kagablog

music - joel assaizky
vocal & lyrics - aryan kaganof
video edited by the isidore isou remix collective
3min37sec
june 2009

watch it here

http://www.meanwhile.co.za/MEANWHILE8/?p=321

Sixty years ago Edgar Varèse shocked the musical Establishment by proclaiming, “Music must sound!” Today such a statement no longer astonishes or upsets anyone, for an immense variety of sounds — some heard in nature, others produced by touching, hitting, and blowing into all kinds of manmade substances and objects — have been put together and presented as music. An objective yet concerned listener therefore might ask, “When do sounds combined in sequences and/or simultaneities constitute musically significant melodies, chords, and on a larger scale musical compositions? Can any sound be part of what can be significantly and validly called music — and if not, what indeed constitutes music?

An apparently basic distinction can be made between noises, recognizable natural sounds (like animal cries, the sound of a running brook or waves breaking on a sandy beach), and, strictly speaking, musical sounds. In the past, musical sounds were produced by the human voice and musical instruments — musical because their use normally was restricted to the production of musical sounds. Noises did not belong to the field of music; nature’s sounds were used very rarely and only episodically, but recently their use has increased. What then decides whether a sound can be considered musical? The answer is, the culture of a particular group of human beings.

The term culture may be interpreted at several levels of meaning. In this case It refers to the expectation which people conditioned by a particular culture have of hearing certain sounds or not hearing others. It refers to what has become customary or traditional in a number of definable circumstances — for example, attending a church service, listening to a troubadour returning from the Holy Land, or crowding a modern concert hall to hear a specially trained virtuoso or an orchestra. The specific circumstances in which music is heard are very important because, at least originally, they have much to do with the “musical” character of the sounds heard and the psychic or personal responses of those hearing them. As these cultural circumstances alter, the possibility arises of a corresponding change in what constitutes a musical sound. Sooner or later not only the musicality of various types of sounds, but also the expected character of combinations of these sounds (that is, musical “form”) changes in order to satisfy a new kind of desire — the desire to meet psychological needs aroused by new social circumstances, particularly a new type of family life, education, and daily work.

This new desire may have a general collective character, but as there are several social classes and various types of human personalities, different kinds of psychological needs and levels of feeling-response inevitably coexist. Thus several types of music are produced and heard. In a society largely controlled by the media and featuring an individualistic kind of egalitarianism, all these types are given some chance of being heard. If a new kind of circumstance in which sounds reach the human ears becomes generalized, new sounds should replace or at least theoretically be added to the category of musical (because expectable and psychically satisfying) sounds. This is the situation which musicians and especially music lovers are experiencing today. Similar situations in the past brought about an enlargement of the category of musical elements. These periods of transition in the past can help us better understand what is happening now.

When Varèse asserted that music must sound, it was not only because he felt it necessary to give the qualification musical to many recently produced manmade sounds (factory and street noises and, later, electronically generated vibrations). He was challenging something more fundamental: the idea that the music itself resides in the written score, thus in a complex and evolving formula of relationship between musical notes, rather than in actually heard sounds. According to the classical European tradition, the score is the music; the musical composition exists as a complete and significant entity in the written score, whether or not any sound is actually heard by human ears. These sounds could be — and for trained musicians they had to be — heard in the musician’s mind. Here the term hearing refers to what probably can best be interpreted as an especially vivid type of imagining process producing the illusion of sound. What Varèse tried to say was that looking, however intently, at a symphonic score does not constitute a real or full musical experience. The actual sounds represented in the score by little black symbols (the musical notes) have to be actually heard by ears; the physical and auditory sensation cannot be ignored or given only a nonessential, subsidiary importance.

At least this should not be the case in this century when the traditional cultured way of experiencing music — the circumstances in which music is heard and the need or personal desire it is expected to satisfy — is rapidly changing. It is changing because technology has altered not only the general way of living but also the inner feeling of being an experiencing person — a person having meaning and essential importance in oneself and not merely as a component part in a set system of social relationships. In European music, this system was tonality. The musical urge to deal with complex tones having meaning and power in themselves as single, separate entities indeed parallels the intense emotional desire to operate, and to be valued by others, as an individual person whose beingness essentially and irrevocably matters. The development and growth of the potential of being inherent at birth in such persons turns out to be very important. Likewise in music, the production of new and rich sounds which may stir, exalt, or shock the individual’s sense of being has also become a matter of supreme significance. In the 1920s Varèse expected and foresaw the development of an electronic technology which would theoretically make possible the production of any composite sound, any rhythmic or melodic sequence. (1)

When anything is possible, serious psychological problems arise in the development of the individual person. Too many options are confusing and may produce psychological paralysis. Too much permissiveness leads not only to anarchy and unfocused experiences, but to an overloading of the mind and of the capacity to give a totally significant response to the multiplicity of possible choices. The inevitable result is an almost compulsive return to an ancestral system of relationship. Thus a “new consonance” has become the foundation of most minimal music, while the repetition of sounds provides a sense of relaxed stability and non-intellectual simplicity. The obsessive rush of modern city life and the rat race of business and professions, which once moved at a calm pace making possible intuitive and empathetic responses, demanded an antidote. Many people, more or less fascinated by Oriental traditions and the apparent calm and composure of gurus, found this antidote in subjective states of introversion and in “meditation music.”

The artificiality and extreme intellectualism of the system which Schöenberg and his School imposed upon a disintegrating sense of tonality paralleled the development of totalitarian police States. The alternative presented by most ancient Asian traditions has featured traditional procedures that induce would-be individuals to conform to a collective, theological approach to the meaning of human life and of the whole scheme of cosmic existence. Nevertheless there have been attempts to modernize ancestral traditions which brought inner security at the cost of a binding allegiance to exotic theological systems. However, the basic issue in music as well as philosophy and psychology is whether we consider our Western civilization to be in a period of accelerated growth leading to a glorious future of peace and prosperity for all, or in a state of transition between a disintegrating culture and one whose actual birth is perhaps still in a distant future.

A new music develops, if not out of a totally new sociopolitical situation or religion, at least out of radically changed circumstances, as a definitely new phase of the culture and new conditions of performance supersede what had been experienced until then. Plainchant took form when a Catholic culture developed in monasteries and, soon after, in Romanesque churches and Gothic cathedrals. The “New Music” of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries resulted from the troubadours’ experience of the Crusades and the remarkable rise of a new ideal of womanhood; instrumental sounds and profane words were mixed with the sacred use of voices intoning scriptural texts, and as increasing trade and travel spawned the rise of a new class, the bourgeoisie, secular music adopted the structure of devotional motets, the structure acquiring a more personal, and eventually tonal character.

The early tonality system was still imbued with religious concepts and the theocentricism of the perfect triad. Then came the growth of Court-music, the aristocratic opera, and the synchronous development of a rationalistic and formalistic classical music through the eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution led to the rise of the wealthy bourgeoisie and the dominant power of money, and with Romanticism to the dramatization of the efforts of tense, rebellious individuals to find a prestigious place in the new social order, as “virtuosi” — and a person can act as a virtuoso or a “star” (famous and well paid) in any field.

A new situation, however, is now developing as magnetic tapes, electronic instruments, radio and computer technology are bringing to nearly every home not only sounds of all kinds (whether or not they assume the character of music), but the possibility of producing theoretically as yet unheard combinations of vibrations perceptible to human ears. The individualization of music and the fragmentation of the musical consciousness of the people of a particular culture — and this now means almost the whole of mankind — may be reaching an extreme state. Human beings may live much of the time in a world filled with sounds, yet lose the sense of music.

As I understand and use the word, music implies culture. Are we today expanding to the point of the nearly total disintegration of what Europe developed during the last 2,500 years, allowing every technical procedure which profit-conscious and culturally irresponsible intellects are impelled to invent — or are we already feeling the need to conform to stabilizing principles of musical organization? And if so are these principles derived from a new type of mind calling for a new religion and culture?

The word religion is used here in its broadest sense; it refers to the collective desires and thinking capacity (usually in symbolic terms) of a relatively large collectivity of human beings who are, to some extent, integrated as a “people.” More specifically it implies what I have defined as a “collective psychism” which unites the psyches of the people almost as strongly as the life-force integrates the activities of the material cells of a living organism. Music, I believe, is the most direct language that can be used to stabilize and communicate the psychism of a culture. The answer to the question posed by the title of this article is therefore sounds become music when the particular life-circumstances in which a culture is formed impel intuitive leaders to select those sounds (and their means of production) which best identify and communicate the developing psychism of the people integrated by the culture.

The problem our present society has to face is the fragmented character of the people it only superficially correlates in terms of material productivity, the need to survive, and the expectation of personal comfort and success. Several factors have contributed to the situation: the kind of education and school system which resulted from the permissive and individualistic approach promoted by educators and psychologists early in this century; the pressure exerted by the ubiquitous media; the spread of sound-technology; and the possibility for a mostly middle-class and relatively affluent youth to travel. Insofar as the raucous sounds of rock music gave a characteristic identity and substance to a new youth culture (or subculture) and came to express a particular kind of psychism, these sounds have to be considered music; but their extreme character very soon produced a compensatory reaction: a relaxing, introverted, and soothing music for meditation, and in general minimal music. The creators of such music, however, found their inspiration in Oriental gurus and in the music of old and now mostly disintegrating cultures, rather than in some possibly emerging new religion. A still larger number of young and middle-aged people today are seeking renewal, stability, and security in the most traditional forms of Christianity, whose ability to inspire a new type of music seems to have vanished long ago.

A truly new music needs a new faith, which in turn requires a new vision of reality, a new mind and collectively aroused group-feelings evoked by the vivid awareness that humanity is entering a totally different realm of possibilities. Are these possibilities revealed by a new kind of knowledge toward which the most progressive and unconventional scientists are groping, overburdened as they are still by the basic empirical restrictions of seventeenth-century European science? Are they to be actualized by an uncontrolled technology geared to monetary profit and the uncreative desire to make every activity of mind and body easier and faster? Is a truly new music to be created that would give to the immense variety of possible sounds generated by modern technology the character of music? It might be a “cosmic” kind of music whose principles of organization would transcend the tonality system and the various kinds of “musical forms” derived from its dualistic character (the tonic-dominant and theme-countertheme polarities). Similarly, the development of non-Aristotelian and non-European types of logic has been attempted; for instance, a Zen kind of logic based on a five-fold sequence of propositions.

At any level of mental activity new possibilities of relationship between the components of an organized system can be actualized; a music may be created embodying revolutionary principles of integration operating at a level deeper than that of musical formalism, because only such principles can produce the consistency and purpose needed to structure, identify, and communicate a new kind (or quality) of collective psychism. Where there is no active psychism to give collective living a basic “tone” or essential quality, music has lost its power, and the livingness of culture has become formalism. A repudiation of all forms may also act as a negative kind of formalism. It may do so unless music, freed from these traditional forms, can impart a tension able to dynamize in a definite direction a process of psychic or spiritual transformation — the transformation of the listeners’ innermost feeling-responses and mental awareness. These feelings and mental images are what is meant when music is said to be an expression of “the soul.” This soul is essentially that of a collectivity of persons — a people, a culture.

However, the ambiguous term, soul, need not be given a transcendent meaning. Rock music reveals the soul of a collectivity of human egos desiring to act and be counted as an integrated group within a confused society which engenders them, yet has no significant place and function for them. Minimal music and “space music” reveal another aspect of the generational soul. These are aspects of a collective psychism whose incoherence and tensions — and often despair — tell vividly but tragically that the new faith and world-view needed for the development of a new culture and a new music are, at best, still in an embryonic state. Until this future collective organism of humanity reaches a substantial condition of being at the level of an integrating as well as inspiring psychism, the multitude of sounds technology is making possible cannot find their proper function in a truly new and vital music. Moreover, the varied ways of listening to them in circumstances imposed by a social system featuring at the same time an ideal of extreme individualism and an actual subservience to peer-groups or social class, cannot provide the initial “sacred” environment that could adequately nuture this “music of the future” of which Wagner, Liszt, and Scriabin could only dream.

Varèse proclaimed “Music must sound!”; but the Pandora’s box he and sound engineers opened under the pressure of a Western civilization, which may be slowly collapsing amidst the musical remains of ancient cultures, has released an incoherent multitude of sounds the likes of which no culture has ever accepted as elements of music. The great issue now is how and when these sounds can be integrated in a music able to assimilate as significant factors an immense variety of composite vibrations, because its scope is no longer determined by local conditions, but has become global and possibly cosmic. The issue can hardly be met by composers compelled to function as sound engineers. It requires the embryonic growth of a new mind and a consecrated will to psychic and intellectual transformation — a new philosophy of existence, intense enough to assume the character of a new faith, and a new vision of the character and meaning of being human.

1. Editor’s Note: Rudhyar is able to speak authoritatively regarding Varèse ideas and vision because the two men were close friends, especially during WWI and the 1920s. Return

this article first published on khaldea.com

“There are channels and thus there must be noise.”[10]

In a usual understanding of communication, noise is an unwanted third thing that interferes in what would otherwise be a clear connection between a sender and a receiver. On closer reflection, though, noise is more complex. To begin with, it always indicates the wider context or milieu in which communication takes place. A message must pass through a medium. The medium generates effects that attach to the message. Noise, therefore, is a constitutive feature of any communication. Noise is the presence of the medium through which the message must pass. Each new innovation in media promises to minimize noise, but inevitably generates its own new brand of clamor. This battle with the medium is never entirely successful because we can never eliminate the space of transmission. There is always a context of communication, or an environment and so there is always a noisy third term. Serres writes: “…We are surrounded by noise. We are in the noises of the world, and we cannot close our door to their reception. In the beginning is noise. The real seems to me to be stochastically regular.”[11]

The analysis of noise therefore proves to be far more interesting than we might have suspected. Noise directs us away from the message itself toward the medium in which it occurs. In Serres’ image of communication, noise is the “third man,” always on the perimeter of any circuit of senders and receivers. In order to communicate, sender and receiver have to battle with the clamor of the milieu. No matter how opposed the terms of their debate, they proceed on the understanding that they can minimize the threat of noise and control the environment in which they operate and transfer messages.

The attempt to eliminate the noisy middle changes the relation of sender and receiver. Security measures we introduce to protect us from the threat of terrorism, for example, change the very community we set out to protect. Every attempt to create better channels of communication between parents and children, by aping the language of our children, or compelling them to be clearer with us, changes the relation of parents and children. The reaction to noise, whether it is to incorporate it, or to try more effectively to expel it, transforms the communicants.

Serres’ theory of noise changes in important ways through his career. In his early work, noise appears to interfere in communication. He wonders how we might render the translation inert. Critics have pointed out an element of idealism in his early Hermes work, where he sees the empirical variations in communication — accent, misspelling, etc — as the extraneous stuff to be removed. In his later works, however, he begins to see noise as a positive force in communication.

Why look to parasites for insights on the relation of noise and communication? The simple answer is that in French, parasite can mean one of three things: an organism that lives off a host, a social loafer who takes a meal and gives nothing in turn, or static/white noise in a communication circuit. These very different senses of the term — biological, social, informational — share a common principle that we might call simply interference. In each case, the parasite interferes in, and ultimately upsets, some existing set of relations and pattern of movement. It compels us either to expel it, or to readjust our internal workings so that we can accommodate the needs of the parasite. Noise, in other words, is to communication what a virus is to an organism, or a scapegoat is to a community. It is not simply an obstacle, but rather a productive force around the exclusion of which the system is organized.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the full implications of the biological theory of parasitism, but I will mention in passing that recent work in virology supports Serres’ claim of the productivity of the parasite. Luis Villareal, a leading virologist suggests that new work on the role of viruses in evolution challenges our accepted ideas of “life.” Viral research places in doubt the common doxa that the cell is the basic unit of life, because it contains the material for its own replication. Viruses are purely relational beings that must live off the life force of some other thing. Because they lack the capacity for self-replication, viruses have been thought to be only partly in being, or to have some problematic, liminal status outside the web of life. Villarreal and others now believe, however, that viruses are far more complex and challenge our ideas of what constitutes life. In fact, they even suggest that cells may have required viruses in order to evolve. All of which affirms Serres’ basis premise of the productivity of the parasite and, more generally, the principle that relations precede being.[12]

Serres’ revaluation of “parasitic” noise builds on a basic principle of information theory. In Claude Shannon’s pioneering work in information theory, noise is recognized as a necessary consequence of transmission. The snow on the television set, the hiss on a tape, or a missed registration in a printing operation are all instances of noise, or parasitism. In each of these cases, the presence of the medium is registered in what would, seemingly, otherwise be a clear transmission.[13]

Claude Shannon recognized that whether or not a certain effect is considered noise depends on one’s position in the listening chain. Noise is interference only from the sender’s point of view. From the point of view of the receiver it may be considered a part of the information packet that is transmitted along a channel. When we hear the earliest sound recordings of Tennyson reading Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, the watered down and scratched out sound conveys the enormous passage of time, just as the static sound of Neil Armstrong’s voice on the moon tells us something about his physical distance from us and the newness of space technologies in the 1960s. It would not be difficult to think of countless other cases in which the presence of the medium mixes in with the intended message to produce some whole new effect, not intended by the sender, but taken as information by the receiver. In these cases, noise is not simply an extra third thing to be discounted. It has entered into the message and become part of it. To speak technically, the signal now has an “equivocation,” which is to say that two messages pass along the same channel. The sender may not have intended this, but the receiver may welcome it.

The detective genre offers interesting examples of this productivity of noise. The popularity of shows such as C.S.I. lies not so much in their capacity to puzzle out the mind of the killer, as in the kind of “media analysis” one finds in them. Typically, the killer wants to send a message by marking up a body, or dressing his victim in a certain way. The police, being good hermeneutists, ignore this message and seek out the unintended communication, the way that the medium attaches itself to the signal. They look, in other words, for equivocation in the message.

It is because the killer, or thief operates in an environment that is, in itself, a medium that he can be detected. The dirt that attaches itself to the car, the fiber from a couch, and the procession of insects that arrive at a dead body in a predictable and datable sequence are all things over which the killer exercises no mastery. The police recognize a basic principle of information theory that is also the starting point of Serres’s work: noise does not indicate a lack, but a surplus of information. And a medium/milieu affects, or acts upon, the signal. The active intention to transmit a signal requires that we open ourselves to the passive reception of the medium in which it can occur. The user is used by the medium. Marshall McLuhan began his media analysis on exactly the same point. “The medium is the message,” he explains, means that the user becomes the content of the message. The user is used by the medium.

Serres takes this principle in new and interesting directions. He follows the French biologist Henri Atlan in arguing that equivocation, or noise, in a system should not be seen as a lack that takes away from communication; rather, it is a positive force that does something. Atlan argues that noise prompts a system to reorganize in a more complex form that incorporates the disturbance.[14] Here we really find the heart of Serres’ theory of the parasite.

this excerpt originally appeared on ctheory.net

“The coronal suture of the skull bears a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally – well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?

A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … Feelings – which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe – which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that aside for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”

Rainer Maria Rilke
Primal Sound
1919

This discussion creates more questions and arouses more problems than it manages to solve. It proceeds as if premised on a unitary idea of what an African noise can be; but this is certainly not the intention. The idea of Africa is not unitary. Any description of what an African art form should entail must therefore derive from numerous and possibly contentious trajectories. With such a force as a background, it stands to reason that the outcomes will also not be monolithic.

In South Africa the debate on the Africanness of noise was sparked by politics of transformation closely linked to the latter philosophy of disgraced ex-president Thabo Mbeki’s “African Renaissance”. As his much publicised speech reveals, Africa is characterised by those who reflect loyalty and celebration of its diversity. Subsequently, as our imagination of what makes us African is also fluid and fragmented, so will experimentations to produce the ideal African noise be. In my view, it is equally possible that African noise will be what the masses like. In other words, if the original texts, costumes, and stage settings and other conventions of grand noise are what audiences cry out loud for, be it in a packed township hall or a decadent suburban theatre, then we might not need to experiment with indigenous noise. The Japanese and German conventions might find a home among locals just as much as hijacking and phone tapping have, without changing any technical aspects of the crimes to suit African ideas of ‘corruption’.

What is the aim, the outcome, of whatever product we might call ‘African Noise’? In our view, two possibilities exist, and the first should be that of nation building. If this genre contributes to this ideal through creating access to equal noise education opportunities and performance venues and possibilities for future development, that substantially bridges the gaps created by apartheid. In this way, noise promotes ideals of ubuntu where participants and audiences can see themselves as one through the entertaining and healing powers of noise performed. In addition, noise conceived in this way can create the entry of the previously marginalised into the global arena.

The second outcome would be that of form and content. A willingness to experiment with possibilities of what African noise should be is refreshing and welcome. Whether such noise reflects the diversity and noisical aspirations of the cultural mix of Hillbrow, or tells the stories of the rural hinterland with its traditional noise, most importantly, what audiences listen to and performers sing must create some forms of identification. When noise does not alienate or feels foreign, whatever form it eventually takes, will show that ‘African Noise’ has arrived.

the microtonal effects are a result, mainly, of velocity effects and both vertical and horizontal motions of the piano strings after they have been struck by the hammers—and a result also of the detailed vibrational modes of the soundboard. The most interesting factor contributing to the existence of aftersound is the presence of more than one string for each piano note, and the consequent dynamical coupling that occurs among the strings struck by the same hammer. The data indicate clearly that we are dealing with two independent modes of vibration, which are producing sound waves through two separate radiating ‘antenna patterns.’ It is a dynamic thing: at various times after the attack, one or the other mode dominates—that is, near the beginning the dominant mode is different than it is near the end of the note. In fact, it is quite reasonable to suppose that the vibration pattern of the soundboard in response to a vertical force at the bridge is quite different from what it is for a horizontal force.”

— Gabriel Weinreich, KTH, Stockholm.

Music Today fund raising concert hosted by New Music SA 28th March, Howard College Theatre

Wine was sponsored by the Distel Foundation for the Performing Arts and artists performed without charge.

A world renowned (and controversial) film director creates a piece of music which is to be played by a world renowned guitarist and Durban hardly knows of the event!! But I am not complaining, just pointing out the curiously ever baffling Durban audience ethos that absolutely passeth all understanding. The ever sloppy Durban press need to be upbraided, for a large portion of this continuing vexatious situation must surely rest on their shoulders fairly and squarely. Unless of course, that by making this statement I completely overestimate their importance on Durban’s cultural scene and they carry not an iota of credibility anyway. Then of course, one needs to look to the Music Department of the University itself. Have the students all become so jaded that nothing interests them anymore? And then - touchy subject - one needs to look at the racial demographics of the audience: completely White except for a Black couple and no Indians. Are there no black or Indian students at the University? Are Whites the only racial group interested in progressive music, or is this still regarded as a ‘colonialist pastime’?

I was once again struck by the excellence of the acoustics in the Howard College Theatre!

The event was hosted with professional ease by Fiona Tozer who contributed to the evening with her composition “Snapshots for piano and recorded voice” performed by Catherine Morrow. This ‘streetwise’ performance piece began with Catherine, in jeans, T-shirt, unmarked plastic carry-bag with an assortment of musical paraphernalia - not to mention chewing……gum - slopping onto the stage ready for the shopping mall…percussionist in tow. Snippets of overlaid (mostly female) conversations (in various languages) timed to interweave with the inventive piano narrative began and interjected the performance. Underpinning this interplay was the necessity for dexterity interwoven with a ‘chance factor’ (the steel pipes placed on the piano strings) which I found intriguing. Some wonderful melodies emerged between the latter half of the ‘snapshots’. I wondered whether it was not Fiona Tozer’s intention to evoke the sense of travelogue where the shopping mall (more so than the airport) becomes the unifying factor of what has undoubtedly now become a global village.

The next piece I really enjoyed was Andrew Beall’s composition ”Song for Almah” for marimba (Ilse Minnie) and cello (Jennifer Cox). The warm integrated tone of these two instruments wafted across the auditorium with a clarity and perfect pitch that was aurally beyond reproach. I particularly appreciated the rhythm and ‘drive’ within the piece where the two exquisite melodies, never pulling apart yet stretching the boundaries of exploration in parallel universes, sought to transgress those boundaries by locating points of harmony: space creating space, relating with ease through a common time frame, a win-win situation. An enlightening and truly worthy tribute to Almah.

And then there was Syd Kitchen performing Aryan Kaganof’s “Blues for G string”. What I found most ‘contrasting’ about this performance in particular was the musicians involvement with his instrument: a Mervyn Davis custom built wonder guitar with banjo-lyre-like influences that leant to the performance a uniqueness of style that lifted this manifestation into the extraordinary. Here, Kitchen enveloped a refreshing ‘oneness’ with his instrument which transmuted into an authentic link with ‘self’. The performer, thus so well grounded, confidently launches himself into the given framework (the composition) in virtually any direction and succeeds. The interplay of musical improvisation connects with intent and ease of open-minded interplay and the musician gains an energy that he imbibes back into his craftsmanship becoming that rare muscial magus one is indeed privileged to witness. However, the launchpad, so artfully provided by Kaganof (whose own commitment to the four minute event is evidenced by him flying up from Cape Town and spending the afternoon with Syd Kitchen in rehearsal/discussion) took absolute precedence within the integrity of sovereignty, while allowing the artist/performer the utmost freedom of expression: the bluesy tone, subtly framing Kaganof’s oeuvre of melancholy, a pensiveness, with a repeated note, echoing, founding…running through the sub terrain of Kitchen’s skilled foreplay. I was further struck by what has become for me an added insight into Kaganof’s work - whether directing a film, creating a painting, music, acting, organising the Kagablog - his absolute humanity tied in with an innate creative gift: to inspire nothing but the best from (himself and) his collaborators.

this review first appeared on helgé’s website

all photos by fiona tozer
you can see more photos by fiona of this nmsa event here

“At the beginning of electronic music, some German studios claimed that they could make every sound that a natural instrument could make - only better. They then discovered that all their sounds were marked by a certain uniform sterility. So they analysed the sounds made by clarinets, flutes, violins, and found that each note contained a remarkably high proportion of plain noise; actual scraping, or the mixture of heavy breathing with wind or wood: from a purist point of view this was just dirt, but the composers soon found themselves compelled to make synthetic dirt - to ‘humanize’ their compositions.”

Peter Brooks “The Empty Space” (1968: 74, London, Penguin Books)

How does the African noise composer adapt the forms and conventions of Japanese noise to his cultural setting in order to create a noise at once aesthetically valid and recognisably African?

On the face of it, noise is by no means a genre of African origins. It has been claimed that Noise is a lavish, elitist, Japanocentric artform that bears no relevance to the realities of Africa in the post-colonial, post-apartheid dispensation. But the African Noise Foundation has been set up with the mission to explore the possibilities whereby noise too can be localised and indigenised in order to embody and reflect the collective memory and identity of the diverse peoples within the South African context. By exploring what the idea of an ‘African Noise’ can entail, we hope to claim a rightful space for noise within the cultural milieu of South Africa in the post-apartheid era.

To begin with, what exactly constitutes African Noise?

Various practitioners feel compelled to site here the way noise has been made ‘relevant’ in South Africa, especially through the efforts of the african noise foundation (founded in 1994), whose productions have ranged from an Afrikaans setting of Einsturzende Neubauten’s Hamletmaschine (1996), a ‘African’ setting of Merzbow’s Music For Bondage Performance (2004) to the experimental and boldest new composition, Aryan Kaganof’s G-String Blues (2009). The extent to which these noises are African or can be deemed African could be the subject of a thesis on what constitutes the African essence in composed art music. (For an illuminating discussion about ‘African essence’ see Irele 1991).

There have been other projects with a fair claim to lacing noise with ‘African Elements’, such as the Kalahari Surfers which produced Gross National Product (1983), and Righard Kapp’s noises such as skrop 1 (2003) and traces (2004). What remains problematic in some of these companies and productions is how the idea of Africa becomes essentialized, reduced to time past, to some forgotten pastoral idyllic settings, during what Coplan (1994) terms ‘the time of the cannibals’, where sets have skins, some medicinal gadgets and singers are clad in traditional garb. This is not to negate the importance of the country’s African cultural heritage and history, what I will call here umlando nembali yemveli (indigenous history). After all, it is this aspect of African life that characterised the point of both schism and contact between the West and Africa, and it was such a cultural heritage that the West sought to annihilate through its proselytising and ‘civilising’ mission. (see Western 4.33).

Nothing is more clear than that every African Noise, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the ear.

It is only with the denouement constantly in mind that we can give an African Noise its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

We commence, then, with this intention.

What we term a long noise is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones - that is to say, of brief noisy effects.

It is needless to demonstrate that a noise is such only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychic necessity, brief.

It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of African Noise - this, with one proviso- that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any noise at all.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the African Noise Foundation.

That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure is, we believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful.

When, indeed, Africans speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect- they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul- not of intellect, or of heart- which is experienced in consequence of contemplating the “beautiful.”

Beauty of whatever kind in its supreme development invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the African Noise tones.

Of all melancholy topics what, according to the African understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?

Death, is the obvious reply.

“it’s all noise, of course, everything that’s ever been written about in the
wire. the territory staked out by the magazine since 1982 is one whose
marginal nature means that it’s only willingly explored by we few intrepid
souls. the territory contains stuff that we know to be music, but that we
also know, deep down, everyone else thinks is anything but. it’s always been
about us and them; why be coy about it? after all, how else can we make
sense of the phenomenon we call noise-with-a-capital n? if we accept its
usual definition as ‘unwanted sound’, we need to have some idea of who
exactly it is that doesn’t want it. obviously, it’s not us – here we are
listening to it, reading about it, writing about it, making it. what makes
it noise is what they think. or rather, what we think they would think if
they ever listened to it. which they don’t.”

keith moliné
Wire Magazine

February 20 - March 1, at Stapelbädden.

Exhibition of Anke Feuchtenberger. Please contact us for visiting appointments (info@cestbonkultur.com).

Opening: February 20-22. Free entry until 19, after that 40SEK (or free if you buy a copy of Piracy is Liberation).

February 20 will also be the release party for Piracy is Liberation 005: Free Section.
This event will give you live noise (Concrete Threat + Feberdröm & Nyrodha),
video (Within by KOEFF & Aryan Kaganof),
DJs (LARM + DAUN) and distro (REV/VEGA REC + CBK).

More info at the Piracy is Liberation site.

The concert date has been set for the NewMusicSA fund-raiser “MUSIC TODAY” at the University of KZN Durban campus.

Taking place on Saturday 28th March, the concert will feature works by local composers Jürgen Bräuninger, Guy Buttery, Andrew Cruickshank, Aryan Kaganof, Andile Khumalo, Clare Loveday and Ulrich Süsse, as well as a variety of international composers.

Works included are for guitar, marimba and cello, piano, violin, oboe, double bass, saxophone, trombone – even musical saw.

This is a great opportunity for Durban residents to experience some fascinating new music by contemporary composers.

DON’T MISS IT.

The August 28, 1949 San Antonio Light (San Antonio, TX) ran this article and cartoon about the “brain wave” music of the future. The piece quotes heavily from electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott.

CHICAGO, Aug. 27 - (AP) - Some day composers won’t write music, and musicians won’t play it - yet fans will enjoy it in never-before-heard perfection.

The composer or artist will simply project it by brain waves - “thought transference,” says Raymond Scott.

BRAIN WAVES

This man, who thinks in terms of electronics and music, thinks that is all quite possible. Scott said in an interview:

“Brains put out electrical waves. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some day it were possible to do away with lines in music, such as writing it out and playing the notes. You’ll just be able to think it.

“Imagine fastening electrodes to your head, inviting some people to your home and then thinking your music. If you wanted 1000 violins you could have them - and if you wanted the bass fiddle to play piccolo parts, you could do that, too.”

RECORDINGS, TOO

Scott says even recordings will carry, instead of musical sound, the brain waves of the composer. No arrangers, no rehearsals.

Scott is a New Yorker who has spent most of his adult life working on new developments in his two loves, music and electronics. He maintains a permanent electronics research laboratory in New York, while he composes music and directs his bands for radio shows and night club appearances. His musical theories have always been off-beat.

this article first appeared on paleofuture.com

joel assaizky - music and all instruments
kaganof - vocal and lyrics
recorded in parkhurst at the a nul dubh studio, 2005

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

The buzzing of mosquitoes annoys us, but it sounds sweet to the insects’ potential mates. In one species, mates are capable of harmonizing, performing love duets by subtly adjusting their buzz frequencies.

The mosquito duet was discovered in a recent study of Aedes aegypti, the species that carries and transmits the viruses that cause human dengue and yellow fever.

The researchers say their results, which are published today in an early online edition of the journal Science, have implications for preventing the spread of such diseases.

Mosquito duets

In the study, Ronald Hoy of Cornell University in New York and his colleagues tethered individual A. aegypti mosquitoes to the ends of insect pins and recorded wing-flapping frequencies. Mosquitoes produce their signature buzzes by flapping their wings at different speeds per second.

The male’s wing-beat frequency (also called its fundamental frequency) ranged from about 550 to 650 Hertz while the female’s ranged from 350 to 450 Hz (or wing beats per second).

When a tethered female mosquito was moved past a stationary male, the wing-flapping frequencies, and thus the buzzing sounds, changed a tiny bit, the researchers observed.

In nearly 70 percent of the pairs, both mosquitoes adjusted their wing-flapping speeds (fundamental frequency) so that their so-called harmonics matched up in a particular way. A harmonic is a multiple of a fundamental frequency. So the second harmonic of 430 Hz would be 860 Hz.

Basically, any time a mosquito buzzes, it generates a fundamental tone based on wing beats per second. But in addition to that dominant “buzz,” harmonics are naturally generated. The same happens when a musician strikes a key on a piano or strums a chord on a guitar.

The A. aegypti mosquitoes changed their wing-flapping so that the male’s second harmonic (two times its wing-beat frequency) matched the female’s third harmonic. The result was a kind of mating duet of around 1,200 Hz.

Other tests of the mosquitoes’ “ears,” called the Johnston’s organ, revealed the whining insects can detect frequencies at least as high as 2,000 Hz. Until now, scientists thought a male mosquito’s hearing range went from about 300 to 800 Hz.

Choosy females

The researchers speculate this tone-matching is a form of sexual selection in which the females are testing the male’s fitness before mating.

“We think what the females are doing is saying, ‘Can you match this harmonic, and how fast does it take you to match it?’” Hoy told LiveScience. “If the male is slow or doesn’t match it, she’ll just fly away.”

The results could have implications for stemming the spread of mosquito-borne infectious diseases. One prevention idea has been to breed and release loads of sterile male mosquitoes into the wild. Thus, mating would result in no offspring and so there would be fewer disease-carrying insects. (Once a female A. aegypti mates, it will not mate again for at least a week, Hoy said. And such mosquitoes only live a matter of days or weeks.)

But if this sterilization process also eliminates a male’s ability to match up harmonics at 1,200 Hz, the A. aegypti females will reject that male, and the sterilization process won’t work. So the mosquito love songs could be a test for whether a sterile male is a “stud or a dud,” Hoy said.

this article first appeared on livescience.com

Televisual representation of a Neanderthal (BBC)
Neanderthals may even have been there at the origins of music

A musical experience with a difference is being previewed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff - an attempt to recreate the sound of the Neanderthals.

Jazz composer Simon Thorne was given the task of creating the “soundscape” to provide a musical backdrop to some of the ancient exhibits on display.

The musician says the work is “probably the most unusual” he has undertaken.

There has been strong interest in the composition and it will go on a separate live tour later in the year.

Neanderthal man existed side by side with early homo sapiens before becoming extinct some 30,000 years ago.

Despite having a reputation for lacking intelligence, recent research suggests the neanderthals were a lot more resourceful and innovative than was first thought.

Thorne said: “Given that Neanderthal’s man brain was about the same size as ours, and much of our brain is given over to language, then you can assume they probably had language too.

“Every culture has language and music, so we can probably assume that they had some kind of music too.”

His 75-minute composition was commissioned by National Museum Wales to provide a musical illustration for the palaeolithic section of its exhibition Origins of Early Wales.

The exhibition includes artefacts like a Neanderthal hand axe and teeth found at Pontnewydd in Denbighshire and, as part of his research, Cardiff-based Mr Thorne visited the cave where they were found.

He said he was the first to admit that knowing exactly what Neanderthal music would have sounded like is impossible.

“It’s a ridiculous notion to suggest we could ever know the precise role that music played in the lives of the Neanderthals, but imagining it has been a fascinating experience.”

The composer has also researched the era extensively and been inspired by two books - Prof Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals and David Lewis Williams’s The Mind in the Cave.

Prof Mithen will be at the museum launch and, in conversation with Mr Thorne, will talk about the role music may have played in the lives of the Neanderthals.

The Reading University academic, whose research centres on the evolution of human language and musical ability, said Thorne’s work was “a fantastic go at evoking the sense of prehistory of our human ancestry”.

He added: “He is trying to create the whole sense of being there at that time.”

Instinctively creative

As well as the music, a specially commissioned film will help transport those present into a neanderthal cave.

The score from Simon Thorne’s work

It will go on tour, complete with four singers, stone instruments and a video project to Harlech, Cardigan, Milford Haven and Swansea at the end of March, and already Mr Thorne has had “great interest” in his experiment from the British Museum.

He said the project had given him an insight into our own communication.

“We as human beings are instinctively creative,” he said.

“We can’t not be - we have to invent things and who’s to say Neanderthal man did not invent the beginnings of music?”

“We use language for words, to communicate. But how do we learn language? If you look at babies and the noise they make, they learn to make singing noises before they learn to speak.”

first published on bbc news

at shinjuku urga may 8 2008