pitch noise distinction totally sinks into oblivion.
daniel dennett talks about freedom as evitability- working out how to avoid something otherwise inevitable - notions of freedom as lack of determination would see spontaneously jinxing out into the oncoming lane of the highway as paradigmatically free. this spinozist ( and deleuzian btw) notion of freedom as comprehended necessity perhaps finds the composer playing fully notated music at the well tempered keyboard the freest of all.
November 14th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
this is actually a reply to aryans post of http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2007/03/19/what-is-free-a-free-noise-manifesto-by-bruce-russell/ while i know that aryan does not share bruces ignorance the film equivalent of the repressed noise myth would be thinking the object, lens, shutter and frame advance
mechanism are all conspiracies to repress the powers of the emulsion.so after decades of solarised prints and scratchings somebody adds a shutter , a lens etc and reveals the emulsion to be a repressive and monopolistic regime. at least bryan ferry merely annoys foxes in his dotage
November 15th, 2009 at 6:08 am
cherry bomb responds :
ja… Lost in Translation…
a tangent: you know, it could be argued that bryan ferry is more
successful at music for airports than brian eno… bryan must be
doddering very comfortably with the ongoing royalties of his
compositions. for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vmhgviJj4U
i have actually been thinking about the above post of yours since i
read it yesterday, jean-pierre… and the jibe referencing ferry
crystallised my wink back. it brought to mind his lugubrious, “more
than this, there is nothing”, and i stumbled upon this video track,
manufactured for karaoke, on youtube. besides the appositely random
lyrics, i found the emulsified sum of the parts of this video
bizarrely profound.
noise - - - folk phonemes - - - cheap mass market synthesis(err) - - -
disposable iterations - - - cover versions - - - karaoke “improv” - -
- digital lyric cues counting down - - - determinism - - - an aging
bill murray singing flat in a foreign context - - -
“mis(s)translation” - - - confounding notation - - - communication
regardless - - - glossolalia - - - spirit mediums - - - noise …
there are some ineffable, elliptical (dis)connections here that tickle
me.
yes, it’s all very oblique and strategy-free. i hope it’s clear though
that my irrational, far-fetched giggles are not intended to trivialise
what you say. i always enjoy reading your comments; they are
wonderful food for thought to someone like me with a reasonably (i
think) experienced ear yet quite a naive mode of apprehension: no
formal academic training in what it is i’m hearing. granola synthesis,
in a sense, is my dominant mode (no bourdieu jokes about taste
please).
p.s. i get annoyed when anyone carps on about a medium being
inherently “oppressive”: if you can’t express what you want to in a particular medium due to its inherent mechanical parameters, look for another technology that fits your message better, surely???