What’s the point in noise music? This is a question posed in the forums of Last.Fm. One person, by way of reply wrote:
“It’s the opposite of a composition called 4′33″ written by John Cage. It is just silence, for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. It has been recorded several times and has even been broadcast on the radio.
That’s just stupid, just as noise music. In my opninion”
Noise annoys. That is often the point.
Iggy Pop has said that one of the driving principles of The Stooges was to be “as loud and annoying as possible” and the track ‘LA Blues’ off ‘Fun House’ would certainly fit into most listener’s category of noise music.
As for Mr Cage, the key to his ‘silent’ composition, is that it is contained within a precise time frame and therefore fulfills Edgard Varése’s definition of music as “the organisation of sound“. Cage’s piece allows for a certain randomness but only within the 4 minute 33 seconds of the ”performance’. The organisation relies only on the stop watch so, in theory, the only way such a piece could ‘fail’ is if the timing were miscalculated.
The piece allows for any instrument to be used (it’s usually a piano) although since each of the three numbered sections are marked ‘tacet’ it effectively informs the performer not to play a single note!
In a ‘performance’, the only sounds will therefore be those that occur within the auditorium and not from any musical instrument.
4’33” is a precisely composed nothingness – a musical void which many dismiss as a post-modernist scam; a poker-faced joke made at the audience’s expense. But while the composer clearly wanted to provoke controversy, he also wanted to draw attention to the whole concept of how we perceive sound.
In essence Cage’s thick skinned willingness to be the butt of ridicule and abuse helped in establishing the principle that any sounds can be termed music, even those which are not comforting or immediately pleasing to the ear. Music does not necessarily need to consist of a ‘nice’ tune or uplifting content or become the soundtrack to some idealised harmonious universe. On the contrary, since the world we live in lurches randomly from apparent order to chaotic unpredictability it seems entirely logical that something of this discordant quality should find expression in contemporary music.
This can reach a point whereby listeners are positively urged to confront the “grim reality” of ‘noise’ to acknowledge what critic Simon Reynolds identifies as “the widely held view that beauty and harmony are a lie, presenting a bourgeois vision of nature and society as fundamentally balanced and ordered” .
In refusing at all costs to be nice and presentable, ‘noise’ is a wake up call to the need to face the harsh realities of life with all the pretty trimmings removed.
THAT is the point.
The thing is, it’s usually these deluded artists that are the ones not living in objective reality. It is them who need to wake up or as my father would say “they needa fucking punch in the ear to knock some sense into them”.