Background Noise, Second Edition

Perspectives on Sound Art

Brandon LaBelle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628923544
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Background Noise follows the development of sound as an artistic medium and illustrates how sound is put to use within modes of composition, installation, and performance. While chronological in its structure, Brandon LaBelle's book is informed by spatial thinking - weaving architecture, environments, and the specifics of location into the work of sound, with the aim of formulating an expansive history and understanding of sound art. At its center the book presupposes an intrinsic relation between sound and its location, galvanizing acoustics, sound phenomena, and the environmental with the tensions inherent in what LaBelle identifies as sound's relational dynamic. For the author, this is embedded within sound's tendency to become public expressed in its ability to travel distances, foster cultural expression, and define spaces while being radically flexible. This second expanded edition includes a new chapter on the non-human and subnatural tendencies in sound art, revisions to the text as well as a new preface by the author. Intersecting material analysis with theoretical frameworks spanning art and architectural theory, performance studies and media theory, Background Noise makes the case that sound and sound art are central to understandings of contemporary culture.

4'33": Sound and Points of Origin

Cage was concerned to organize the temporal
unfolding of the work in a context where
chance already rules, for reasons that are
more social than musical . . .¹

—JEAN-JACQUES NATTIEZ

All I am doing is directing attention to the
sounds of the environment.²

—JOHN CAGE

Introduction to Part 1

4'33": Sound and Points of Origin

Given the extraordinary breadth of materials written on and about John Cage, not to mention his own writings and extensive creative projects spanning his long life, to begin my own undertaking with him is to confront a mass of material, opinions, bibliographies, references, and anecdotes. Yet it is with Cage that I begin, not so much with a desire to analyze the plethora of material or to rewrite all that surrounds him (if that is possible . . .), but to initiate a specific project in which Cage must figure. For Cage stages a consideration of sound through musical practice. In this way, music not only functions as a form of cultural output, but a platform for critical reflection. Cage’s beginning is thus a reinvention of musical practice through an investment in sound’s potential to invigorate music’s reach.

To refer to sound and music in the same breath is to confront, right from the start, a semantic impasse or jag in the cognitive map. For how can I begin with “sound,” which presupposes a relation to found phenomena, and “music,” which operates in the domain of cultural production? In short, with musical aesthetics and thinking and the sonority of environments not as two sides of the same coin, but as faces that overlap, superimposed to form a singular? For Cage sought the found environment, as space for altered and renewed listening within a musical framework. In doing so, he articulates what would become a driving force for the aesthetic project of the neo-avant-garde throughout the sixties, which would increasingly aim for immediacy, beyond the artistic object and musical messages, seeking instead the heart of the real. Through such moves, Cage bursts the seams of the musical framework so as to open onto the outside, reminding music what it is made of: sound. For Cage, such advances came by emphasizing the “here and now” of sound: that sound was found in the immediate and the proximate, whether that be a concert hall or a shopping center, inside objects or even inside his own throat. For “it behooves us to see each thing directly as it is, be it the sound of a tin whistle or the elegant Lepiota procera [mushroom].”³ To “see each thing directly as it is” finds its maximized realization in the very move toward sound: against prevailing musical languages of the classical tradition, sound is cast as the essence to musical experience, to musical objects, and to the auditory situation of music in general.⁴ To make music was thus to harness the essential ingredient of sound, mobilizing it for direct sensory experience. The immediacy of sound thus lends to its own force and value. For Cage, it opens the way to leaving behind the discursive narrative of musical messages in favor of a social inertia.

Expanded View

To follow Cage’s example, his lessons and his vocabulary, is to begin with an expanded view in which something like music takes on cultural weight. Such a view necessarily leads one’s listening to new sounds and new ways of perceiving such sounds. Yet Cage is not alone in creating such an expansive field. Contemporaneously, musique concrète equally uncovers an entirely new set of musical possibilities, yet through very different means: whereas Cage aims for the here and now of sound beyond the mechanics of representation, musique concrète appropriates technologies of sound recording and reproduction in the constructing of musical work. Phonographs, tape machines, editing techniques, found recordings, speaker systems, mixing consoles all feature in the machinery employed to piece together musique concrète’s elaborate mosaics of sound. While occupying an extreme end of experimental music’s auditory discoveries in the late 1940s and early 1950s, musique concrète contributes greatly to the expansion of musical vocabulary, lending weight to electronic, extra-timbral technological potential, while detailing the rhetoric around sound.

It is my intent to pursue Cage and musique concrète as forerunners to experimental music, with a particular view toward recognizing how sound is defined according to spatial and locational coordinates. That is, their work defines sonic culture by continually positioning music, either in relation to social space, as in Cage’s project, or through methods of appropriation, electronic manipulation, and diffusion, in musique concrète. To add to this, the work of Group Ongaku, a Japanese collective from the early 1960s whose performative improvisational work could be said to utilize the technology of the body by appropriating found objects. Ongaku aims for an anthropological aesthetics, where site, sound, and action coalesce in performances that leave behind any semblance of tonality.

Conceptualism

By seeking to reflect upon the conventions of musical practice through the very process of producing music and establishing compositional methods as a way to articulate such reflection, Cage defines what can be called a “conceptual” approach, in that music is both the thing and a reflection on the thing. Such conceptual moves can be understood through following his incorporation and cultivation of silence, sound, chance operations, and indeterminacy. Each of these interests can be seen as prescient of Conceptual art in the latter part of the 1960s: silence within musical composition can be heard in terms of a “dematerialization” of the musical object, revealing a suspicion toward representational structures; sound, as distinguished from harmony and pitch, short-circuits the traditions of musical understanding, and in doing so provokes an implicit critique of such traditions; the development of chance operations and indeterminacy as methods of composition and performance sets the stage for a self-referentiality in which the very means of composing and processes of performing become part of the content of the work itself—what one partially hears in chance operations is chance itself as reflected through sonic events. Cage’s work, his procedures and ideas, underscores sound not only as a musical medium but as a trigger for directing attention not so much beyond interpretation but toward the context in which interpretation must always take place.

By marking Cage in relation to Conceptual art, I want to underscore his work as initiating a mode of critical practice that would influence the developments of contemporary art throughout the 1960s and 1970s that spatialized, contextualized, and politicized itself. Further, in Cage’s practice we can identify the developments of auditory thinking whereby sound is brought to the fore as cultural media as well as philosophical arena. The approach to such auditory thinking is thus wed to a conceptual, critical practice based on self-reflection, contextual awareness, the appropriation of found materials, and an overarching interest in social reality.

As Ursula Meyer proposes in her Conceptual Art anthology from 1972, “Art is not in the objects, but in the artist’s conception of art to which the objects are subordinated.”⁵ Even while Cage strove to remove his own authoring hand through techniques based on chance and indeterminacy, with a view toward liberating sound from its referent, to deliver up experience rather than object, he did so by continually framing his projects through a self-styled language that philosophically made explicit his conceptualizations. That is to say, he was very much in control of the process by which liberation could be discovered and made concrete. Sound thus gains credibility through its potential as an addition to the musical palette, and more by its ability to activate perception, social space, and temporal immediacy—its potential to foster subjective intensities, from listening to living.

Context is thus prominent within Cage’s philosophical project, referring audition intensely toward its very location. The here and now takes a twist in the “acousmatic” methods of musique concrète: working directly with sound recording techniques and technologies, musique concrète renders the here and now through intensely constructed sound objects that enliven the ear. The theatrics of sonic diffusion creates its own unique presence, turning a given time and place into an active musical experience. The importance of the experiential, the here and now of sound, the elaboration of a rhetoric of audition, these are the ingredients of a prominent thread of experimental music, one that leads to the developments of sound art and forms of audio art throughout the latter part of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, “Cage and Boulez: A Chapter of Music History,” in The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1993), p. 15.

2. John Cage, For the Birds (London and Boston, MA: Marion Boyars, 1995), p. 98.

3. John Cage, “Music Lovers Field Companion,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 276.

4. The classical tradition as exemplified in the Romantic legacy of Wagner, and the German tradition, in turn finds its Modernist undoing in the works of Schoenberg, whose own “emancipation of dissonance,” and subsequent twelve-tone compositional method, already announces a move toward sound as a category, though under the guise of atonality and the overtone spectrum. Cage, in this regard, makes a final sweep against the lingering threads of the classical tradition by progressively interfering with the musical vocabulary of atonality through the use of percussion, the introduction of silence as governing terminology, and, eventually, with the lessening of compositional control with chance operations and indeterminacy.

5. Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. XI. It is curious to note that Meyer, in her introduction, quotes Cage on the first page, after Wittegenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Roland Barthes.

Chapter 1

Sociality of Sound: John Cage and Musical Concepts

The experimental ethos as exemplified by Cage refutes the classical tradition, for “traditional dialectical music is representational: the musical form relates to an expressive content and is a means of creating a growing tension; this is what is usually called the musical argument.”¹ In contrast, the new experimentalism develops “multiple permutations” consisting of “independent structural units . . . making uncertainty a positive feature.”² While “musical arguments” characterize and overdetermine the inherent richness of sound through representational “signs” in need of interpretation, the experimental “open work” calls “for a new form of mental collaboration with the music” in which “the singularity of the moment” comes into being “in the listener’s ear.”³

In the experimental “open work,” musical arguments are replaced by processes that result in “music,” and the writing of music is supplanted by the creation of situations. Michael Nyman’s differentiation of Cage from a contemporary, Stockhausen, may highlight the distinctions further: “The classical system, and its contemporary continuation [Stockhausen] is essentially a system of priorities which sets up ordered relationships between its components, and where one thing is defined in terms of its opposite.”⁴ In contrast, for Cage, such prioritizing is overturned by indeterminate and chance-oriented events in which sounds and nonsounds, control and chaos, are placed on equal footing. Thus, any remnant of musical argument is negated by a prevailing extravagance of nonintentionality, multiplicity, silence, and noise.

The musicological argument over the referentiality and meaning of music must be seen to shift radically under the momentum of Cage’s work. Yet Cage does not so much escape representation as resituate it onto the field of sound through which “its ephemereality . . . its interpenetration and unimpededness, becomes meaningful.”⁵ The very condition of sound thus features as means for composition as well as interpretation. By overturning the musical object so as to insert the presence of the listener, Cage resituates the terms by which the referent of music takes on social weight, beyond symbolic systems and toward immediacy and the profound presence of being there. In doing so, he relies upon sound as an ontological crutch by casting it as always other to music’s traditional construction, as ephemeral and transcendent, as nonreferential and nonintended, as anarchic and free. Sound is the boundless, undefined materiality of musical events, as well as a vocabulary for a new philosophy of musical ethics. According to Cage, music is accountable not only for its aesthetic or formalistic properties, but as a social and political object with real influence.

Increasingly through the 1940s both fronts intertwined in a dual consideration that ultimately leaves them indistinguishable: progressively, music is never without the social. This process is not without its problems or tension, for Cage’s project ultimately aims to transcend the material conditions of the musical object by insisting, on some level, upon the very material conditions of such an object. In other words, as listeners, we are asked to witness a musical event that, by insisting on its material conditions (this sound is only this sound), may lead us beyond music. For instance, his prepared piano of the 1940s⁶ turns the classical instrument into a drum orchestra, removing tonality for the percussive surprises of screws, bolts, and spoons, echoing his earlier Living Room Music (1940), whose first and last movements ask for household items, such as magazines, books, tabletops, and window frames, to function as sound sources, or The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), which calls for playing the piano solely through tapping, banging, and knocking it; and his Imaginary Landscape series introduces electronic tone tests (No. 1, [1939]), radio uncertainties from twelve receivers and twenty-four players (No. 4, [1951]), and randomly mixed recordings structured with the I-Ching (No. 5, [1952]), progressively interfering with the musical messag...