Audio Culture

Revised Edition
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Sources and Permissions
Introduction to the Revised Edition

Part 1 Theories
I. Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence
Introduction
1 “Noise and Politics” Jacques Attali
2 “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto” Luigi Russolo
3 “The Liberation of Sound” Edgard Varèse
4 “The Joys of Noise” Henry Cowell
5 “The Future of Music: Credo” John Cage
6 “The Music of the Environment” R. Murray Schafer
7 “The Gender of Sound” Anne Carson
8 “Queer Sound” Drew Daniel
9 “The Quiet of Blackness: Miles Davis and John Coltrane” Kevin
Quashie

II. Modes of Listening

Introduction
10 “Visual and Acoustic Space” Marshall McLuhan
11 “Acousmatics” Pierre Schaeffer
12 “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter” Francisco
López
13 “Ambient Music” Brian Eno
14 “Auralizing the Sonosphere: A Vocabulary for Inner Sound and
Sounding” Pauline Oliveros
15 “Perceptual Geography: Third Ear Music and Structure Borne
Sound” Maryanne Amacher
16 “Hearing Essay” Evelyn Glennie
17 “The Aural Walk” Iain Chambers
18 “Ubiquitous Listening” Annahid Kassabian
19 “Forensic Listening” Lawrence Abu Hamdan
20 “Organizing the Silence” Ultra-red

III. Music in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

Introduction
21 “The Prospects of Recording” Glenn Gould
22 “The Studio as Compositional Tool” Brian Eno
23 “Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt” John
Oswald
24 “Plunderphonia” Chris Cutler
25 “Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality” Kodwo Eshun
26 “Six File-Sharing Epiphanies” Kenneth Goldsmith
27 “Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound” Tara Rodgers

Part 2 Practices
IV. The Open Work
Introduction
28 “Poetics of the Open Work” Umberto Eco
29 “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” John Cage
30 “Every Sound You Can Imagine: On Graphic Scores” Christoph Cox
31 “Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic” Earle
Brown
32 “The Game Pieces” John Zorn
33 “Introduction to Catalog of Works” Anthony Braxton
34 “Notes on Conduction” Lawrence “Butch” Morris

V. Experimental Musics
Introduction
35 “Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music” Michael Nyman
36 “Introduction to Themes & Variations” John Cage
37 “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts” Brian Eno
38 “Scratch Music Draft Constitution” Cornelius Cardew
39 “The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital
Culture” David Toop
40 “The New Discipline” Jennifer Walshe
41 “Re-Invent: Experimental Music in China” Yan Jun

VI. Improvised Musics

Introduction
42 “Change of the Century” Ornette Coleman
43 “Notes (8 Pieces): Creative Music” Wadada Leo Smith
44 “Free Improvisation” Derek Bailey
45 “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation” Frederic Rzewski
46 “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological
Perspectives” George E. Lewis
47 “Improvisation: Terms and Conditions” Vijay Iyer
48 “Going Fragile” Mattin
49 “27 Questions For a Start … And Some Answers to Begin With” Trio
Sowari et al.

VII. Minimalisms
Introduction
50 “Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism” Kyle Gann
51 “Basic Concepts of Minimal Music” Wim Mertens
52 “Music as a Gradual Process” Steve Reich
53 “Conversation with Richard Kostelanetz” La Monte Young and
Marian Zazeela
54 “LYssophobia: On Four Violins” Tony Conrad
55 “Rap, Minimalism and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century
Culture” Susan McClary
56 “Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: Minimalism in Contemporary
Electronic Dance Music” Philip Sherburne

VIII. DJ Culture
Introduction
57 “Production–Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph” László
Moholy-Nagy
58 “Détournement as Negation and Prelude” Situationist International
59 “The Invisible Generation” William S. Burroughs
60 “Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory” Paul D. Miller
61 “Replicant: On Dub” David Toop
62 “Post-Rock” Simon Reynolds
63 “A Few Notes on Production and Playback” Marina Rosenfeld

IX. Electronic Music and Electronica

Introduction
64 “Introductory Remarks to a Program of Works Produced at the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” Jacques Barzun
65 “Electronic and Instrumental Music” Karlheinz Stockhausen
66 “Stockhausen vs the Technocrats” Karlheinz Stockhausen et al.
67 “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal” Eliane Radigue
68 “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary
Computer Music” Kim Cascone
69 “Laptop Intimacy and Platform Politics” Holly Herndon

Chronology
Selected Discography
Selected Bibliography
Glossary
Notes to Quotations
Index
 Acknowledgements

A large network of people contributed to the publication of Audio Culture

in its two editions. The first edition was ably guided by Continuum’s David
Barker, who enthusiastically supported the project, the revised edition by
Bloomsbury’s Ally Jane Grossan, Michelle Chen, and Leah Babb-
Rosenfeld, whom we thank for their patience and generosity. Gabriella
Page-Fort superbly copyedited the manuscript and made helpful
suggestions and wise decisions. Thanks also to The Wire magazine’s Rob
Young, Tony Herrington, Chris Bohn, and Anne Hilde Neset. Aaron
Berman and Eva Rueschmann, Deans of Faculty at Hampshire College,
supported our work on the book with a series of faculty development grants
for which we are very grateful. A grant from Hampshire’s European Studies
Program, directed by Jim Miller, made possible the translation of Pierre
Schaeffer’s “Acousmatics.” Several students assisted with the manuscript or
suggested materials: Matt Krefting, Matthew Latkiewicz, Daniel Lopatin,
Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Rosenblum, Charlotte Schwennsen, John Shaw,
Noel Kirsch, and Kira DeCoudres. Amherst College music librarians Ann
Maggs and Jane Beebe generously granted us access to that library’s fine
collections. Thanks, too, to a number of friends and colleagues who helped
us locate materials and track down authors and artists: Robert Walser,
David Rothenberg, Marta Ulvaeus, Stephen Vitiello, Andrew Deutsch, Jon
Abbey, Jonas Leddington, Oren Ambarchi, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe,
Jason Tors, and Eyal Hareuveni. Discographical advice was generously
offered by Michael Ehlers, Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, Philip Sherburne,
and Matt Krefting. Catherine Dempsey put in hours of work comparing and
correcting versions of Brian Eno’s essays. John Zorn offered helpful
criticisms and generously took the time to talk with us about his work. Bill
Dietz gave us access to unpublished material in the Maryanne Amacher
Archive. Special thanks to Daniel W. Smith for his superb translation of
Pierre Schaeffer’s text, and to Holly Herndon, Kevin Quashie, Marina
Rosenfeld, and Philip Sherburne for contributing commissioned essays
under tight deadlines.
 Our warmest and deepest thanks go to Molly Whalen for her patience,
support, and enthusiasm, and to Mary Russo for her love, advice, and
encouragement. Finally, we express our sincere gratitude to the writers,
composers, and musicians who generously allowed us to reprint their
important work.
 Sources and Permissions

Every reasonable effort has been made to locate the owners of rights to
previously published works and the translations printed here. We gratefully
acknowledge permission to reprint the following material:

Chapter
1 From Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Used by permission of the publisher.
2 From Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986).
Used by permission of the publisher.
3 From Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1966). Used by permission of Chou Wen-
Chung for the Estate of Edgard Varèse.
4 From Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music, ed. Dick Higgins (Kingston, NY:
McPherson & Company, 2002). Used by permission of the publisher.
5 From Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England/Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Used by permisson of the publisher.
6 From R. Murray Schafer, The Music of the Environment (Wien: Universal Edition, 1973). Used
by permission of the author.
7 From Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), incorporating
section titles from the version published in Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 3 (Fall
1994): 24–31. Used by permission of the publisher.
8 From The Wire 333 (November 2011): 42–46. Used by permission of the author.
9 Commissioned for this volume.
10 From Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village (New York: Oxford, 1989).
Used by permission of the publisher.
11 From Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), translated for
this volume by Daniel W. Smith. Used by permission of Jacqueline Schaeffer and the publisher.
12 From Francisco López, “Blind Listening,” in The Book of Music and Nature, ed. David
Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Modified
with reference to the text’s original publication as liner notes to López’s recording La Selva
V2_Archief V228. Reprinted by permission of the author and David Rothenberg.
13 From Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). Used by
permission of the author.
14 From Pauline Oliveros, Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009, ed. Lawton Hall
(Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2010). Used by permission of Ione.
15 From Maryanne Amacher, “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some
Features of a Perceptual Geography” (1977), presented in 1979 at The Mary Ingraham Bunting
Institute of Radcliffe College, and “About the Big Waves of Structure Borne Sound,” previously
unpublished. Both texts used by permission of Bill Dietz and the Maryanne Amacher Archive.
16 Evelyn Glennie, “Hearing Essay” (January 1, 2015), https://www.evelyn.co.uk/hearing-essay.
Used by permission of the author.
17 From Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). Used by
permission of the author and Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
18 From Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Used by permission of the publisher.
19 From Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “The Freedom of Speech Itself: A Contemporary Chronology of
Forensic Listening,” Cabinet 43 (Fall 2011). Used by permission of the author.
20 From On Horizons: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Hlavajova, Simon
Sheikh, and Jill Winder (Utrecht: BAK/Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2011). Used by permission of
the authors.
21 From High Fidelity (April 1966). Used by permission of Glenn Gould Estate.
22 From Down Beat 50 (July 1983) and (August 1983), edited by Howard Mandel. Used by
permission of the author.
23 From The Whole Earth Review (Winter 1987). Used by permission of the author.
24 From Musicworks 60 (Fall 1994). Slightly modified and used by permission of the author.
25 From Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London:
Quartet, 1998). Used by permission of the author.
26 From The Wire 327 (April 2011). Used by permission of the author.
27 From Leonardo Music Journal 25 (2015). Used by permission of the author.
28 From Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
29 From Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England/Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Used by permission of the publisher.
30 From the catalog to “Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine,” curated by Christoph
Cox, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, October 3–December 2, 2008. Used by permission
of the author.
31 From Current Musicology 67/68 (2002). Used by permission of the Earle Brown Music
Foundation.
32 The first portion of this chapter appeared as liner notes to John Zorn, Cobra, Tzadik TZ 7335.
The interview that follows was conducted for this volume by Christoph Cox.
33 From Anthony Braxton, Catalog of Works (Synthesis Publishing, 1989). Used by permission of
the author.
34 From the liner notes to Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris, Testament: A Conduction Collection (New
World Records, 1995). Used by permission of New World Records.
35 From Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
36 From John Cage, Themes & Variations (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1982). Used by
permission of the publisher.
37 From Studio International (Nov./Dec. 1976). Used by permission of the author.
38 From Scratch Music, ed. Cornelius Cardew (London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1972). Used by
permission of Horace Cardew, www.dannydarkrecords.co.uk
39 From David Toop, “The Generation Game,” The Wire 207 (May 2001). Used by permission of
the author.
40 From the program for the Borealis 2016 experimental music festival, Bergen, Norway. Used by
permission of the author.
41 From the liner notes to An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music, 1992–2008, Sub Rosa,
SR265 (2009). Afterword written for this volume. Used by permission of the author.
42 From the liner notes to Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century, Atlantic SD 1327 (1960).
43 From notes (8 pieces) source a new world music: creative music, self-published, 1973. Used by
permission of the author.
44 From Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo,
1992). Used by permission of the author and Karen Brookman.
45 From Black Music Research Journal 16 (1996). Slightly modified and used by permission of the
author
46 From Current Musicology 67/68 (2002). Used by permission of the author.
47 From Arcana IV: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Hips Road, 2009). Used by
permission of the author.
48 From Noise and Capitalism, ed. Anthony Iles and Mattin (San Sebastián, Spain: Arteleku
Audiolab, 2009). Used by permission of the author.
49 From Echtzeitmusik Berlin: Self-Defining a Scene, ed. Burkhard Beins et al. (Hofheim: Wolke
Verlag, 2011). Used by permission of Burkhard Beins.
50 From Kyle Gann, “Minimal Music, Maximal Impact,” NewMusicBox 31, vol. 3, no. 7
(November 2001). Used by permission of the author and NewMusicBox.
51 From Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, trans. J. Hautekier (London: Kahn & Averill,
1983). Used by permission of Usura publishers and the author.
52 From Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Used by permission of the publisher.
53 From Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings,
Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial Press, 1968).
Used by permission of Richard Kostelanetz
54 From liner notes to Tony Conrad, Early Minimalism, Vol. 1, Table of the Elements TOE-CD-33.
Used by permission of the author.
55 From Susan McClary, “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures off Time in Late-Twentieth Century
Culture,” the Norman and Jane Geske Lecture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Used by permission of the author.
56 Commissioned for this volume.
57 From “Production–Reproduction” and “New Form in Music: Potentialities of the Phonograph,”
in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Krisztina Passuth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). Used by
permission of Corvina Books.
58 From Situationist International Anthology, revised and expanded edition, ed. and trans Ken
Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).
59 From William S. Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Used by
permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
60 From the liner notes to DJ Spooky, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, Asphodel ASP0961. Used by
permission of the author.
61 From David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 1995). Used by permission of the author.
62 From The Village Voice (August 29, 1995). Used by permission of the author.
63 Commissioned for this volume.
64 From the liner notes to Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Columbia MS 6566 LP
(1964). Used by permission of the author.
65 Delivered as a lecture in October 1958 and published in German in Die Reihe 5 (Vienna:
Universal Edition, 1959), translated by Jerome Kohl in collaboration with Suzanne Stephens and
John McGuire. Used by permission of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music.
66 From The Wire 141 (November 1995). Used by permission Tony Herrington for The Wire.
67 From Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009). Used by permission of the author.
68 From Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (Winter 2000). Used by permission of the author.
69 Commissioned for this volume.
 Introduction to the Revised Edition: Music and the
New Audio Culture

A new audio culture emerged in the late twentieth century, a culture of

musicians, composers, improvisors, sound artists, scholars, and listeners
attentive to sonic substance, the act of listening, and the creative
possibilities of sound recording, playback, and transmission. This culture of
the ear has become particularly marked since the late 1990s, as evidenced
by a constellation of distinct but interrelated phenomena. The academy has
witnessed the emergence of “sound studies,” an interdisciplinary field of
inquiry led by historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and cultural
theorists who have turned their attention to sound as a marker of temporal
and cultural difference.1 At the same time, sound art has become a
prominent field of artistic practice, presented at major museums and
galleries all across the globe.2 In music, once-marginal sonic and auditory
explorers—Luigi Russolo, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Pauline Oliveros,
R. Murray Schafer, Maryanne Amacher, Éliane Radigue, and others—have
come to be acknowledged as ancestors and influences by an extraordinary
number and range of musicians and producers working across the
boundaries of classical, jazz, rock, and dance music.
What accounts for this auditory turn in contemporary culture?
Technological innovations have certainly played a central role. “Sound
recording, audio tracking of movies and video, online MP3s, all have re-
sounded our ways of thinking,” notes historian Richard Cullen Rath,
recapitulating a view advocated by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the
1960s.3 McLuhan argued that the rise of electronic media was causing a
shift in the sensorium, ousting the visual from its long hegemony and giving
way to an immersive experience exemplified by the auditory.4 In his
persuasive history of musical technology, musician and theorist Chris
Cutler offers a related view, arguing that sound recording has deposed the
culture of the eye exemplified by the highly literate and score-governed
field of European art music, and has “throw[n] the life of music production
back onto the ear.” As with the orally transmitted folk music that was
eclipsed by the European classical tradition, “the first matter is again
Sound. Recording is memory of sound.”5
Invented in the mid-1930s, but commercially unavailable until a decade-
and-a-half later, the tape recorder revolutionized music. Early
experimenters such as Cage and Schaeffer noted that this device opened
music to “the entire field of sound,”6 rather than merely the restricted body
of sounds produced by traditional musical instruments. Indeed, trained as a
radio engineer instead of a composer, Schaeffer came to represent a new
breed of musician: an amateur explorer working directly (“concretely,” as
he put it) with sound material rather than going through the detours of
musical notation, conductors, and performers. And just as Schaeffer
prefigured today’s music producer, who manipulates sound with
inexpensive hardware and software on a home computer, he also prefigured
the age of the remix. For recorded sound obscures the difference between
the original and the copy, and is available for endless improvisatory
manipulations and transformations. Finally, the tape recorder (and related
technologies such as the phonograph and the radio) made possible a new
mode of listening, what Schaeffer termed “acousmatic listening”: listening
to sounds in the absence of their sources and visual contexts, a listening that
thus gives access to sound-as-such.
A second technological revolution has also contributed to the rise of
audio culture over the past few decades: the advent of digital media.
Compact discs, the Internet, MP3, peer-to-peer networks, podcasts,
streaming media—all these digital technologies and platforms have led to
the creation of a vast virtual archive of sound and music available on a
massive scale. The pristine clarity of digital sound fosters an attention to
sonic matter and detail; its replicability and microscopic malleability allows
even a novice to become a sound artist or remixer. Finally, the internet
enables new audio communities, networks, and resources to form and
flourish.
Exploiting these technologies and networks, the emergent audio culture
manifests a new kind of sonic literacy, history, and memory. If the
traditional conception of history as a continuous, linear unfolding can be
thought of as analog, this new sonic sensibility might be conceived as a
digital one. It flattens the distinction between “high art” and “mass culture,”
and treats music history as a database from which to draw random-access
sonic alliances and affinities that ignore established genre categories. Thus,
the avant-rock quartet Sonic Youth links punk rock to the work of
experimental music founders Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, and
Takehisa Kosugi. Derek Bailey puts free improvisation into conversation
with drum ‘n’ bass. Composer Anthony Braxton uses iPods to sample his
own work in live performance and collaborates with the noise band Wolf
Eyes. House and Techno producers sample, emulate, and remix the music of
minimalist masters. Pop experimentalist Björk pays homage to Karlheinz
Stockhausen and collaborates with Free Jazz drummer Chris Corsano,
electronic duo Matmos, and improvising harpist Zeena Parkins. Composer
Michael Pisaro quotes the music of DJ Screw on a record with art-pop
singer Julia Holter, and combines field recordings and sine tones with
instrumental composition.7 The combinations are myriad and the cross-
fertilizations ongoing.
Indeed, across the field of modern music, one discovers a host of shared
practices and theoretical concerns. For example, John Cage’s critique of the
composer’s authority is also explicitly an issue in contemporary electronica
and DJ culture, in which producers take on a protean array of aliases and
make their mark by mixing and remixing the music of others. The boundary
between “music” and “noise” is challenged as much by Jana Winderen’s
environmental sound compositions as by the cacophonous compositions of
Merzbow and Fe-mail. Issues around technology and aesthetic originality
pervade the contemporary musical spectrum, from the early collages of
James Tenney to the work of composer/improviser John Oswald, rock
renegades Negativland, HipHop turntablists DJ QBert and the X-
Ecutioners, and electronica artists Jason Forrest, Girl Talk, and Oneohtrix
Point Never.
Audio Culture attempts to map the musical terrain of this new culture of
sound. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, the book
traces the genealogies of contemporary musical practices and theoretical
concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical forms and
earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various
rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in
the past several decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language
for this new audio culture. As such, the book poses, and seeks to answer,
questions such as: What new modes of production, circulation, reception,
and discourse are mobilized by vanguard musical production today? How
do musical practices within the new audio culture complicate the definition
of “music” and its distinction from “silence,” “noise,” and “sound”? In what
ways do they challenge traditional conceptions of authorship, textuality, and
ownership? How are musical strategies such as indeterminacy, minimalism,
free improvisation, turntablism, and electronic experimentation employed
by artists from different backgrounds?
The texts included here are drawn from a heterogeneous array of sources.
Statements by composers, improvisers, and producers are printed alongside
essays by theorists and critics who provide lines of connection and
historical contexts. Excerpts from books sit beside magazine articles, liner
notes, and essays that first appeared on the internet. This heterogeneity
reflects the fact that the new audio culture is a discourse, a loose collection
of terms, concepts, and statements gathered from across the cultural field.
This discourse not only challenges aesthetic distinctions between “high art”
and “popular culture.” In the age of the Internet, it also flattens traditional
hierarchies between “high” and “low” venues for publishing. Most of the
texts were written within the past half-century, though the book also
includes several earlier texts that have been reanimated by the new audio
culture.
The group of texts in Part I explores some key ontological and
epistemological issues that have shaped music and sound over the past few
decades. These texts investigate the shifting definition of “music” and
examine the various modes of listening necessitated by the contemporary
soundscape. Several texts discuss changes in the production and reception
of sound that have resulted from newer technologies such the iPod, the
sampler, and the laptop computer, and from reappropriations of older
technologies such as magnetic tape and the phonograph. The incursion of
music into everyday life and the spaces of everyday living raises political
issues concerning the ways that sound constructs us as human subjects and
locates us in particular social and cultural contexts; hence, several texts in
Part I suggest strategies for navigating the current sonic landscape.
 Part II more closely examines a spectrum of musical practices that are
currently providing resources for musicians from different generations and
backgrounds. Practices such as minimalism, open-form composition, free
improvisation, and experimentalism are taken here not as fixed historical
entities but as ongoing musical strategies that are continually being adopted
and reshaped for new contexts. Hence, each section attempts to give a sense
of the particular practice as a general strategy, to trace some of its
genealogical strands, and to examine some of its current inhabitations.
Throughout the book, we have tried to foreground the ways that these
theoretical concerns and practices, though to some degree distinct,
significantly overlap or flow into one another. All the issues in Part I are
interlinked: musical ontology is shaped by musical technologies and by
modes of listening and aural attention. The practices explored in Part II
similarly overlap. At its limit, open-form composition becomes
experimental music; Reich’s early tape works and Alvin Lucier’s Music on
a Long Thin Wire propel experimental music into the minimalist domain;
minimalist methodologies drive a great deal of contemporary electronica.
Turntablists such as Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshihide, and Marina
Rosenfeld merge DJ culture with free improvisation, which is also currently
practised by electronica producers such as Marcus Schmickler, AGF, and
Christian Fennesz. Indeed, all contemporary music is, in some sense,
electronic music; thus, texts on electronic music are not confined to the
final section but are spread throughout the book. Moreover, most of the
authors and musicians presented in the book are linked to one another via
myriad networks of influence or collaboration. Several of these—John
Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Brian Eno, and David Toop, for example—form key
nodal points to which most of the developments in contemporary music can
be linked. Hence, their names are ubiquitous and constantly cross-
referenced.
This second edition of Audio Culture contains twenty-four new essays.
Several of these present classic and archival texts by important artists
neglected in the first edition, among them Maryanne Amacher, Éliane
Radigue, La Monte Young, Wadada Leo Smith, Lawrence “Butch” Morris,
and Anne Carson. Other essays present the perspectives of artists who have
become prominent voices over the past decade and a half: Vijay Iyer,
Marina Rosenfeld, Ulra-red, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mattin, Yan Jun, Trio
Sowari, Jennifer Walshe, Holly Herndon, and Kevin Quashie. Several
essays (for example, those by Herndon, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tara Rodgers,
and Annahid Kassabian) trace the impact of digital technologies and
platforms on music, cultural production, and reception. The book also
includes four newly commissioned essays. Kevin Quashie meditates on
“quiet” as a critical strategy in African-American music and culture. Philip
Sherburne tracks Minimalist tendencies in electronic music. Marina
Rosenfeld reflects on the material and conceptual conditions of her
turntablist practice. And Holly Herndon discusses the intimacy of the laptop
and how the internet has affected composition and performance.
It will have been noticed that what we are calling “contemporary music”
or “modern music” has a peculiar character. Though it cuts across classical
music, jazz, rock, reggae, and dance music, it is resolutely avant gardist in
character and all but ignores the more mainstream inhabitations of these
genres. In our view, it is the vanguard fringe within each of these generic
categories that fully and richly challenges prevailing assumptions about the
nature of music and sound, and challenges these genre categories
themselves. These vanguard practices destabilize the obvious, and push our
aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities to their limits. They force us to
confront the unheard core of all music—the sonic and auditory as such—
and, hence, provide the musical currency of the new audio culture.

Notes
1 A sampling of such work can be found in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and
Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003) Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2004); The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York:
Routledge, 2012); The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin
Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Keywords in Sound, ed, David Novak
and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
2 International survey exhibitions include: “Sonic Boom,” Hayward Gallery, London, April–June
2000; “Sounding Spaces: Nine Sound Installations,” NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo,
July–September 2003; “Sons et Lumières: A History of Sound in 20th Century Art,” Centre
Pompidou, Paris, September 2004–January 2005; “Sonambiente Berlin 2006,” June–July 2006;
“See This Sound: Promises in Sound and Vision,” Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria, August
2009–January 2010; “Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art,” ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany,
 March 2012–January 2013; “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” Museum of Modern Art, New
York, August–November 2013; “Art or Sound,” Fondazione Prada, June–November 2014
3 Richard Cullen Rath, interviewed by Emily Eakin in “History You Can See, Hear, Smell, Touch,
and Taste,” New York Times (December 20, 2003).
4 This view is presented most fully in Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global
Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), particularly the chapter “Visual and Acoustic Space” (see Chapter 10,
below).
5 Chris Cutler, “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms,” in File Under Popular: Theoretical and
Critical Writings on Music (New York: Autonomedia, 1993), 33. Cutler’s historical account is
richly developed and explored in the “Probes” podcast series he curates for Ràdio Web
MACBA: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/probes_tag.
6 John Cage, “Future of Music: Credo,” Chapter 5 below.
7 Sonic Youth, Goodbye 20th Century, SYR 4; Derek Bailey, Guitar, Drums ‘n’ Bass, Avant
AVAN 060; Anthony Braxton, 3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011, Firehouse 12 Records FH12-
01-02-020; Wolf Eyes & Anthony Braxton, Black Vomit, Les Disques Victo VICTO CD 099;
Various Artists, Reich Remixed, Nonesuch 79552-2, and The Orb, “Little Fluffy Clouds,” The
Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, Big Life BLR 98; Björk, “Why I Love Stockhausen,”
The Guardian (October 29, 2008); Michael Pisaro, Tombstones, Human Ear HEMK0026, and
Michael Pisaro, Continuum Unbound, Gravity Wave gw 011–013.
 Part One

Theories
Background noise [le bruit de fond] is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it
is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and
cesspool of our messages […] The background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous,
unending, unchanging. It has itself no background, no contradictory […] Noise cannot be made
a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a
beacon against the fog, as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must be separated
from the hubbub that occupies silence.
– Michel Serres1

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise,
and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for them. And no wonder; for all the resources of
our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.
That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit
through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of
course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news
items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music,
continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for
daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting
stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears,
through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and
desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has
but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence.
– Aldous Huxley2

Our biggest competitor is silence.

— A member of the marketing department at Muzak3

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented
by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not
subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the
caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard
by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.
— Lester Bangs4

Post-Renaissance music differs from nearly all other musics, which love to use noise—sounds,
that is, of no precise pitch or definite harmonic structure—as well as those pitches which lie
between our twelve divisions of the octave, and which our music considers to be “out of tune”
[…] Post-Renaissance musicians could not tolerate these acoustically illogical and unclear
sounds, sounds which were not susceptible to total control.
— Christopher Small5

Edgard Varèse described himself as an “organizer of sound.” That concept is probably more
valid today than in any previous era.
— John Zorn6

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see,
something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering
purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an
anechoic chamber […] a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several
years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer
in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one
my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my
death.
— John Cage7

Noise may have lost its power to offend. Silence hasn’t.

— Dan Warburton8

The fear of silence is nothing new. Silence surrounds the dark world of death. Sometimes the
silence of the vast universe hovers over us, enveloping us. There is the intense silence of birth,
the quiet silence of one’s return to the earth. Hasn’t art been the human creature’s rebellion
against silence? Poetry and music were born when man first uttered sound, resisting the silence.
— Toru Takemitsu9

There is no difference between noise and music in my work. I have no idea what you term
“music” and “noise.” It’s different depending on each person. If noise means uncomfortable
sound, then pop music is noise to me.
 — Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow)11

Is there censorship for sound, experimental music, sound art [in China]? The disappointing fact
is, as long as there are no words or lyrics involved, sound is harmless to the state. That is why
extreme noise acts are not censored, even when Torturing Nurse performed in Shanghai, in
2007, with nude in bondage and hot wax dripping. With Chinese urban centers being huge,
high-volume noise generators in themselves, such small events in tiny venues can hardly raise
an eyebrow.
— Dajuin Yao12
 I. Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence

Introduction
What is music? A little more than a century ago, the question was fairly
easy to answer. But, ever since the early decades of the twentieth century, it
has become increasingly difficult to distinguish music from its others:
noise, silence, and non-musical sound.
The reasons for this are many. The music of Claude Debussy, Arnold
Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky challenged tonality on a number of fronts.
Not long after, Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage began to
explore non-pitched sounds. Ethnomusicological research into music
outside Europe began to suggest a need to expand the concept of music
beyond the narrow and specialized domain it demarcated in the West.
Audio recording played a crucial role in blurring the lines of distinction
between music and its others. It gave composers access to what John Cage
called “the entire field of sound,” making conventional distinctions between
“musical” and “non-musical” sounds increasingly irrelevant. And tape
composition allowed the composer to bypass musical notation, instruments,
and performers in one step. In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer broadcast over French
radio a “Concert of Noises,” a set of pieces composed entirely from
recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, canal boats,
percussion instruments, and the occasional piano. Schaeffer called his new
music “musique concrète,” in contrast with traditional “musique abstraite,”
which passed through the detours of notation, instrumentation, and
performance. Trained as a radio engineer rather than a musician, Schaeffer’s
method of composition bore a closer resemblance to cinematic montage
than it did to traditional musical composition. The most prominent
European avant-garde composers (Stockhausen, Boulez, etc.) flocked to his
Paris studio; but, ultimately, the impact of Schaeffer’s work was felt most
strongly outside classical music, for example, in the early tape experiments
of Les Paul, the studio manipulations of Beatles producer George Martin,
the concrète pranks of Frank Zappa, the live tape-loop systems of Terry
Riley, and the sampling practices of DJs and turntablists from Grandmaster
Flash to Maria Chavez.
In his 1913 manifesto, Russolo wrote that the traditional orchestra was no
longer capable of capturing the imagination of a culture immersed in noise,
and that the age of noise demanded new musical instruments he called
“noise instruments” (intonarumori). Composer Edgard Varèse dismissed the
conventional distinction between “music” and “noise,” preferring to define
his work as “organized sound.” In his writings of the 1930s, he described
his own music as the “collision of sound-masses,” blocks of sound “moving
at different speeds and at different angles.” Varèse’s use of sirens in the
ground-breaking percussion piece Ionisation (1929–31) gestured back to
Russolo and forward to the development of electronic instruments that
could provide the “parabolic and hyperbolic trajectories of sound” of which
he dreamt. Two decades later, in the early 1950s, the European avant-garde
became captivated by the extraordinary powers of these electronic
instruments, which extended the domain of music far beyond that of
traditional instrumental sonorities.
In the decades that followed, commercial synthesizers tamed these unruly
powers and made tidy electronic instruments available to the general public.
By the 1970s, such instruments had become the norm in rock and dance
music. Aiming to revive and celebrate the powers of noise, British and
European “industrial” bands merged punk rock attitudes, performance art
sensibilities, and a Russolian fascination with mechanical noise to forge a
retro-futurist music made with found objects: chains, tire irons, oil drums,
and other industrial debris. “Industrial music” and the “noise bands” that
followed highlighted certain cultural and political features of noise: noise as
disturbance, distraction, and threat.
Noise has also functioned as a vehicle for ecstasy and transcendence,
shaping the musical aesthetic of drone-based minimalists La Monte Young
and Tony Conrad as well as free jazz players from Albert Ayler and John
Coltrane through David S. Ware and Matana Roberts. Punk, hiphop, and
heavy metal have also revalued the notion of noise, transforming it into a
marker of power, resistance, and pleasure; and the same is true of feminist
and queer artists whose noises have been relegated to the social and cultural
margins.
 The rise of interest in “noise” in contemporary music has gone hand-in-
hand with a renewed interest in its conceptual opposite: silence. With his
Zen embrace of contradiction, John Cage attempted to erase the distinctions
between silence, music, and noise, while simultaneously noting that perfect
silence is never more than a conceptual ideal, an aural vanishing point. In
the face of rising noise levels in urban and rural environments, composer
and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer called for “the recovery of
positive silence” and a subtle attention to the endangered non-musical
sounds of our environment. Microphones and headphones brought the
vanishing point of silence within aural reach, forever transforming the
relationship of silence to sound, giving them equal ontological status.
What is music? According to Jacques Attali, it is the constant effort to
codify and stratify noise and silence, which, for their part, always resist and
threaten it from without. From Russolo through “noise music,”
experimental musical practices have inhabited that borderland where noise
and silence become music, and vice versa.
 1
Noise and Politics
Jacques Attali

During the 1980s, economic theorist Jacques Attali was Special Counselor to French President
François Mitterand. He subsequently headed the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development and was an economic advisor under President Nicolas Sarkozy. With the
publication of Noise: The Political Economy of Music in 1977, Attali quickly became one of
Europe’s leading philosophers of music. For Attali, music, like economics and politics, is
fundamentally a matter of organizing dissonance and subversion – in a word, “noise.” Yet Attali
argues that, an all-but-immaterial force, music moves more quickly than economics and politics,
and hence prefigures new social relations.

[…] Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its

appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially
political. More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements
that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the
world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion. In noise can
be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamor, Melody,
Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools,
when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of
purpose and power, of the dream—Music. It is at the heart of the
progressive rationalization of aesthetics, and it is a refuge for residual
irrationality; it is a means of power and a form of entertainment.
Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the
primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the
relations to self and others.
All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or
consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to
its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its
forms. Therefore, any theory of power today must include a theory of the
localization of noise and its endowment with form. Among birds a tool for
marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the
panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the
limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to
survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it.1 And since noise is the source
of power, power has always listened to it with fascination. In an
extraordinary and little-known text, Leibniz describes in minute detail the
ideal political organization, the “Palace of Marvels,” a harmonious machine
within which all of the sciences of time and every tool of power are
deployed.

These buildings will be constructed in such a way that the master of the house will be able to
hear and see everything that is said and done without himself being perceived, by means of
mirrors and pipes, which will be a most important thing for the State, and a kind of political
confessional.2

Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of

power. The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and
recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus. The symbolism of the
Frozen Words,3 of the Tables of the Law, of recorded noise and
eavesdropping—these are the dreams of political scientists and the fantasies
of men in power: to listen, to memorize—this is the ability to interpret and
control history, to manipulate the culture of a people, to channel its violence
and hopes. Who among us is free of the feeling that this process, taken to an
extreme, is turning the modern State into a gigantic, monopolizing noise
emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device.
Eavesdropping on what? In order to silence whom?
The answer, clear and implacable, is given by the theorists of
totalitarianism. They have all explained, indistinctly, that it is necessary to
ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy,
support for differences or marginality: a concern for maintaining tonalism,
the primacy of melody, a distrust of new languages, codes, or instruments, a
refusal of the abnormal—these characteristics are common to all regimes of
that nature […]
The economic and political dynamics of the industrialized societies living
under parliamentary democracy also lead power to invest art, and to invest
in art, without necessarily theorizing its control, as is done under
dictatorship. Everywhere we look, the monopolization of the broadcast of
messages, the control of noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of
others assure the durability of power. Here, this channelization takes on a
new, less violent, and more subtle form: laws of the political economy take
the place of censorship laws. Music and the musician essentially become
either objects of consumption like everything else, recuperators of
subversion, or meaningless noise.
Musical distribution techniques are today contributing to the
establishment of a system of eavesdropping and social surveillance. Muzak,
the American corporation that sells standardized music, presents itself as
the “security system of the 1970s” because it permits use of musical
distribution channels for the circulation of orders. The monologue of
standardized, stereotyped music accompanies and hems in a daily life in
which in reality no one has the right to speak any more. Except those
among the exploited who can still use their music to shout their suffering,
their dreams of the absolute and freedom. What is called music today is all
too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is
the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to
communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication
been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy
excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new
industrial sector. Still, it is an activity that is essential for knowledge and
social relations.

Notes
1 “Whether we inquire into the origin of the arts or observe the first criers, we find that everything
in its principle is related to the means of subsistence.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur
l’inégalité.
2 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Drôle de pensée touchant une nouvelle sorte de représentation,” ed.
Yves Belaval, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise 70 (1958): 754–68. Quoted in Michel Serres, “Don
Juan ou le Palais des Merveilles,” Les Eludes Philosophiques 3 (1966): 389.
3 [A reference to Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, b. 4, chap. 54. TR.]

* From Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Used by permission of the publisher.
 2
The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto
Luigi Russolo

A prominent painter in the Italian Futurist movement, Luigi Russolo is best known for “The Art
of Noises: Futurist Manifesto” (1913), one of the most important and influential texts in
twentieth-century musical aesthetics. Written as a letter to his friend, the Futurist composer
Francesco Balilla Pratella, this manifesto sketches Russolo’s radical alternative to the classical
musical tradition. Drawing inspiration from the urban and industrial soundscape, Russolo
argues that traditional orchestral instruments and composition are no longer capable of
capturing the spirit of modern life, with its energy, speed, and noise. A year after composing this
letter, Russolo introduced his intonarumori (“noise instruments”) in a series of concerts held in
London. None of Russolo’s music remains; and the intonarumori were destroyed in a fire during
World War II. Yet, since the War, Russolo’s manifesto has become increasingly important,
inspiring a host of musicians, composers, and sound artists, among them musique concrète
pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, 1980s dance-pop outfit The Art of Noise,
“industrial” bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept., turntablist DJ Spooky, and
sound artist Francisco López.

Dear Balilla Pratella, Great Futurist Composer,

In Rome, at the very crowded Teatro Costanzi, while I was listening to
the orchestral performance of your revolutionary MUSICA FUTURISTA
with my friends Marinetti, Boccioni, and Balla, I conceived a new art: The
Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th Century, with the invention of
machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is triumphant and reigns sovereign
over the sensibility of men. Through many centuries life unfolded silently,
or at least quietly. The loudest of noises that interrupted this silence was
neither intense, nor prolonged, nor varied. After all, if we overlook the
exceptional movements of the earth’s crust, hurricanes, storms, avalanches,
and waterfalls, nature is silent.
In this scarcity of noises, the first sounds that men were able to draw
from a pierced reed or a taut string were stupefying, something new and
wonderful. Among primitive peoples, sound was attributed to the gods. It
was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich their
rites with mystery. Thus was born the idea of sound as something in itself,
as different from and independent of life. And from it resulted music, a
fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolable and sacred
world. The Greeks greatly restricted the field of music. Their musical
theory, mathematically systematized by Pythagoras, admitted only a few
consonant intervals. Thus, they knew nothing of harmony, which was
impossible.
The Middle Ages, with the developments and modifications of the Greek
tetrachord system, with Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the
musical art. But they continued to regard sound in its unfolding in time, a
narrow concept that lasted several centuries, and which we find again in the
very complicated polyphony of the Flemish contrapuntalists. The chord did
not exist. The development of the various parts was not subordinated to the
chord that these parts produced in their totality. The conception of these
parts, finally, was horizontal not vertical. The desire, the search, and the
taste for the simultaneous union of different sounds, that is, for the chord
(the complete sound) was manifested gradually, moving from the consonant
triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize
contemporary music. From the beginning, musical art sought out and
obtained purity and sweetness of sound. Afterwards, it brought together
different sounds, still preoccupying itself with caressing the ear with suave
harmonies. As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out
combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it
comes ever closer to the noise-sound.
This evolution of music is comparable to the multiplication of machines,
which everywhere collaborate with man. Not only in the noisy atmosphere
of the great cities, but even in the country, which until yesterday was
normally silent. Today, the machine has created such a variety and
contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no
longer provokes emotion.
In order to excite and stir our sensibility, music has been developing
toward the most complicated polyphony and toward the greatest variety of
instrumental timbres and colors. It has searched out the most complex
successions of dissonant chords, which have prepared in a vague way for
the creation of MUSICAL NOISE. The ear of the Eighteenth Century man
would not have been able to withstand the inharmonious intensity of certain
chords produced by our orchestra (with three times as many performers as
that of the orchestra of his time). But our ear takes pleasure in it, since it is
already educated to modern life, so prodigal in different noises.
Nevertheless, our ear is not satisfied and calls for ever greater acoustical
emotions.
Musical sound is too limited in its variety of timbres. The most
complicated orchestras can be reduced to four or five classes of instruments
different in timbres of sound: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds,
and percussion. Thus, modern music flounders within this tiny circle, vainly
striving to create new varieties of timbre.
We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite
variety of noise-sounds.
Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of
sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the
listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators. We
futurists have all deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great
masters. Beethoven and Wagner have stirred our nerves and hearts for many
years. Now we have had enough of them, and we delight much more in
combining in our thoughts the noises of trams, of automobile engines, of
carriages and brawling crowds, than in hearing again the “Eroica” or the
“Pastorale.”
We cannot see the enormous apparatus of forces that the modern
orchestra represents without feeling the most profound disillusionment
before its paltry acoustical results. Do you know of a more ridiculous sight
than that of twenty men striving to redouble the mewling of a violin?
Naturally, that statement will make the musicomaniacs scream—and
perhaps revive the sleepy atmosphere of the concert halls. Let us go
together, like futurists, into one of these hospitals for anemic sounds. There
—the first beat brings to your ear the weariness of something heard before,
and makes you anticipate the boredom of the beat that follows. So let us
drink in, from beat to beat, these few qualities of obvious tedium, always
waiting for that extraordinary sensation that never comes. Meanwhile, there
is in progress a repugnant medley of monotonous impressions and of the
cretinous religious emotion of the Buddha-like listeners, drunk with
repeating for the thousandth time their more or less acquired and snobbish
ecstasy. Away! Let us leave, since we cannot for long restrain ourselves
from the desire to create finally a new musical reality by generously
handing out some resounding slaps and stamping with both feet on violins,
pianos, contrabasses, and organs. Let us go!
It cannot be objected that noise is only loud and disagreeable to the ear. It
seems to me useless to enumerate all the subtle and delicate noises that
produce pleasing sensations.
To be convinced of the surprising variety of noises, one need only think
of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of a
waterfall, the gurgling of a brook the rustling of leaves, the trotting of a
horse into the distance, the rattling jolt of a cart on the road, and of the full,
solemn, and white breath of a city at night. Think of all the noises made by
wild and domestic animals, and of all those that a man can make, without
either speaking or singing.
Let us cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our
eyes. We will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, of air or gas in
metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an
indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the
shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on the tracks, the cracking
of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags. We will amuse ourselves by
orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters,
the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing
presses, electrical plants, and subways.
Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the
poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to
me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle

every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB mutiny of
500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-
TUUUMB area 50 square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries.
Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle
Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely
taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the stings slaps traak-traak
whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools
muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack
 laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-
craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast]
crooc-craaac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pa n here paak there
BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up there all around high up
look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of
the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in
Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of
smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke
odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-
cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the
performers they terribly beaten playing playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off
slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers
Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels
waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised
grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB the
orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden
balloon that observes the firing …

We want to give pitches to these diverse noises, regulating them

harmonically and rhythmically. Giving pitch to noises does not mean
depriving them of all irregular movements and vibrations of time and
intensity but rather assigning a degree or pitch to the strongest and most
prominent of these vibrations. Noise differs from sound, in fact, only to the
extent that the vibrations that produce it are confused and irregular. Every
noise has a pitch, some even a chord, which predominates among the whole
of its irregular vibrations. Now, from this predominant characteristic pitch
derives the practical possibility of assigning pitches to the noise as a whole.
That is, there may be imparted to a given noise not only a single pitch but
even a variety of pitches without sacrificing its character, by which I mean
the timbre that distinguishes it. Thus, some noises obtained through a rotary
motion can offer an entire chromatic scale ascending or descending, if the
speed of the motion is increased or decreased.
Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is thus
familiar to our ear and has the power of immediately recalling life itself.
Sound, estranged from life, always musical, something in itself, an
occasional not a necessary element, has become for our ear what for the eye
is a too familiar sight. Noise instead, arriving confused and irregular from
the irregular confusion of life, is never revealed to us entirely and always
holds innumerable surprises. We are certain, then, that by selecting,
coordinating, and controlling all the noises, we will enrich mankind with a
new and unsuspected pleasure of the senses. Although the characteristic of
noise is that of reminding us brutally of life, the Art of Noises should not
limit itself to an imitative reproduction. It will achieve its greatest emotional
power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will
know how to draw from the combining of noises.
Here are the six families of noises of the futurist orchestra that we will
soon realize mechanically:

1. Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms

2. Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
3. Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
4. Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Humming, Crackling, Rubbing
5. Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
6. Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles,
Sobs.

In this list we have included the most characteristic of the fundamental

noises. The others are only associations and combinations of these.
The rhythmic motions of a noise are infinite. There always exists, as with
a pitch, a predominant rhythm, but around this there can be heard numerous
other, secondary rhythms.

Conclusions
1. Futurist composers should continue to enlarge and enrich the field of
sound. This responds to a need of our sensibility. In fact, we notice in the
talented composers of today a tendency toward the most complicated
dissonances. Moving ever farther from pure sound, they have almost
attained the noise-sound. This need and this tendency can be satisfied only
with the addition and the substitution of noises for sounds.
2. Futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres
that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises,
reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.
3. The sensibility of musicians, being freed from traditional and facile
rhythms, must find in noise the means of expanding and renewing itself,
given that every noise offers a union of the most diverse rhythms, in
addition to that which predominates.
4. Every noise having in its irregular vibrations a predominant general
pitch, a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quartertones
is easily attained in the construction of the instruments that imitate it. This
variety of pitches will not deprive a single noise of the characteristics of its
timbre but will only increase its tessitura or extension.
5. The practical difficulties involved in the construction of these
instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle that produces a
noise has been found, its pitch can be changed through the application of
the same general laws of acoustics. It can be achieved, for example, through
the decreasing or increasing of speed, if the instrument has a rotary motion.
If the instrument does not have a rotary motion, it can be achieved through
differences of size or tension in the sounding parts,
6. It will not be through a succession of noises imitative of life but
through a fantastic association of the different timbres and rhythms that the
new orchestra will obtain the most complex and novel emotions of sound.
Thus, every instrument will have to offer the possibility of changing pitches
and will need a more or less extended range.
7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, having perhaps a thousand
different machines, we are able to distinguish a thousand different noises,
tomorrow, with the multiplication of new machines, we will be able to
distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not simply by
imitation but by combining according to our fancy.
8. Therefore, we invite talented and audacious young musicians to
observe all noises attentively, to understand the different rhythms that
compose them, their principal pitch, and those which are secondary. Then,
comparing the various timbres of noises to the timbres of sounds, they will
be convinced that the first are much more numerous than the second. This
will give them not only the understanding of but also the passion and the
taste for noises. Our multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by
futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears. Thus, the motors and
machines of our industrial cities can one day be given pitches, so that every
workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noises.
Dear Pratella, I submit to your futurist genius these propositions of mine,
inviting your discussion. I am not a musician by professionand therefore, I
have no acoustical prejudices, nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter
who projects beyond himself, into an art much-beloved and studied, his
desire to renew everything. Thus, bolder than a professional musician, not
worried about my apparent incompetence, and convinced that audacity has
all rights and all possibilities, I was able to divine the great renewal of
music through the Art of Noises.

* From Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986).
Used by permission of the publisher.
 3
The Liberation of Sound
Edgard Varèse

Born in France, Edgard Varèse emigrated to the United States in 1915. Like Russolo, he called
for a new concept of music and new musical instruments. Yet, where Russolo was inspired by the
concrete noises of everyday life, Varèse’s new musical vision was sparked by metaphors drawn
from chemistry, astronomy, cartography, and geology. Describing himself as “a worker in
rhythms, frequencies, and intensities,” Varèse redefined music as “organized sound,” side-
stepping the conventional distinction between “music” and “noise.” Varèse’s music focuses on
the matter of sound—on timbre, texture, and musical space, elements that would become
increasingly important in later electronic and Ambient music. Indeed, in the 1950s, Varèse
composed two early masterpieces of electronic music: Déserts (1950–54), realized in Pierre
Schaeffer’s Paris studio, and Poème Électronique (1957–58), part of a “spectacle of sound and
light” installed in the Phillips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier for the World’s Fair in
Brussels. Varèse’s description of music as “the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes”
and “beams of sound” aptly describes not only his own music but a good deal of modern
experimental music as well, from Musica Elettronica Viva’s live electronic music and Maryanne
Amacher’s installations to Merzbow’s noise composition and the work of laptop ensembles such
as M.I.M.E.O. The following text is taken from a series of lectures given by Varèse from 1936 to
1962 and compiled by his student Chou Wen-Chung.

New instruments and new music (1936)

[…] When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it,
the movement of sound-masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived
in my work, taking the place of the linear counterpoint. When these sound-
masses collide, the phenomena of penetration or repulsion will seem to
occur. Certain transmutations taking place on certain planes will seem to be
projected onto other planes, moving at different speeds and at different
angles. There will no longer be the old conception of melody or interplay of
melodies. The entire work will be a melodic totality. The entire work will
flow as a river flows.
 We have actually three dimensions in music: horizontal, vertical, and
dynamic swelling or decreasing. I shall add a fourth, sound projection—that
feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being reflected back, a
feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful
searchlight—for the ear as for the eye, that sense of projection, of a journey
into space.
Today with the technical means that exist and are easily adaptable, the
differentiation of the various masses and different planes as well as these
beams of sound, could be made discernible to the listener by means of
certain acoustical arrangements. Moreover, such an acoustical arrangement
would permit the delimitation of what I call “zones of intensities.” These
zones would be differentiated by various timbres or colors and different
loudnesses. Through such a physical process these zones would appear of
different colors and of different magnitude, in different perspectives for our
perception. The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from
being incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it would become an
agent of delineation, like the different colors on a map separating different
areas, and an integral part of form. These zones would be felt as isolated,
and the hitherto unobtainable non-blending (or at least the sensation of non-
blending) would become possible.
In the moving masses you would be conscious of their transmutations
when they pass over different layers, when they penetrate certain opacities,
or are dilated in certain rarefactions. Moreover, the new musical apparatus I
envisage, able to emit sounds of any number of frequencies, will extend the
limits of the lowest and highest registers, hence new organizations of the
vertical resultants: chords, their arrangements, their spacings—that is, their
oxygenation. Not only will the harmonic possibilities of the overtones be
revealed in all their splendor, but the use of certain interferences created by
the partials will represent an appreciable contribution. The never-before-
thought-of use of the inferior resultants and of the differential and
additional sounds may also be expected. An entirely new magic of sound!
I am sure that the time will come when the composer, after he has
graphically realized his score, will see this score automatically put on a
machine that will faithfully transmit the musical content to the listener. As
frequencies and new rhythms will have to be indicated on the score, our
actual notation will be inadequate. The new notation will probably be
seismographic. And here it is curious to note that at the beginning of two
eras, the Mediaeval primitive and our own primitive era (for we are at a
new primitive stage in music today), we are faced with an identical
problem: the problem of finding graphic symbols for the transposition of
the composer’s thought into sound. At a distance of more than a thousand
years we have this analogy: our still primitive electrical instruments find it
necessary to abandon staff notation and to use a kind of seismographic
writing much like the early ideographic writing originally used for the voice
before the development of staff notation. Formerly the curves of the musical
line indicated the melodic fluctuations of the voice; today the machine-
instrument requires precise design indications [… .]

Music as an art-science (1939)

Personally, for my conceptions, I need an entirely new medium of
expression: a sound-producing machine (not a sound-reproducing one).
Today it is possible to build such a machine with only a certain amount of
added research.
If you are curious to know what such a machine could do that the
orchestra with its man-powered instruments cannot do, I shall try briefly to
tell you: whatever I write, whatever my message, it will reach the listener
unadulterated by “interpretation.” It will work something like this: after a
composer has set down his score on paper by means of a new graphic
notation, he will then, with the collaboration of a sound engineer, transfer
the score directly to this electric machine. After that, anyone will be able to
press a button to release the music exactly as the composer wrote it—
exactly like opening a book.
And here are the advantages I anticipate from such a machine: liberation
from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining
any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and
consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low
and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-
harmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any
differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics far beyond
the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space
by means of the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall,
as may be required by the score; cross-rhythms unrelated to each other,
treated simultaneously, or, to use the old word, “contrapuntally,” since the
machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any
subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them—all these in a given unit
of measure or time that is humanly impossible to attain […]

Rhythm, form, and content (1959)

My fight for the liberation of sound and for my right to make music with
any sound and all sounds has sometimes been construed as a desire to
disparage and even to discard the great music of the past. But that is where
my roots are. No matter how original, how different a composer may seem,
he has only grafted a little bit of himself on the old plant. But this he should
be allowed to do without being accused of wanting to kill the plant. He only
wants to produce a new flower. It does not matter if at first it seems to some
people more like a cactus than a rose […]
Because for so many years I crusaded for new instruments1 with what
may have seemed fanatical zeal, I have been accused of desiring nothing
less than the destruction of all musical instruments and even of all
performers. This is, to say the least, an exaggeration. Our new liberating
medium—the electronic—is not meant to replace the old musical
instruments, which composers, including myself, will continue to use.
Electronics is an additive, not a destructive, factor in the art and science of
music. It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old
ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony […]

The electronic medium (1962)

First of all, I should like you to consider what I believe is the best definition
of music, because it is all-inclusive: “the corporealization of the intelligence
that is in sound,” as proposed by Hoëne Wronsky.2 If you think about it you
will realize that, unlike most dictionary definitions, which make use of such
subjective terms as beauty, feelings, etc., it covers all music, Eastern or
Western, past or present, including the music of our new electronic medium.
Although this new music is being gradually accepted, there are still people
who, while admitting that it is “interesting,” say: “but is it music?” It is a
question I am only too familiar with. Until quite recently I used to hear it so
often in regard to my own works that, as far back as the twenties, I decided
to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a
worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.” Indeed, to stubbornly
conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But
after all, what is music but organized noises? And a composer, like all
artists, is an organizer of disparate elements. Subjectively, noise is any
sound one doesn’t like.
Our new medium has brought to composers almost endless possibilities
of expression, and opened up for them the whole mysterious world of
sound. For instance, I have always felt the need of a kind of continuous
flowing curve that instruments could not give me. That is why I used sirens
in several of my works. Today such effects are easily obtainable by
electronic means. In this connection, it is curious to note that it is this lack
of flow that seems to disturb Eastern musicians in our Western music. To
their ears, it does not glide, sounds jerky, composed of edges of intervals
and holes and, as an Indian pupil of mine expressed it, “jumping like a bird
from branch to branch.” To them, apparently, our Western music seems to
sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backward. But
playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, I found that I
had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all.
The electronic medium is also adding an unbelievable variety of new
timbres to our musical store, but most important of all, it has freed music
from the tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace
with the other arts and with science. Composers are now able, as never
before, to satisfy the dictates of that inner ear of the imagination. They are
also lucky so far in not being hampered by esthetic codification—at least
not yet! But I am afraid it will not be long before some musical mortician
begins embalming electronic music in rules.
We should also remember that no machine is a wizard, as we are
beginning to think, and we must not expect our electronic devices to
compose for us. Good music and bad music will be composed by electronic
means, just as good and bad music have been composed for instruments.
The computing machine is a marvelous invention and seems almost
superhuman. But in reality it is as limited as the mind of the individual who
feeds it material. Like the computer, the machines we use for making music
can only give back what we put into them. But, considering the fact that our
electronic devices were never meant for making music, but for the sole
purpose of measuring and analyzing sound, it is remarkable that what has
already been achieved is musically valid. These devices are still somewhat
unwieldy and time-consuming, and not entirely satisfactory as an art-
medium. But this new art is still in its infancy, and I hope and firmly
believe, now that composers and physicists are at last working together and
music is again linked with science as it was in the Middle Ages, that new
and more musically efficient devices will be invented.

Notes
1 As early as 1916, Varèse was quoted in the New York Morning Telegraph as saying: “Our
musical alphabet must be enriched. We also need new instruments very badly.… In my own
works I have always felt the need of new mediums of expression … which can lend themselves
to every expression of thought and can keep up with thought.” And in the Christian Science
Monitor, in 1922: “The composer and the electrician will have to labor together to get it.”
2 Hoëne Wronsky (1778–1853), also known as Joseph Marie Wronsky, was a Polish philosopher
and mathematician, known for his system of Messianism. Camille Durutte (1803–81), in his
Technie Harmonique (1876), a treatise on “musical mathematics,” quoted extensively from the
writings of Wronsky.

* From Perspectives of New Music 5, No. 1 (Fall–Winter 1966). Used by permission of Chou
Wen-Chung for the Estate of Edgard Varèse.
 4
The Joys of Noise
Henry Cowell

John Cage called Henry Cowell “the open sesame for new music in America.” Through his New
Musical Edition, Cowell championed experimental music, publishing Varèse’s Ionisation and
other scores. Cowell’s own theoretical text, New Musical Resources (1930) laid out his
compositional innovations, most significantly extended piano techniques such as the use of
“tone clusters” and the practice of striking or plucking the piano strings. This impulse to treat
conventional instruments in unconventional ways directly influenced Cage’s “prepared piano”
and, more generally, the unorthodox performance practices of free jazz, avant-rock, and
turntablism.

Cowell was probably the earliest twentieth-century composer to study African and Asian musics
(a path later followed by Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, and Leo Smith, among others); and his
own musical practice draws on those resources, extending the boundaries of compositional
practice in the areas of rhythm and timbre.

Russolo offered a largely historical argument in favor of noise, embodying the Futurist idea that
speed, power, and noise will progressively overtake music and art traditionally conceived.
Cowell’s argument in the following piece, first published in 1929, is more conceptual. It presents
a deconstruction of the binary opposition between music and noise, arguing that the latter is
always already contained in the former.

Music and noise, according to a time-honored axiom, are opposites. If a

reviewer writes “It is not music, but noise,” he feels that all necessary
comment has been made.
Within recent times it has been discovered that the geometrical axioms of
Euclid could not be taken for granted, and the explorations outside them
have given us non-Euclidian geometry and Einstein’s physically
demonstrable theories.
Might not a closer scrutiny of musical axioms break down some of the
hard-and-fast notions still current in musical theory, and build up a non-
Bachian counterpoint, a non-Beethovenian harmony, or even a non-
Debussian atmosphere, and a non-Schoenbergian atonality? […]
In almost any reliable book on harmony, you will find the axiom that the
primary elements of music are melody, harmony and rhythm. If noise were
admitted at all, and I doubt if it ever has been, it would unquestionably be
classified as part of rhythm. This, however, is a faulty idea of rhythm.
Rhythm is a conception, not a physical reality. It is true that, to be realized
in music, rhythm must be marked by some sort of sound, but this sound is
not itself the rhythm. Rhythmical considerations are the duration of sounds,
the amount of stress applied to sounds, the rate of speed as indicated by the
movement of sounds, periodicity of sound patterns, and so on.
Sound and rhythm thus are the primary musical elements, sound
comprising all that can be heard, and rhythm the formulating impulse
behind the sound. Before sound can be divided into melody and harmony,
another and more primary, division must take place: a division into tone—
or sound produced by periodic vibration—and noise—or sound produced
by non-periodic vibration. Tone may then be divided into melody and
harmony; noise remains a much-used but almost unknown element, little
developed from its most primitive usages, perhaps owing to its ill-repute
[…]
We are less interested […] in primitive and oriental uses of percussion
than in our own employment of it, and its power of moving. Noise-making
instruments are used with telling effect in our greatest symphonies, and
were it not for the punctuation of cymbal and bass drum, the climaxes in
our operas would be like jelly-fish.
In the search for music based on pure tone, we may turn hopefully to
vocal works, only to find that they too are riddled by noises; for it is only
while singing a vowel that a singer makes anything like a “pure” tone—the
pronunciation of most consonants produces irregular vibrations, hence
noise.
But most shocking of all is the discovery that there is a noise element in
the very tone itself of all our musical instruments. Consider the sound of a
violin. Part of the vibrations producing the sound are periodic, as can be
shown by a harmonic analyzer. But others are not—they do not constantly
re-form the same pattern, and consequently must be considered noise. In
varying proportions all other instruments yield similar combinations. A
truly pure tone can be made only in an acoustical laboratory, and even there
it is doubtful whether, by the time the tone has reached our ear, it has not
been corrupted by resonances picked up on the way.
As musical sound grows louder, the noise in it is accentuated and the tone
element reduced. Thus a loud sound is literally noisier than a soft one; yet
music does not touch our emotional depths if it does not rise to a dynamic
climax. Under the best circumstances, the emotions are aroused by musical
noise and lulled musical tone.
Since the “disease” of noise permeates all music, the only hopeful course
is to consider that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good
microbe, which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener,
instead of producing musical oblivion.
Although existing in all music, the noise-element has been to music as
sex to humanity, essential to its existence, but impolite to mention,
something to be cloaked by ignorance and silence. Hence the use of noise in
music has been largely unconscious and undiscussed. Perhaps this is why it
has not been developed, like the more talked-of elements, such as harmony
and melody. The use of noise in most music today is little beyond the
primitive; in fact, it is behind most native music, where the banality of the
thumps often heard in our concerts would not be tolerated.
Men like Varèse, in his Hyperprism or Arcana or Bartôk, in his Piano
Concerto, where he uses percussion noises canonically, render a service by
opening a wide field for investigation—although they arrive at nothing
conclusive. If we had scales of percussion-sounds, with each “key”
determined by some underlying quality, such as drum-sound, cymbal-
sound, and so on, we could produce music through the conscious use of the
melodic steps that would then be at the disposal of the composer. Perhaps
this is one of the things music is coming to, and a new chemistry of sound
will be the result.

* From Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music, ed. Dick Higgins (Kingston, NY:
McPherson & Company, 2002). Used by permission of the publisher.
 5
The Future of Music: Credo
John Cage

No figure has had a more profound influence on contemporary musical thought and practice
than John Cage (see also Chapters 29 and 36). A student of Schoenberg and Cowell, Cage
pioneered a host of techniques and practices that have become central to contemporary music-
making. In his early percussion ensembles, he included tin cans and other found objects
alongside standard orchestral instruments. His Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) was among
the very first compositions to employ turntables; he was an early proponent of live electronics,
composing pieces for radio, phonograph cartridges, computers, and other electronic devices. In
1940, Cage began composing for “prepared piano,” which called for the insertion of screws,
bolts, cardboard, weather stripping, and other objects into the piano’s strings to highlight the
instrument’s percussive character and to extend its sonorous possibilities. In the early 1950s, he
pioneered the use of “chance” or “indeterminate” techniques in composition. Cage’s most
famous composition 4′33″ (1952) calls for the performer(s) to make no intentional sound, thus
shifting the audience’s attention to ambient sounds and to the background noise we call
“silence.”

In the following essay, written in 1937, Cage joins Russolo and Varèse in imagining a musical
future in which “noise” will be a crucial resource. “Whereas in the past,” Cage writes, “the
point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate
future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.” The future of music—from musique
concrète and the classical avant-garde to soundscape composition, free jazz, industrial music,
hiphop and beyond—would certainly bear out Cage’s prediction.

I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When
we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The
sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain.
We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound
effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound
effects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to
control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give
to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film
phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor,
wind, heartbeat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term:
organization of sound.

WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE

REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF
ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS

Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have

attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth- century instruments, just as
early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the
Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct
the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new
possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound
like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and
performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although
the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by
the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those
sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound
experiences.

The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete

control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to
make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.

WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL

PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD.
PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE
SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
 It is now possible for composers to make music directly,
without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated
often enough on a sound track is audible. Two hundred and eighty circles
per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of
Beethoven repeated fifty times per second on a sound track will have not
only a different pitch but a different sound quality.
WILL BE EXPLORED. WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF
DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND
CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE,
BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.

THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY

THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO
PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE
INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH
THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.

The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not

only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The
“frame” or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will
probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be
beyond the composer’s reach.

NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED,

BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG’S TWELVE-
TONE SYSTEM
Schoenberg’s method assigns to each material, in a group of equal
materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony assigned to each
material, in a group of unequal materials, its function with respect to the
fundamental or most important material in the group.) Schoenberg’s method
is analogous to a society in which the emphasis is on the group and the
integration of the individual in the group.

AND PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING PERCUSSION MUSIC

Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced
music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the
composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden
“non-musical” field of sound insofar as is manually possible.
Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic
structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into
one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group
improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has
already taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz.

AND ANY OTHER METHODS WHICH ARE

FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A FUNDAMENTAL TONE.

THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY

CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE
GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT WAS IN THE
PAST, AT ONE TIME THE FUGUE AND AT ANOTHER THE SONATA,
IT WILL BE RELATED TO THESE AS THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER:

Before this happens, centers of experimental music must

be established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators, turntables,
generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc.,
available for use. Composers at work using twentieth-century means for
making music. Performances of results. Organization of sound for extra-
musical purposes (theatre, dance, radio, film).

THROUGH THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION

OR MAN’S COMMON ABILITY TO THINK.

* From Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England/Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Used by permisson of the publisher.
 6
The Music of the Environment
R. Murray Schafer

Canadian composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer came to prominence in the early 1970s with
a series of writings on environmental sound and noise pollution. In 1977, Schafer published The
Tuning of the World, which presented his most sustained argument for what he termed
“acoustic ecology.” Inspired by the Pythagorean (and, later, Cagean) idea that the cosmos itself
is a musical composition, the book looked back on the history of modern literature, music, and
audio theory (Russolo, Cage, Schaeffer, etc.) and offered prescriptions for a new kind of
listening to the world “soundscape,” a term Schafer coined. Schafer also founded the World
Soundscape Project, which drew attention to the sonic environment through location recordings
and environmental advocacy. The “acoustic ecology” movement is still thriving today, notably
represented by The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the work of environmental sound
artists such as Hildegard Westerkamp, David Dunn, Douglas Quin, Chris Watson, and Jana
Winderen. The following piece is drawn from Schafer’s The Music of the Environment, a 1973
pamphlet that presents, in distilled form, the argument Schafer elaborated in The Tuning of the
World.

The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to

inhabit a world with an acoustical environment radically different from any
he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and
intensity from those of the past, have already alerted researchers to the
dangers of the imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every
corner of man’s life. In various parts of the world important research is
being undertaken in many independent areas of sonic studies: acoustics,
psychoacoustics, otology, audiology, noise abatement practices and
procedures, communications and sound recording engineering (electro-
acoustics and electronic music), aural pattern perception and the structural
analysis of speech and music. These researches are related; each is dealing
with aspects of the world soundscape, the vast musical composition which
is unfolding around us ceaselessly. In one way or another researchers
engaged on these various themes are asking the same questions: what is the
relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what
happens when these sounds change? Is the soundscape of the world an
indeterminate composition over which we have no control or are we its
composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?
These researches have been given an additional impetus lately since noise
pollution has now emerged as a world problem. It would seem that the
world soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time and many
experts have predicted universal deafness as the ultimate consequence
unless the problem can be brought quickly under control. Noise pollution
results when man does not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have
learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise
abatement. This is a negative approach. We must seek a way to make
environmental acoustics a positive study program. Which sounds do we
want to preserve, encourage, multiply? When we know this, the boring or
destructive sounds will be conspicuous enough and we will know why we
must eliminate them. Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment
can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world. Ear
cleaning in the schools to eliminate audiometry in factories. Clairaudience,
not ear muffs.
The following thoughts are crosshatchings on this theme designed to
suggest how a new subject of acoustic design might develop, knitting
together scientific discipline and artistic imagination.

The musician is an architect of sounds

Throughout this essay I am going to treat the world soundscape as a
macrocosmic musical composition. This is perhaps an unusual idea but I am
going to nudge it forward relentlessly. The definition of music has
undergone radical change in recent years. In one of the more contemporary
definitions John Cage has declared: “Music is sounds, sounds heard around
us whether we’re in or out of concert halls (cf. Thoreau).”1 The reference is
to Thoreau’s Walden where the author experiences in the sounds and sights
of nature an inexhaustible entertainment.
There are two basic ideas of what music is or ought to be. These may be
seen clearly in two Greek myths dealing with the origin of music. Pindar’s
twelfth Pythian Ode tells how the art of aulos playing was invented by
Athena on hearing the heart-rending cries of Medusa’s sisters after Perseus
had killed the Gorgon. In a Homeric hymn to Hermes an alternative origin
is proposed. The lyre is said to have been invented by Hermes when he
surmised that the shell of the turtle, if used as a body of resonance, could
produce sound.
In the first of these myths music arises as subjective emotion; in the
second it arises with the discovery of sonic properties in the materials of the
universe. These are the cornerstones on which all subsequent theories of
music are founded. In the former myth, music is conceived as subjective
emotion breaking forth from the human breast; in the latter it is external
sound possessing secret unitary properties. This is the anahata of the Indian
theorists and the music of the spheres of Pythagoras. It suggests that the
universe is held together by the harmonies of some precise acoustic design,
serene and mathematical. For many decades, however, it is the other view
of music that has dominated Western musical thought. This is the musical
expression of the romanticist. Its tempo fluctuations, dynamic shadings and
tonal colourings are the means by which the subjective and irrational art of
the virtuoso artist is created.
The research I am about to describe represents a reaffirmation of music
as a search for the harmonizing influence of sounds in the world about us.
In Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia there is an illustration entitled
“The Tuning of the World” in which the earth forms the body of an
instrument across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine
hand. We must try once again to find the secret of that tuning […]

Clairaudience
We will not argue for the priority of the ear. Modern man, who seems to be
in the process of deafening himself apparently regards this as a trivial
mechanism. In the West the ear has given way to the eye as the most
important gatherer of environmental information. One of the most evident
testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine
God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture.
Previously He had been conceived as sound or vibration. In the Middle East
the message of Mohammed is still heard through the recitation of his Koran.
Sama is the Sufi word for audition or listening. The followers of Jalal al-
Din Rumi worked themselves into the sama state by whirling in mystical
dances. Their dancing is thought by some scholars to have represented the
solar system, recalling also the deep-rooted mystical belief in the music of
the spheres, which the attuned soul could at times hear. In the Zoroastrian
religion the priest Srosh (representing the genius of hearing) stands between
man and the pantheon of the gods transmitting the divine messages to
humanity.
When man was fearful of the dangers of an unexplored environment, the
whole body was an ear. In the virgin forests of North America, where vision
was restricted to a few feet, hearing was the most important sense. The
Leatherstocking Tales of Fenimore Cooper are full of beautiful and
terrifying surprises.

… for, though the quiet deep of solitude reigned in that vast and nearly boundless forest, nature
was speaking with her thousand tongues, in the eloquent language of night in the wilderness.
The air sighed through ten thousand trees, the water rippled, at places, even roared along the
shores and now and then was heard the creaking of a branch, or a trunk as it rubbed against
some object similar to itself, under the vibrations of a nicely balanced body … When he desired
his companions, however, to cease talking, in the manner just mentioned, his vigilant ear had
caught the peculiar sound that is made by the parting of a dried branch of a tree, and which, if
his senses did not deceive him, came from the western shore. All who are accustomed to that
particular sound will understand how readily the ear receives it, and how easy it is to distinguish
the tread which breaks the branch from every other noise of the forest … “Can the accursed
Iroquois have crossed the river, already, with their arms and without a boat?”2

The rural soundscape

When men lived mostly in isolation or in small communities their ears
operated with seismographic delicacy. In the rural soundscape sounds are
generally uncrowded, surrounded by pools of stillness. For the farmer, the
pioneer or the woodsman the minutest sounds have significance. The
shepherd, for instance, can determine from sheep bells the precise state of
his flock.

Just before dawn he was assisted in waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music …
In the solemn calm of the awakening morn that note was heard by Gabriel beating with unusual
 violence and rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways—by the rapid
feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture, which gives it
an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation.3

The sounds of the environment signalled in many ways.

He was disturbed in his meditation by a grating noise from the coach-house. It was the vane on
the roof turning round, and this change in the wind was the signal for a disastrous rain.4

Even when sounds had no special messages, poets among men knew how to
make larger interpretations of them. Goethe, his ear pressed to the grass:

When I hear the humming of the little world among the stalks, and am near the countless
indescribable forms of the worms and insects, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, Who
created us in His own image …5

When Phillip Grove travelled the Manitoba prairies in his buggy in 1916,
often by night or in dense marsh fog, he travelled by ear as much as eye.

I had become all ear. Even though my buggy was silent and though the road was coated with a
thin film of soft clay-mud, I could distinctly hear from the muffled thud of the horses’ hoofs on
the ground that they were running over a grade … I listened intently for the horses’ thump. Yes,
there was that hoof-beat again—I was on the last grade that led to the angling road across the
corner of the marsh .… 6

The hi-fi and the lo-fi soundscape

A hi-fi system is one possessing a favourable signal to noise ratio. The hi-fi
soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of
the low ambient noise level. The country is generally more hi-fi than the
city; night more than day; ancient times more than modern. In a hi-fi
soundscape even the slightest disturbance can communicate interesting or
vital information. The human ear is alert, like that of an animal.

… footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust
road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps and then reversing the process in going away.7
In a lo-fi soundscape individual acoustic signals are obscured in an
overdense population of sounds. The pellucid sound—a footstep in the
snow, a train whistle in the distance or a church bell across the valley—is
masked by broad-band noise. Perspective is lost. On a downtown street
corner there is no distance; there is only presence. Everything is close-
miked. There is cross-talk on all the channels, and in order for the most
ordinary sounds to be heard they have to be monstrously amplified. In the
ultimate lo-fi soundscape the signal to noise ratio is 1 to 1 and it is no
longer possible to know what, if anything, is to be listened to.

Muscle sounds […]: The industrial revolution

The industrial revolution began to produce the lo-fi soundscape. Let us
briefly chronicle its development. When industry first intruded into town
life it was immediately conspicuous by the aberration of its novel noises.
Stendhal, writing in 1830, noticed how it upset the rhythms of French
provincial towns.

No sooner has one entered the town than one is startled by the din of a noisy machine of
terrifying aspect. A score of weighty hammers, falling with a clang which makes the pavement
tremble, are raised aloft by a wheel which the water of the torrent sets in motion. Each of these
hammers turns out, daily, I cannot say how many thousands of nails. A bevy of fresh, pretty
girls subject to the blows of these enormous hammers, the little scraps of iron which are rapidly
transformed into nails.8

By the early twentieth century such sounds had become more acceptable to
the urban ear, “blending” with the natural rhythms of antiquity. As Thomas
Mann described it,

We are encompassed with a roaring like that of the sea; for we live almost directly on the swift-
flowing river that foams over shallow ledges at no great distance from the popular avenue …
Upstream, in the direction of the city, construction troops are building a pontoon bridge. Shouts
of command and the thump of heavy boots on the planks sound across the river; also, from the
further bank, the noise of industrial activity, for there is a locomotive foundry a little way
downstream. Its premises have been lately enlarged to meet increased demands, and light
streams all night long from its lofty windows. Beautiful glittering new engines roll to and fro on
 trial runs; a steam whistle emits wailing head-tones from time to time; muffled thunderings of
unspecified origin shatter the air, smoke pours out of the many chimneys to be caught up by the
wind and borne away over the wooded country beyond the river, for it seldom or never blows
over to our side. Thus in our half-suburban, half-rural seclusion the voice of nature mingles with
that of man, and over all lies the bright-eyed freshness of the new day.9

Ultimately the throb of the machine began to intoxicate man everywhere

with its incessant vibrations.

As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run
of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain.10

Before long, the noises of modern industrial life swung the balance
against those of nature. This significant flashpoint occurred about the time
of the First World War, the first mechanized war of history. In 1913 the
futurist Luigi Russolo proclaimed the event in his manifesto The Art of
Noises […]11
Russolo invented an orchestra of noise makers, consisting of buzzers,
howlers and other gadgets calculated to advance his philosophy. The
“pastorale” and the “nocturne” give way before machine-music like
Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1924), an imitation of a locomotive, Antheil’s
Ballet méchanique (1926), which employed a number of airplane
propellers, Prokofiev’s Pas d’acier (Dance of Steel), Mossolov’s Iron
Foundry and Carlos Chávez’s HP (Horse-power) all dating from 1928. This
blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds is the most
striking feature of twentieth century music. Finally in the practices of
musique concrète it became possible to insert any sound from the
environment into a composition via tape; while in electronic music the
hard-edge sound of the tone generator may be indistinguishable from the
police siren or the electric tooth-brush […]

Schizophonia
The Greek prefix schizo means split, separated. Schizophonia refers to the
split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or
reproduction. It is another twentieth-century development.
 Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time and in
one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms
which produced them. The human voice travelled only as far as one could
shout. Every sound was uncounterfeitable, unique. Sounds bore
resemblances to one another, such as the phonemes which go to make up
the repetition of a word, but they were not identical. Tests have shown that
it is physically impossible for nature’s most rational and calculating being
to reproduce a single phoneme in his own name twice in exactly the same
manner.
Since the invention of electroacoustical equipment for the transmission
and storage of sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and
shot around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations of
the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds
have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and
independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole
in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same
instant it may issue from millions of holes in millions of public and private
places around the world.
The twentieth century has given us the ability to dislocate sounds in time
as well as in space. A record collection may contain items from widely
diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem, to a person from
any century but our own, an unnatural and surrealistic juxtaposition.
Most recently, the quadraphonic sound system has made possible a 360
degree soundscape of moving and stationary sound events which allows any
sound environment to be simulated in time and space. This provides for the
complete portability of acoustic space. Any sonic environment can now
become any other sonic environment. When I originally coined
schizophonia in The New Soundscape I said it was intended to be a nervous
word. Related to schizophrenia, I intended it to convey the same sense of
aberration and drama. The benefits of electroacoustic transmission and
reproduction of sound are well-enough celebrated, but they should not
obscure the fact that at precisely the time hi-fi was being engineered, the
world soundscape was slipping into a lo-fi condition. Indeed the overkill of
hi-fi gadgetry contributes generously to the lo-fi problem.
A character in one of Borges’ stories dreads mirrors because they
multiply men. The same might be said of radios. As the cry broadcasts
distress, the loudspeaker communicates anxiety. “We should not have
conquered Germany without … the loudspeaker,” wrote Hitler in 1938.12 In
the USA, Americans were listening to 268,000,000 radios by 1969. Modern
life has been ventriloquized.

Towards the integrity of inner space

The desire to dislocate sounds in time and space has been evident for some
time in the history of Western music, so that the recent technological
developments are merely the consequences of aspirations that have been
building for some centuries. The introduction of dynamics, echo effects, the
splitting of resources, the separation of soloist from the ensemble, are all
attempts to create virtual spaces which are larger or different from natural
room acoustics; just as the simultaneous breaking forward to find new
musical resources and the turning back to recover the past represents a
desire to transcend the present.
If I speak of music it is because I believe music to be a barometer giving
clues to our whole attitude towards making and hearing sound. Certainly in
the growth of the orchestra we have a clue to the present day imperialistic
spread of sounds of all kinds. And there is little difference between
Beethoven’s attempts to épater le bourgeois with sforzando effects and that
of the modern teen-ager with his motorcycle. The one is an embryo of the
other.
The concert hall made concentrated listening possible, just as the art
gallery encouraged, focused and selected viewing. Music designed for
outdoor performance—such as most folk music—does not demand great
attention to detail, but brings into play what we might call “peripheral
hearing,” similar to the way the eye drifts over an interesting landscape.
Today the transistor is reviving interest in the outdoor concert while
headphone listening is isolating the listener in a private acoustic space.
Messages on earphones are always private property. “Head space” is a
popular expression with the young, referring to the geography of the mind,
which can be reached by no telescope. Drugs and music are the means of
invoking entry. In the headspace of earphone listening, the sounds not only
circulate around the listener, they literally seem to emanate from points in
the cranium itself, as if the archetypes of the unconscious were in
conversation. There is a clear resemblance here to the functioning of Nada
Yoga in which interiorized sound (vibration) removes the individual from
this world and elevates him towards higher spheres of existence. When the
yogi recites his mantra he feels the sound surge through his body. His nose
rattles. He vibrates with its dark, narcotic powers. Similarly when sound is
conducted directly through the skull of the headphone listener, he is no
longer regarding events on the acoustic horizon; no longer is he surrounded
by a sphere of moving elements. He is the sphere. He is universe. While
most twentieth-century developments in sound production tend to fragment
the listening experience and break up concentration, headphone listening
directs the listener towards a new integrity with himself […]

Acoustic design […]: Quiet groves and times

The huge noises of our civilization are the result of imperialistic ambitions.
Territorial expansion has always been one of our aims. Just as we refuse to
leave a space of our environment uncultivated, unmastered, so too we have
refused to leave an acoustic space quiet and unpunctured by sound. The
moon probes are undoubtedly a great achievement, but they may likewise
be interpreted as an expression of that same imperialism that made Western
man a world colonial power.
The amplifier was also invented by an imperialist; for it responds to the
instinct to dominate others with one’s own sound. But in a crowded and
restless world, imperialism loops back on itself; its proponents become its
victims as the locus of the battlefield shifts. For the first time in history,
Constantin Doxiadis reminds us, man is less safe in the heart of his city than
outside the city gates.
Just as man requires time for sleep to refresh and renew his life energies,
so too he requires quiet periods for mental and spiritual recomposure. At
one time stillness was a precious article in an unwritten code of human
rights. Man held reservoirs of stillness in his life to facilitate this restoration
of the spiritual metabolism. Even in the hearts of cities there were the dark,
still vaults of churches and libraries, or the privacy of drawing-room and
bedroom. Outside the throb of cities the countryside was accessible with its
lulling whir of natural sounds. There were still times too. The holy days
were quiet before they became holidays. In Christendom Sunday was the
quietest day before it became Fun-day. The importance of these quiet
groves far transcended the particular purposes to which they were put. We
see this now that they are being destroyed. The city park is situated next to
the parkway, the library is next to a construction or demolition site, the
church is next to a heliport.
Acoustic design will want to pay special attention to the repatriation of
quiet groves and times. Genclik Park in Ankara is merely one of many in
the cities of the world today that has been wired throughout for background
music, though the volume at which it is played is louder than most. This
practice betrays an important principle of acoustic design: always to let
nature sing for itself.
A park or a garden is a place where nature is cultivated. It is a humanized
treatment of landscape. It may contain human artifacts (a bench, a swing)
but they must harmonize with the natural inheritance (trees, water)—
otherwise we no longer have a park but a highway or a slum. If synthetic
sounds are introduced, if we venture to produce what I would call “the
soniferous garden,” care must be taken to ensure that they are sympathetic
vibrations of the garden’s original notes. The wind chimes of the Japanese,
or the once-popular aeolian or wind harp, are reinforcements of natural
sounds in the same way as the trellis reinforces the presence of the rose.
The object in creating a soniferous garden would be to work up from
natural sounds, materials, formations […]

The recovery of positive silence

In October 1969 the General Assembly of the International Music Council
of UNESCO passed a most interesting resolution.

We denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and of the right of
everyone to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded or
broadcast music. We ask the Executive Committee of the International Music Council to initiate
a study from all angles—medical, scientific and juridical—without overlooking its artistic and
educational aspects, and with a view to proposing to UNESCO, and to the proper authorities
everywhere, measures calculated to put an end to this abuse.
 For the first time in history an organization involved primarily in the
production of sounds suddenly turned its attention to their reduction. In the
present article I have been suggesting that a saturation point has been
reached with regard to all sounds. It remains to discuss how best to
accomplish their reduction. I have suggested that the least effective way
would be by the introduction of more noise abatement bylaws, sound-proof
walls or ear plugs. An uncomprehending public with a developed appetite
for noise would scarcely accept these means, unless they were necessary for
public health—though in many instances this can now be demonstrated to
be the case.
My approach, over which I do [not] wish to exercise permanent
ownership, has been to treat the world soundscape as a huge macrocosmic
composition which deserves to be listened to as attentively as a Mozart
symphony.13 Only when we have truly learned how to listen can we make
effective judgements about the world soundscape. I am especially anxious
that musicians should take the initiative in this field, because musicians are
the architects of sounds; they are concerned with making balances and
arrangements of interesting sounds to produce desired aesthetic effects.
Silence is the most potentialized feature of Western music. Because it is
being lost, the composer today is more concerned with silence; he
composes with it. Anton Webern moved composition to the brink of silence.
The ecstasy of his music is enhanced by his sublime use of rests. By this
means he produces hi-fi works in which diminutive but stunning musical
gestures inhabit containers of stillness.
Simultaneous with Webern’s rediscovery of the value of silence in music,
his compatriot Freud discovered its value for psychoanalysis. “The analyst
is not afraid of silence. As Saussure remarked, the unconscious monologue
of the patient on the one side and the almost absolute silence of the
psychiatrist on the other was never made a methodological principle before
Freud.”14
In the West, silence has for many centuries been unfashionable. It will be
recalled that when Galileo’s telescope first suggested the infinity of space,
the philosopher Pascal was deeply afraid of the prospect of an infinite and
eternal silence. “Le silence éternal de ces espaces infinis m’effraye [The
eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me].”15
 When silence is conceived as the rejection of the human personality, the
ultimate silence is death. Then man likes to surround himself with sounds in
order to nourish his fantasy of perpetual life. In Western society silence is
negative, an embarrassment, a vacuum. Silence for Western man equals
communication hang-up. If one does not speak, the other will speak. This
has not always been so, nor is it so for all peoples today. I have seen Arabs
sitting quietly in a circle saying nothing for long stretches of time. Even the
conversation of farmers is much more leisurely than that of citydwellers.
In the West we may assume that silence as a condition of life and a
workable concept disappeared sometime towards the end of the thirteenth
century, with the death of Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, Angela de Foligno
and the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing. This is the
era of the last great Christian mystics and contemplation as a habit and skill
began to disappear about that time.
I am about to suggest that the soundscape will not again become
ecological and harmonious until silence is recovered as a positive and
felicitous state in itself. We need to regain that state in order that fewer
sounds could intrude on it with pristine brilliance. The Indian mystic Kirpal
Singh expresses this eloquently:

The essence of sound is felt in both motion and silence, it passes from existent to nonexistent.
When there is no sound, it is said that there is no hearing, but that does not mean that hearing
has lost its preparedness. Indeed, when there is no sound, hearing is most alert, and when there
is sound the hearing nature is least developed.16

It is this same idea that Rilke expresses in his Duineser Elegien when he
speaks of “die unterbrochene Nachricht der Stille” [“the endless report that
grows out of silence”]. Silence is indeed news for those possessing
clairaudience.
Among our students we have declared days of moratorium on speech. In
our classes we have also been trying to employ some yogic or relaxing
exercises as a preparation to the listening and creating experience. Little by
little the muscles and the mind relax and the whole body becomes an ear.
This may take some time but at the conclusion, students have told me, they
have heard music as never before.
 It is in exercises such as these that I have come to believe our ultimate
hope lies in improving the acoustic design of the world. Still the noise in the
mind: that is the first task—then everything else will follow in time.

Notes
1 R. Murray Schafer, The New Soundscape, Universal Edition, London and Vienna, 1971, p. 1.
2 J. Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, New York, 1961, pp. 113–14.
3 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, London, 1902, p. 43.
4 Ibid., p. 254.
5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Leipzig, 1774, p. 9.
6 F. Phillip Grove, Over Prairie Trails, Toronto, 1922, p. 34.
7 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, New York, 1962, p. 40.
8 R. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, New York, 1926, p. 10.
9 Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, “A Man and His Dog,” New York, 1936, pp. 440–41.
10 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, New York, 1915, p. 7.
11 [See Chapter 2, above.]
12 “Ohne Kraftwagen, ohne Flugzeug und ohne Lautsprecher hätten wir Deutschland nicht
erobert,” Adolf Hitler, Manual of the German Radio, 1938–39.
13 These ideas are expounded more fully in my booklets, Ear Cleaning, The New Soundscape, and
When Words Sing, Universal Edition, London and Vienna, 1970–71.
14 Theodor Reik, Listening With the Third Ear, New York, 1949, pp. 122–23.
15 Pascal, Pensées, Ch. M. des Granges, ed., Granier Frères, 1964, p. 131.
16 Kirpal Singh, Naam or Word, Ruhani Satsang, Delhi, India, 1970, p. 59.

* From R. Murray Schafer, The Music of the Environment (Wien: Universal Edition, 1973). Used
by permission of the author.
 7
The Gender of Sound
Anne Carson

Since the late 1980s, Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson has published volumes of
poetry, verse fiction, essays, and translations of ancient Greek literature. Indeed, her writing
often combines these genres and forms, melding poetry with memoir, essay, and literary
analysis, frequently on classical themes. Her verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998), for
example, modernizes the mythological story of the three-headed giant Geryon, and includes
both an analysis of the Greek poet Stesichoros and translations of his fragments on Geryon. In
“The Gender of Sound,” Carson reflects on the problem of the female voice in patriarchal
culture, which associates the vocal utterance of women with irrationality, animality, immorality,
and political danger. Carson’s examples are primarily classical, though she argues that the
attitudes and prohibitions established by the Greeks are still with us today. Carson’s analysis of
the female voice resonates with the vocal experiments and provocations of Yoko Ono, Joan La
Barbara, Diamanda Galas, Maja Ratkje, Amy Yoshida, and others.

Physiognomics
It is in large part according to the sounds people make that we judge them
sane or insane, male or female, good, evil, trustworthy, depressive,
marriageable, moribund, likely or unlikely to make war on us, little better
than animals, inspired by God. These judgments happen fast and can be
brutal. Aristotle tells us that the high pitched voice of the female is one
evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like
lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices.1 If you
hear a man talking in a gentle or high pitched voice you know he is a
kinaidos (“catamite”).2 The poet Aristophanes puts a comic turn on this
cliché in his Ekklesiazousai. As the women of Athens are about to infiltrate
the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the feminist leader
Praxagora reassures her fellow female activists that they have precisely the
right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that
among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the
ones who get fucked a lot” (113–14).
This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of
sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the
ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general
rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to
characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine
ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into
this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable.
Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle
is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he
ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on
a man’s vocal cords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.3 In
Hellenistic and Roman times doctors recommended vocal exercises to cure
all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in men, on the theory that
the practice of declamation would relieve congestion in the head and correct
the damage that men habitually do to themselves in daily life by using the
voice for high pitched sounds, loud shouting or aimless conversation. Here
again we note a confusion of vocal quality and vocal use. This therapy was
not on the whole recommended to women or eunuchs or androgynes, who
were believed to have the wrong kind of flesh and the wrong alignment of
pores for the production of low vocal pitches, no matter how hard they
exercised. But for the masculine physique vocal practice was thought an
effective way to restore body and mind by pulling the voice back down to
appropriately manly pitches.4 I have a friend who is a radio journalist and
he assures me that these suppositions about voice quality are still with us.
He is a man and he is gay. He spent the first several years of his career in
radio fending off the attempts of producers to deepen, darken and depress
his voice, which they described as “having too much smile in it.” Very few
women in public life do not worry that their voices are too high or too light
or too shrill to command respect. Margaret Thatcher trained for years with a
vocal coach to make her voice sound more like those of the other
Honourable Members and still earned the nickname Attila the Hen.5 This
hen analogy goes back to the publicity surrounding Nancy Astor, first
female member of the British House of Commons in 1919, who was
described by her colleague Sir Henry Channon as “a queer combination of
warmheartedness, originality and rudeness … she rushes about like a
decapitated hen … intriguing and enjoying the smell of blood … the mad
witch.”6 Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions
commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient
as well as modern contexts. Consider how many female celebrities of
classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by
the way they use their voice. For example, there is the heart-chilling groan
of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word *garg meaning
“a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the
throat through a hugely distended mouth.”7 There are the Furies whose high
pitched and horrendous voices are compared by Aiskhylos to howling dogs
or sounds of people being tortured in hell (Eumenides, 117, 131, 189).
There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of
Helen (Odyssey, 4.275) and the incredible babbling of Kassandra
(Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon, 1213–14) and the fearsome hulabaloo of Artemis
as she charges through the woods (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 18–20).
There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect
of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it
to other women (Iliad, 14.216). There is the old woman of Eleusinian
legend, Iambe, who shrieks obscenities and throws her skirt up over her
head to expose her genitalia.8 There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph
Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by
Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth” (Philoktetes, 188).

Beefsteak
Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of
patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an
ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and
death. Consider this description by one of her biographers of the sound of
Gertrude Stein:

Gertrude was hearty. She used to roar with laughter, out loud. She had a laugh like a beefsteak.
She loved beef.9
These sentences, with their artful confusion of factual and metaphorical
levels, carry with them, as it seems to me, a whiff of pure fear. It is a fear
that projects Gertrude Stein across the boundary of woman and human and
animal kind into monstrosity. The simile “she had a laugh like a beefsteak”
which identifies Gertrude Stein with cattle is followed at once by the
statement “she loved beef” indicating that Gertrude Stein ate cattle.
Creatures who eat their own kind are regularly called cannibals and
regarded as abnormal. Gertrude Stein’s other abnormal attributes, notably
her large physical size and lesbianism, were emphasized persistently by
critics, biographers and journalists who did not know what to make of her
prose. The marginalization of her personality was a way to deflect her
writing from literary centrality: if she is fat, funny-looking and sexually
deviant she must be a marginal talent, is the assumption.
One of the literary patriarchs who feared Gertrude Stein most was Ernest
Hemingway. And it is interesting to hear him tell the story of how he came
to end his friendship with Gertrude Stein because he could not tolerate the
sound of her voice. The story takes place in Paris. Hemingway tells it from
the point of view of a disenchanted expatriate just realizing that he cannot
after all make a life for himself amid the alien culture where he is stranded.
One spring day in 1924 Hemingway comes to call on Gertrude Stein and is
admitted by the maid:

The maidservant opened the door before I rang and told me to come in and wait. Miss Stein
would be down at any moment. It was before noon but the maidservant poured me a glass of
eau-de-vie, put it in my hand and winked happily. The colorless liquid felt good on my tongue
and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard
one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever. Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and
begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”
I swallowed the drink and put the glass down on the table and started for the door. The
maidservant shook her finger at me and whispered, “Don’t go. She’ll be right down.”
“I have to go,” I said and tried not to hear any more as I left but it was still going on and the
only way I could not hear it was to be gone. It was bad to hear and the answers were worse…
That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough … She got to look like a Roman
emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors … In the end
everyone or not quite everyone made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. But I
 could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot
make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that.10

Indeed it is more complicated than that. As we shall see if we keep Ernest

Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in mind while we consider another vignette
about a man confronting the female voice. This one is from the seventh
century BC. It is a lyric fragment of the archaic poet Alkaios of Lesbos.
Like Ernest Hemingway, Alkaios was an expatriate writer. He had been
expelled from his home city of Mytilene for political insurgency and his
poem is a lonely and demoralized lament from exile. Like Hemingway,
Alkaios epitomizes his feelings of alienation in the image of himself as a
man stranded in an anteroom of high culture and subjected to a disturbing
din of women’s voices from the room next door:

… wretched I
exist with wilderness as my lot
longing to hear the sound of the Assembly
being called, O Agesilaidas,
and the Council.
What my father and the father of my father grew old enjoying –
among these citizens who wrong one another –
from this I am outcast

an exile on the furthest fringes of things, like Onomaklees

here all alone I have set up my house
in the wolfthickets…

… I dwell keeping my feet outside of evils

where the Lesbian women in their contests for beauty

come and go with trailing robes

and all around reverberates

an otherworldly echo of women’s awful yearly shrieking (ololygas) …11

This is a poem of radical loneliness, which Alkaios emphasizes with an

oxymoron. “All alone (oios) I have set up my household (eoikesa)” he says
(at verse 10), but this wording would make little sense to a seventh-century
BC ear. The verb (eoikesa) is made from the noun oikos, which denotes the
whole relational complex of spaces, objects, kinsmen, servants, animals,
rituals and emotions that constitute life within a family within a polis. A
man all alone cannot constitute an oikos.
Alkaios’ oxymoronic condition is reinforced by the kind of creatures that
surround him. Wolves and women have replaced “the fathers of my
fathers.” The wolf is a conventional symbol of marginality in Greek poetry.
The wolf is an outlaw. He lives beyond the boundary of usefully cultivated
and inhabited space marked off as the polis, in that blank no-man’s-land
called to apeiron (“the unbounded”). Women, in the ancient view, share this
territory spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a “natural” female
affinity for all that is raw, formless and in need of the civilizing hand of
man. So for example in the document cited by Aristotle that goes by the
name of The Pythagorean Table of Opposites, we find the attributes
curving, dark, secret, evil, ever-moving, not self-contained and lacking its
own boundaries aligned with Female and set over against straight, light,
honest, good, stable, self-contained and firmly bounded on the Male side
(Aristotle, Metaphysics, 986a22).
I do not imagine that these polarities or their hierarchization is news to
you, now that classical historians and feminists have spent the last ten or
fifteen years codifying the various arguments with which ancient Greek
thinkers convinced themselves that women belong to a different species
than men. But it interests me that the radical otherness of the female is
experienced by Alkaios, as also by Ernest Hemingway, in the form of
women’s voices uttering sounds that men find bad to hear. Why is female
sound bad to hear? The sound that Alkaios hears is that of the local Lesbian
women who are conducting beauty contests and making the air reverberate
with their yelling. These beauty contests of the Lesbian women are known
to us from a notice in the Iliadic scholia which indicates they were an
annual event performed probably in honour of Hera. Alkaios mentions the
beauty contests in order to remark on their prodigious noise level and, by so
doing, draws his poem into a ring composition. The poem begins with the
urbane and orderly sound of a herald summoning male citizens to their
rational civic business in the Assembly and the Council. The poem ends
with an otherworldly echo of women shrieking in the wolfthickets.
Moreover the women are uttering a particular kind of shriek, the ololyga.
This is a ritual shout peculiar to females.12 It is a high pitched piercing
cry uttered at certain climactic moments in ritual practice (e.g., at the
moment when a victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice) or at climactic
moments in real life (e.g., at the birth of a child) and is also a common
feature of women’s festivals. The ololyga with its cognate verb ololyzo is
one of a family of words, including eleleu with its cognate verb elelizo, and
alala with its cognate verb alalazo, probably of Indo-European origin and
obviously of onomatopoeic derivation.13 These words do not signify
anything except their own sound. The sound represents a cry of either
intense pleasure or intense pain.14 To utter such cries is a specialized female
function. When Alkaios finds himself surrounded by the sound of the
ololyga he is telling us that he is completely and genuinely out of bounds.
No man would make such sound. No proper civic space would contain it
unregulated. The female festivals in which such ritual cries were heard were
generally not permitted to be held within the city limits but were relegated
to suburban areas like the mountains, the beach or the rooftops of houses
where women could disport themselves without contaminating the ears or
civic space of men. To be exposed to such sound is for Alkaios a condition
of political nakedness as alarming as that of his archetype Odysseus, who
awakens with no clothes on in a thicket on the island of Phaiakia in the
sixth book of Homer’s Odyssey, surrounded by the shrieking of women.
“What a hulabaloo of females comes around me!” Odysseus exclaims
(Odyssey, 6.122) and goes on to wonder what sort of savages or
supernatural beings can be making such a racket. The savages of course
turn out to be Nausikaa and her girlfriends playing soccer on the riverbank,
but what is interesting in this scenario is Odysseus’ automatic association of
disorderly female sound with wild space, with savagery and the
supernatural. Nausikaa and her friends are shortly compared by Homer to
the wild girls who roam the mountains in attendance upon Artemis
(Odyssey, 9.105-6), a goddess herself notorious for the sounds that she
makes—if we may judge from her Homeric epithets. Artemis is called
keladeine, derived from the noun kelados which means a loud roaring noise
as of wind or rushing water or the tumult of battle. Artemis is also called
iocheaira which is usually etymologized to mean “she who pours forth
arrows” (from ios meaning “arrow”) but could just as well come from the
exclamatory sound io and mean “she who pours forth the cry IO!”15

Sound control
Greek women of the archaic and classical periods were not encouraged to
pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis
or within earshot of men. Indeed masculinity in such a culture defines itself
by its different use of sound. Verbal continence is an essential feature of the
masculine virtue of sophrosyne (“prudence, soundness of mind, moderation,
temperance, self-control”) that organizes most patriarchal thinking on
ethical or emotional matters. Woman as a species is frequently said to lack
the ordering principle of sophrosyne. Freud formulates the double standard
succinctly in a remark to a colleague: “A thinking man is his own legislator
and confessor, and obtains his own absolution, but the woman … does not
have the measure of ethics in herself. She can only act if she keeps within
the limits of morality, following what society has established as fitting.”16
So too, ancient discussions of the virtue of sophrosyne demonstrate clearly
that, where it is applied to women, this word has a different definition than
for men.17 Female sophrosyne is coextensive with female obedience to male
direction and rarely means more than chastity. When it does mean more, the
allusion is often to sound. A husband exhorting his wife or concubine to
sophrosyne is likely to mean “Be quiet!”18 The Pythagorean heroine
Timyche who bit off her tongue rather than say the wrong thing is praised
as an exception to the female rule.19 In general the women of classical
literature are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of
sound – to shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams
of pain or of pleasure and eruptions of raw emotion in general. As Euripides
puts it, “For it is woman’s inborn pleasure always to have her current
emotions coming up to her mouth and out through her tongue”
(Andromache, 94–5). When a man lets his current emotions come up to his
mouth and out through his tongue he is thereby feminized, as Herakles at
the end of the Trachiniai agonizes to find himself “sobbing like a girl,
whereas before I used to follow my difficult course without a groan but now
in pain I am discovered a woman” (1070–5).
 It is a fundamental assumption of these gender stereotypes that a man in
his proper condition of sophrosyne should be able to dissociate himself
from his own emotions and so control their sound. It is a corollary
assumption that man’s proper civic responsibility towards woman is to
control her sound for her insofar as she cannot control it herself. We see a
summary moment of such masculine benevolence in Homer’s Odyssey in
Book 22 when the old woman Eurykleia enters the dining hall to find
Odysseus caked in blood and surrounded by dead suitors. Eurykleia lifts her
head and opens her mouth to utter an ololyga. Whereupon Odysseus
reaches out a hand and closes her mouth saying, ou themis: “It is not
permitted for you to scream just now. Rejoice inwardly …” (22.407–12).
Closing women’s mouths was the object of a complex array of legislation
and convention in preclassical and classical Greece, of which the best
documented examples are Solon’s sumptuary laws and the core concept
Sophokles’ blanket statement, “Silence is the kosmos [good order] of
women.”20 The sumptuary laws enacted by Solon in the sixth century BC
had as their effect, Plutarch tells us, “to forbid all the disorderly and
barbarous excesses of women in their festivals, processions and funeral
rites.”21 The main responsibility for funeral lament had belonged to women
from earliest Greek times. Already in Homer’s Iliad we see the female
Trojan captives in Achilles’ camp compelled to wail over Patroklos
(18.339). Yet lawgivers of the sixth and fifth centuries like Solon were at
pains to restrict these female outpourings to a minimum of sound and
emotional display.
The official rhetoric of the lawgivers is instructive. It tends to denounce
bad sound as political disease (nosos) and speaks of the need to purify civic
spaces of such pollution. Sound itself is regarded as the means of
purification as well as of pollution. So for example the lawgiver Charondas,
who laid down laws for the city of Katana in Sicily, prefaced his legal code
with a ceremonial public katharsis. This took the form of an incantation
meant to cleanse the citizen body of evil ideas or criminal intent and to
prepare a civic space for the legal katharsis that followed. In his law code
Charondas, like Solon, was concerned with regulating female noise and
drew attention to the ritual funeral lament. Laws were passed specifying the
location, time, duration, personnel, choreography, musical content and
verbal content of the women’s funeral lament on the grounds that these
“harsh and barbaric sounds” were a stimulus to “disorder and licence” (as
Plutarch puts it).22 Female sound was judged to arise in craziness and to
generate craziness.

Rationality
We detect a certain circularity in the reasoning here. If women’s public
utterance is perpetually enclosed within cultural institutions like the ritual
lament, if women are regularly reassigned to the expression of nonrational
sounds like the ololyga and raw emotion in general, then the so-called
“natural” tendency of the female to shrieking, wailing, weeping, emotional
display and oral disorder cannot help but become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But circularity is not the most ingenious thing about this reasoning. We
should look a little more closely at the ideology that underlies male
abhorrence of female sound. And it becomes important at this point to
distinguish sound from language.
For the formal definition of human nature preferred by patriarchal culture
is one based on articulation of sound. As Aristotle says, any animal can
make noises to register pleasure or pain. But what differentiates man from
beast, and civilization from the wilderness, is the use of rationally
articulated speech: logos.23 From such a prescription for humanity follow
severe rules for what constitutes human logos. When the wife of Alexander
Graham Bell, a woman who had been deafened in childhood and knew how
to lipread but not how to talk very well, asked him to teach her sign
language, Alexander replied, “The use of sign language is pernicious. For
the only way by which a language can be thoroughly mastered is by using it
for the communication of thought without translation into any other
language.”24 Alexander Graham Bell’s wife, whom he had married the day
after he patented the telephone, never did learn sign language. Or any other
language.
What is it that is pernicious about sign language? To a husband like
Alexander Graham Bell, as to a patriarchal social order like that of classical
Greece, there is something disturbing or abnormal about the use of signs to
transcribe upon the outside of the body a meaning from inside the body
which does not pass through the control point of logos, a meaning which is
not subject to the mechanism of dissociation that the Greeks called
sophrosyne or self-control. Sigmund Freud applied the name “hysteria” to
this process of transcription when it occurred in female patients whose tics
and neuralgias and convulsions and paralyses and eating disorders and
spells of blindness could be read, in his theory, as a direct translation into
somatic terms of psychic events within the woman’s body.25 Freud
conceived his own therapeutic task as the rechannelling of these hysteric
signs into rational discourse.26 Herodotos tells us of a priestess of Athene in
Pedasa who did not use speech to prophesy but would grow a beard
whenever she saw misfortune coming upon her community (1.75).
Herodotos does not register any surprise at the “somatic compliance” (as
Freud would call it) of this woman’s prophetic body nor call her condition
pathological. But Herodotos was a practical person, less concerned to
discover pathologies in his historical subjects than to congratulate them for
putting “otherness” to cultural use. And the anecdote does give us a strong
image of how ancient culture went about constructing the “otherness” of the
female. Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside. By
projections and leakages of all kinds – somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual –
females expose or expend what should be kept in. Females blurt out a direct
translation of what should be formulated indirectly. There is a story told
about the wife of Pythagoras, that she once uncovered her arm while out of
doors and someone commented, “Nice arm” to which she responded, “Not
public property!” Plutarch’s comment on this story is: “The arm of a
virtuous woman should not be public property, nor her speech neither, and
she should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she
would guard against stripping off her clothes. For in her voice as she is
blabbering away can be read her emotions, her character and her physical
condition.”27 In spite of herself, Plutarch’s woman has a voice that acts like
a sign language, exposing her inside facts. Ancient physiologists from
Aristotle through the early Roman Empire tell us that a man can know from
the sound of a woman’s voice private data like whether or not she is
menstruating, whether or not she has had sexual experience.28 Although
these are useful things to know, they may be bad to hear or make men
uncomfortable. What is pernicious about sign language is that it permits a
direct continuity between inside and outside. Such continuity is abhorrent to
the male nature. The masculine virtue of sophrosyne or self-control aims to
obstruct this continuity, to dissociate the outside surface of a man from what
is going on inside him. Man breaks continuity by interposing logos—whose
most important censor is the rational articulation of sound.
Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private
interior, yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the
outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture
that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can
censor themselves and those who cannot.
In order to explore some of the implications of this division let us
consider how Plutarch depicts the two species in his essay “On
Talkativeness.”
To exemplify the female species in its use of sound Plutarch tells the
story of a politician’s wife who is tested by her husband. The politician
makes up a crazy story and tells it to his wife as a secret early one morning.
“Now keep your mouth closed about this,” he warns her. The wife
immediately relates the secret to her maidservant. “Now keep your mouth
closed about this,” she tells the maidservant, who immediately relates it to
the whole town and before midmorning the politician himself receives his
own story back again. Plutarch concludes this anecdote by saying, “The
husband had taken precautions and protective measures in order to test his
wife, as one might test a cracked or leaky vessel by filling it not with oil or
wine but with water.”29 Plutarch pairs this anecdote with a story about
masculine speech acts. It is a description of a friend of Solon’s named
Anacharsis:

Anacharsis, who had dined with Solon and was resting after dinner, was seen pressing his left
hand on his sexual parts and his right hand on his mouth: for he believed that the tongue requires
a more powerful restraint. And he was right. It would not be easy to count as many men lost
through incontinence in amorous pleasures as cities and empires ruined through revelation of a
secret.30

In assessing the implications of the gendering of sound for a society like

that of the ancient Greeks, we have to take seriously the connection
Plutarch makes between verbal and sexual continence, between mouth and
genitals. Because that connection turns out to be a very different matter for
men than for women. The masculine virtue of self-censorship with which
Anacharsis responds to impulses from inside himself is shown to be simply
unavailable to the female nature. Plutarch reminds us a little later in the
essay that perfect sophrosyne is an attribute of the god Apollo whose epithet
Loxias means that he is a god of few words and concise expression, not one
who runs off at the mouth.31 Now, when a woman runs off at the mouth
there is far more at stake than waste of words: the image of the leaky water
jar with which Plutarch concludes his first anecdote is one of the
commonest figures in ancient literature for the representation of female
sexuality.

Mouths
The forms and contexts of this representation (the leaky jar of female
sexuality) have been studied at length by other scholars (including me)32 so
let us pass directly to the heart, or rather the mouth, of the matter. It is an
axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical
discussion that a woman has two mouths.33 The orifice through which vocal
activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place
are both denoted by the word stoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition
of adverbs ano or kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both
the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by a neck
(auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin). Both mouths provide access to a hollow
cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed. The ancient
medical writers not only apply homologous terms but also parallel
medications to upper and lower mouths in certain cases of uterine
malfunction. They note with interest, as do many poets and scholiasts,
symptoms of physiological responsion between upper and lower mouth, for
example that an excess or blockage of blood in the uterus will evidence
itself as strangulation or loss of voice;34 that too much vocal exercise results
in loss of menses;35 that defloration causes a woman’s neck to enlarge and
her voice to deepen.36
“With a high pure voice because she has not yet been acted upon by the
bull,” is how Aiskhylos describes his Iphigeneia (Agamemnon, 244). The
changed voice and enlarged throat of the sexually initiated female are an
upward projection of irrevocable changes at the lower mouth. Once a
woman’s sexual life begins, the lips of the uterus are never completely
closed again—except on one occasion, as the medical writers explain: in his
treatise on gynecology Soranos describes the sensations that a woman
experiences during fruitful sexual intercourse. At the moment of
conception, the Hellenistic doctor Soranus alleges, the woman has a
shivering sensation and the perception that the mouth of her uterus closes
upon the seed.37 This closed mouth, and the good silence of conception that
it protects and signifies, provides the model of decorum for the upper mouth
as well. Sophokles’ frequently cited dictum “Silence is the kosmos of
women” has its medical analog in women’s amulets from antiquity which
picture a uterus equipped with a lock at the mouth.
When it is not locked the mouth may gape open and let out unspeakable
things. Greek myth, literature and cult show traces of cultural anxiety about
such female ejaculation. For example there is the story of Medusa who,
when her head was cut off by Perseus, gave birth to a son and a flying horse
through her neck.38 Or again that restless and loquacious nymph Echo,
surely the most mobile female in Greek myth. When Sophokles calls her
“the girl with no door on her mouth” we might wonder which mouth he
means. Especially since Greek legend marries Echo off in the end to the god
Pan whose name implies her conjugal union with every living thing.
We should also give some consideration to that bizarre and variously
explained religious practice called aischrologia. Aischrologia means
“saying ugly things.” Certain women’s festivals included an interval in
which women shouted abusive remarks or obscenities or dirty jokes at one
another. Historians of religion classify these rituals of bad sound either as
some Frazerian species of fertility magic or as a type of coarse but cheering
buffoonery in which (as Walter Burkert says) “antagonism between the
sexes is played up and finds release.”39 But the fact remains that in general
men were not welcome at these rituals and Greek legend contains more than
a few cautionary tales of men castrated, dismembered or killed when they
blundered into them.40 These stories suggest a backlog of sexual anger
behind the bland face of religious buffoonery. Ancient society was happy to
have women drain off such unpleasant tendencies and raw emotion into a
leakproof ritual container. The strategy involved here is a cathartic one,
based on a sort of psychological division of labour between the sexes, such
as [pseudo]Demosthenes mentions in a reference to the Athenian ritual
called Choes. The ceremony of Choes took place on the second day of the
Dionysian festival of Anthesteria.41 It featured a competition between
celebrants to drain an oversize jug of wine and concluded with a symbolic
(or perhaps not) act of sexual union between the god Dionysos and a
representative woman of the community. It is this person to whom
Demosthenes refers, saying “She is the woman who discharges the
unspeakable things on behalf of the city” (59.73).

Speak the unspeakable

Let us dwell for a moment on this ancient female task of discharging
unspeakable things on behalf of the city, and on the structures that the city
sets up to contain such speech.
A ritual structure like the aischrologia raises some difficult questions of
definition. For it collapses into a single cathartic activity two different
aspects of sound production. We have noticed this combinatory tactic
already throughout most of the ancient and some of the modern discussions
of voice: female sound is bad to hear both because the quality of a woman’s
voice is objectionable and because a woman uses her voice to say what
should not be said. When these two aspects are blurred together, some
important questions about the distinction between essential and constructed
characteristics of human nature recede into circularity. Nowadays, sex
difference in language is a topic of diverse research and unresolved debate.
The sounds made by women are said to have different inflectional patterns,
different ranges of intonation, different syntactic preferences, different
semantic fields, different diction, different narrative textures, different
behavioural accoutrements, different contextual pressures than the sounds
that men make.42 Tantalizing vestiges of ancient evidence for such
difference may be read from, e.g., passing references in Aristophanes to a
“woman’s language” that a man can learn or imitate if he wants to
(Thesmophoriazousai, 192, 267); or from the conspicuously onomatopoeic
construction of female cries like ololuga and female names like Gorgo,
Baubo, Echo, Syrinx, Eileithyia.43 But in general, no clear account of the
ancient facts can be extracted from strategically blurred notions like the
homology of female mouth and female genitals, or tactically blurred
activities like the ritual of the aischrologia. What does emerge is a
consistent paradigm of response to otherness of voice. It is a paradigm that
forms itself as katharsis.
As such, the ancient Greek ritual of aischrologia bears some resemblance
to the procedure developed by Sigmund Freud and his colleague Josef
Breuer for treatment of hysterical women. In Case Studies on Hysteria,
Freud and Breuer use the term “katharsis” and also the term “talking cure”
of this revolutionary therapy. In Freud’s theory the hysterical patients are
women who have bad memories or ugly emotions trapped inside them like
a pollution. Freud and Breuer find themselves able to drain off this
pollution by inducing the women under hypnosis to speak unspeakable
things. Hypnotized women produce some remarkable sounds. One of the
patients described by Freud can at first only clack like a hen; another insists
on speaking English although she was Viennese; another uses what Freud
calls “paraphrastic jargon.”44 But all are eventually channelled by the
psychoanalyst into connected narrative and rational exegesis of their
hysteric symptoms. Whereupon, both Freud and Breuer claim, the
symptoms disappear – cleansed by this simple cathartic ritual of draining
off the bad sound of unspeakable things.
Here is how Josef Breuer describes his interaction with the patient who
goes by the pseudonym Anna O.:

.… I used to visit her in the evening, when I knew I should find her in her hypnosis, and then I
relieved her of the whole stock of imaginative products which she had accumulated since my
last visit. It was essential that this should be effected completely if good results were to follow.
When this was done she became perfectly calm, and next day she would be agreeable, easy to
manage, industrious and even cheerful … She aptly described this procedure as a “talking cure,”
while she referred to it jokingly as “chimney sweeping” … 45

Whether we call it chimney sweeping or aischrologia or ritual funeral

lament or a hulabaloo of females or having a laugh like a beefsteak, the
same paradigm of response is obvious. As if the entire female gender were
a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things, patriarchal order
like a well-intentioned psychoanalyst, seems to conceive its therapeutic
responsibility as the channelling of this bad sound into politically
appropriate containers. Both the upper and the lower female mouth
apparently stand in need of such controlling action. Freud mentions shyly in
a footnote to Case Studies on Hysteria that Josef Breuer had to suspend his
analytic relationship with Anna O. because “she suddenly made manifest to
Breuer the presence of a strongly unanalyzed positive transference of an
unmistakably sexual nature.”46 Not until 1932 did Freud reveal (in a letter
to a colleague)47 what really happened between Breuer and Anna O. It was
on the evening of his last interview with her that Breuer entered Anna’s
apartment to find her on the floor contorted by abdominal pain. When he
asked her what was wrong she answered that she was about to give birth to
his child. It was this “untoward event” as Freud calls it that caused Breuer
to hold back the publication of Case Studies on Hysteria from 1881 to 1895
and led him ultimately to abandon collaborating with Freud. Even the
talking cure must fall silent when both female mouths try to speak at the
same time.

Baubo
It is confusing and embarrassing to have two mouths. Genuine kakophony is
the sound produced by them. Let us consider one more example from
antiquity of female kakophony at its most confusing and embarrassing.
There is a group of terracotta statues recovered from Asia Minor and dated
to the 4th century BC which depict the female body in an alarmingly
shortcircuited form.48 Each of these statues is a woman who consists of
almost nothing but her two mouths. The two mouths are welded together
into an inarticulate body mass which excludes other anatomical function.
Moreover the position of the two mouths is reversed. The upper mouth for
talking is placed at the bottom of the statue’s belly. The lower or genital
mouth gapes open on top of the head. Iconographers identify this monster
with the old woman named Baubo49 who figures in Greek legend as an
allomorph of the old woman Iambe (in the Demeter myth) and is a sort of
patron saint of the ritual of the aischrologia. Baubo’s name has a double
significance; according to LSJ, the noun baubo is used as a synonym for
koilia (which denotes the female uterus) but as a piece of sound it derives
from baubau, the onomatopoeic Greek word for a dog’s bark.50 The mythic
action of Baubo is also significantly double. Like the old woman Iambe,
Baubo is credited in legend with the twofold gesture of pulling up her
clothes to reveal her genitalia and also shouting out obscene language or
jokes. The shouting of Baubo provides one aetiology for the ritual of the
aischrologia; her action of genital exposure may also have come over into
cult as a ritual action called the anasyrma (the “pulling up” of clothing).51 If
so, we may understand this action as a kind of visual or gestural noise,
projected outward upon circumstances to change or deflect them, in the
manner of an apotropaic utterance. So Plutarch describes the use of the
anasyrma gesture by women in besieged cities: in order to repel the enemy
they stand on the city wall and pull up their clothing to expose unspeakable
things.52 Plutarch praises this action of female self-exposure as an instance
of virtue in its context. But woman’s allegedly definitive tendency to put the
inside on the outside could provoke quite another reaction. The Baubo
statues are strong evidence of that reaction. This Baubo presents us with
one simple chaotic diagram of an outrageously manipulable female identity.
The doubling and interchangeability of mouth engenders a creature in
whom sex is cancelled out by sound and sound is cancelled out by sex. This
seems a perfect answer to all the questions raised and dangers posed by the
confusing and embarrassing continuity of female nature. Baubo’s mouths
appropriate each other.
Cultural historians disagree on the meaning of these statues. They have
no certain information on the gender or intention or state of mind of the
people who made them. We can only guess at their purpose as objects or
their mood as works of art. Personally I find them as ugly and confusing
and almost funny as Playboy magazine in its current predilection for
placing centrefold photographs of naked women side by side with long
intensely empathetic articles about high profile feminists. This is more than
an oxymoron. There is a death of meaning in the collocation of such
falsehoods – each of them, the centrefold naked woman and the feminist, a
social construct purchased and marketed by Playboy magazine to facilitate
that fantasy of masculine virtue that the ancient Greeks called sophrosyne
and Freud renamed repression.
In considering the question, how do our presumptions about gender affect
the way we hear sounds? I have cast my net rather wide and have mingled
evidence from different periods of time and different forms of cultural
expression – in a way that critics of such methods like to dismiss as
ethnographic naïveté. I think there is a place for naïveté in ethnography, at
the very least as an irritant. Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I
force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think
I know. It is surprising what you learn that way. Some of the words turn out
to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound
can make you ask questions you wouldn’t otherwise ask. Lately I have
begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept
of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to
most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if
there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another
notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than
one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human
essence than self.

Notes
1 Physiognomics, 807a.
2 Physiognomics, 813a. On kinaidos see Aiskhines 1.131 and 2.99; Sir K.J. Dover, Greek
Homosexuality (Oxford, 1975), 17, 75; M.W. Gleason, “The Semiotics of Gender:
Physiognomics and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.,” in F. Zeitlin et al., eds., Before
Sexuality (Princeton, 1990), 401. I am indebted to Maud Gleason also for allowing me to
preview a chapter (“The Role of the Voice in the Maintenance of Gender Boundaries”) of her
book on self-presentation in the Second Sophistic, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation
in Ancient Rome (Princeton, 1994).
3 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 787b–788.
4 Oribasios, 6; Gleason, Making Men, 12.
5 A. Raphael, The Observer, October 7, 1979,
6 S. Rogers in S. Ardener, Women and Space (London, 1981), 59.
7 T. Howe, “The Origin and Function of the Gorgon Head,” American Journal of Archaeology
vol. 58 (1954): 209; J-P Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, 1982), 117.
8 On Iambe, see M. Olender, “Aspects of Baubo: Ancient Texts and Contexts,” in Zeitlin, 85–90
and references.
9 M.D. Luhan, Intimate Memoirs (New York, 1935), 324.
10 E. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York, 1964), 118.
11 F. Lobel and D.L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955), fr. 30.
12 S. Eitrem, Beitrage zur griechischen Religionsgeschichte III (Kristiana, 1919), 44–53,
assembles the pertinent texts.
13 E. Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris and Heidelberg, 1907), 698.
14 L. Gernet, Les Grecs sans miracle (Paris, 1983), 248 and n8.
15 So Gernet (1983), 249-250 following H. Ehrlich, Zur indogermanischen Sprachgeschichte
(Konigsberg, 1910), 48.
16 Letter to E. Silberstein cited by P. Grosskurth, “Review of R.W. Clarke, Freud, The Man And
The Cause,” TLS, August 8, 1980, 889.
17 H. North, Sophrosyne (Ithaca, 1966); see especially 1, 22, 37, 59, 206.
18 E.g., Sophokles, Ajax, 586.
19 Iamblichos, Life of Pythagoras, 31.194.
20 Cited by Aristotle, Politics,1.1260a30.
21 Life of Solon, 21 = Moralia, 65b.
22 Ibid.,12.5 and 21.4. I learn from Marilyn Katz that there is serious contemporary debate about
Jewish women praying aloud (i.e. reading from the Torah) at the Western Wall in Jerusalem:
“The principal objection that I have heard has to do with the men’s enforced exposure to kol
ishah (female voice) from which they are normally expected to be protected, for a vast array of
reasons articulated by rabbis in the Talmud and elsewhere, including sexual temptation.”
23 Politics, 1253a.
24 This anecdote formed part of a lecture Bell delivered to the Social Science Association, Boston,
December 1871.
25 Freud and Breuer, Case Studies on Hysteria, J. Strachey, trans. (New York, 1966).
26 “We found that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared
when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was
provoked and … when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and
had put the affect into words.” Freud goes on to say that the psychotherapeutic method works
“by allowing strangulated affect to find a way out through speech” (Ibid., 6, 253).
27 Life of Pythagoras, 7 = Moralia, 142d; Gleason, Making Men, 65.
28 Aristotle, History of Animals, 581a31-b5; Suidas s.v. Diagnomon; Gleason, Making Men, 53; A.
Hanson and D. Armstrong, “The Virgin’s Neck and Voice: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 245 and
Other Texts,” Bulletin of the Institute Of Classical Studies vol. 97 (1986), 97–100; Hanson, “The
Medical Writers’ Woman,” in Zeitlin, 328–29 and references.
29 On Talkativeness, 7 = Moralia, 507b–d.
30 Ibid., 7 = Moralia, 505a.
31 Ibid., 17 = Moralia, 511b6–10.
32 The logic of the representation has obviously to do with male observation of the mysteriously
unfailing moistures of female physiology and also with a prevailing ancient medical conception
of the female uterus as an upside down jar. See A. Carson, “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman
As Dirt in Ancient Society,” Zeitlin, 135–70; Hanson, “The Medical Writers’ Woman,” 325–27;
G. Sissa, Greek Virginity, A. Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 125–57.
33 Hippokrates, Diseases of Women, 2.137, 8.310.5 (Littré); Galen, On The Usefulness of the Parts,
15.3; Hanson, “The Medical Writers’ Woman,” 321–29; Olender, 104–5; Sissa, 5, 53–66, 70,
166–68.
34 Galen, On Generation, 15.2-3; Hanson, “The Medical Writer’s Woman,” 328.
35 Soranos, Gynaikeia, 1.4.22; Gleason, Making Men, 122.
36 Aiskhylos, Agamemnon, 244; Hanson, “The Medical Writers’ Woman,” 329–32; Hanson and
Armstrong.
37 Soranos, Gynaikeia, 1.44; Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, 4.3.1.9–11 (Ilberg); Hanson, “The
Medical Writers’ Woman,” 315, 321–22.
38 Hesiod, Theogony, 280–81; R. Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis (New York, 1978), 120.
39 “The Greek evidence points most conspicuously to the absurdity and buffoonery of the whole
affair: there is a conscious descent to the lower classes and the lower parts of the anatomy …”:
Burkert, Greek Religion, J. Raffan, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1985), 105.
40 Euripides, Bakkhai; M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris,
1979), 184–86; Zeitlin, “Cultic Models of the Female,” Arethusa vol. 15 (1982), 146–53.
41 On the Anthesteria see H.W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London, 1977), 107–113;
Burkert, Greek Religion, 239.
42 See e.g. M.K. Adler, Sex Differences in Human Speech (Hamburg, 1978); H. Cixous,
“Castration or Decapitation?” Signs vol. 7 (1981): 27–39; M. Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1991), especially 6–84; L. Irigaray, Sexes et genres à travers les langues (Paris,
1990); C. Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking (Rowley, Mass., 1981); R. Lakoff, Language
and Woman’s Place (New York, 1975); E. Sapir, Selected Writings on Language, Culture and
Personality (Berkeley, 1949); D. Spender, Man Made Language (London, 1985).
43 See also Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality and the Feminine in Greek Drama,”
Representations vol. 11 (1985), on the feminization of the male in Greek tragedy.
44 Freud and Breuer, Case Studies on Hysteria, 5–17, 29.
45 Ibid., 30.
46 Ibid., 40n1.
47 P. Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (New York, 1988), 67.
48 Olender, “Aspects of Baubo” and plates.
49 H. Diels made the identification in “Arcana cerealia,” 3–14, in Miscellanea di archeologia,
storia e filologia dedicata al Professore A. Salinas (Palermo, 1907); on Baubo see further A.N.
Athanassakis, “Music and ritual in primitive Eleusis,” Platon 28 (1976): 86–105; Burkert, Greek
Religion, 368; G. Devereux, Baubo: La vulve mythique (Paris, 1983); Graf, Eleusis und die
orphische Dichtung Athens in vorhellenistischer Zeit (Berlin, 1974), 169, 171; C.A. Lobeck,
Aglaophamus sive de Theologiae Mysticae Graecorum Causis, 3 vols. (Konigsberg, 1829);
Olender, “Aspects of Baubo.”
50 Olender, “Aspects of Baubo,” suggests another explanation, associated with nursing an infant:
97–99 and references.
51 Graf, Eleusis, 169, 195; Olender, “Aspects of Baubo,” 93–95.
52 On The Virtue of Women, 5.9 = Moralia, 532f.

* From Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, and God (New York: New Directions, 1995), incorporating
section titles from the version published in Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 3 (Fall
1994): 24–31. Used by permission of the publisher.
 8
All Sound Is Queer
Drew Daniel

A scholar of early modern English literature and culture, Drew Daniel is also one half of the
electronic music duo Matmos, which formed in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. In Matmos,
Daniel and his partner M.C. Schmidt create electronic pop using the strategies of musique
concrète, building tracks from the sampled sounds of liposuction surgery, amplified crayfish
nerve tissue, washing machines, and various everyday objects. The duo has collaborated with
Björk, Terry Riley, Marina Abramovic, Daria Martin, Zeena Parkins, and others. Matmos’ 2006
record The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast consists of ten tracks, each dedicated to a
prominent gay or lesbian figure. In this essay, however, Daniel argues that no musical genre,
song, or track can be adequately termed “queer,” and that what is “queer” is not music but
“the sound of the world” its inhuman alterity.

Three queers walk into a bar. The bar is The Eagle, a leather bar on the
fringe of what used to be Manhattan’s meatpacking district, now the site of
yet more luxury condos for the hedge fund elite. It’s Friday night on “Black
Party” weekend, a circuit party for the muscle-and-amphetamines set.
Queer A is transgender, never goes to gay bars, nervous as they obviously
don’t fit in, but giddy and curious, happy to encounter the sheer exoticism
of this over the top macho environment. Queer B, in tweeds, is here under
duress, actively disliking the bearded, shirtless, beerswilling demographic.
Queer C is me, not hairy enough to be a bear, nor muscular enough to be a
gym queen, but down with sleazy cruising. Waiting to check our coats, we
all hear the same song: Lil’ Louis’ “French Kiss,” a House track from 1989
that syncs a dramatic tempo drop to a female orgasm that grinds downwards
to a brain-erasing petite mort of pure pleasure and then, basking in the
afterglow, ramps back up to speed again. It’s the sort of “classic” that you
can’t not know if you’re a faggot of a certain age. Its presence here is no
accident. This must be the place. They’re playing our song.
Identitarian gay pride based musical discourse would fasten upon this
moment as an example of the way that sexuality and music intertwine to
make community and belonging possible, and it would afford a political
pay-off to the powerfully binding force of such emotional attachments.
Subcultures can “adopt” mainstream artists or underground anthems and
love them with a fanaticism that supposedly transubstantiates fandom into a
kind of passionately vicarious self-expression, creating human connections
across networks mediated by commodities like recordings. It’s an often-told
story, from opera queens loving Maria Callas to showtune queens loving
Judy Garland to 1980s pop fans loving Madonna to baby dykes loving
Bikini Kill to the countless queer fans of the present moment being told to
find—or perhaps even finding—ratification in episodes of Glee or YouTube
clips of Lady Gaga. Pop music approaches its listeners with The Velvet
Underground’s promise in mind: “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” Buying into this
fantasy, we are asked to see and hear ourselves within the scenarios and
implied identities that “our” music affords: shelter from misunderstanding,
inclusion in a tribe, recognition, affirmation. Given the actively
homophobic, or merely drab and exploitive, environment in which so many
queers live and work and struggle alongside everybody else, it’s no surprise
that there are plenty of people eager to invest in such deeply pleasurable
virtual acts of communion. For better and for worse, the shared experience
of pop music can create a “we” within which to party, cruise, hook up, let
off steam, organize, network, protect, include. Or at least it is supposed to
do that.
But a funny thing happened as we waited in line to check our coats:
friction. The experience of being met at the door by Lil’ Louis was meant to
be welcoming, the first familiar caress of a night of debauchery, a way to
get everyone to come together. It didn’t click. It didn’t bring A, B, and C
together as “gay men” or as “queers.” We weren’t united. Feeling caught
out there by cliche as I enjoyed a guilty pleasure, I was struck by the jarring
distance between the female orgasm of the song and the hypermacho setting
in which it played. Was it here to remind us that we were supposed to be
men, or to perfume the shame of an imagined inward femininity that
everyone’s muscled and tattooed bodies were meant to disavow? Not
worrying about such things, A just chuckled at the song’s playedoutness.
Straight-up offended, B voiced his hatred of House music as the de facto
genre that gay men are simply assumed to enjoy. What we shared then as
three queers hearing a House anthem in a safe space was … nothing. The
implied community supposedly generated at the crossing of queerness and
music is contentious and perhaps illusory, and only ever happens as a
virtual force field of antagonisms between pleasure and boredom,
familiarity and surprise, inclusion and exclusion.
At its worst and most alienating, the experience of music generates not
belonging, not identity, not community, but an oppressive experience that
another “Lil’ Louis,” French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, termed
“hailing.”1 His oft-cited example is the cop on the street who calls out:
“Hey you!” In so doing, our identities are conferred upon us and reinforced,
kept legible, open to being offered for inspection to the relevant authorities.
Whether we are eagerly customizing our Facebook profile or waiting in the
queue for a passport, we are all good subjects in the capitalist subject-
machine. Like the policeman calling us out on the street, the presentation of
House music in gay bars performs a similar function of social subjection:
Hey you! You are this kind of person! This is your music! The obligation to
“Enjoy!” is the ceaseless imperative of the culture industry and its
subcultural variants. There are all sorts of places to go and people to be, but
so long as one is not free not to be “someone,” there is really nowhere else
to go, and no one worth being.
Identity is normative: you are a this, I am a that. The identity politics of
the 1990s in particular were about claiming visibility, becoming
identifiable, standing up and being counted, being recognized by implicit
watchers, overseers and media outlets. Above all, seeing and being seen is
politics as usual. Which is why the bagging and tagging of identities on
behalf of a celebration of difference is a dead end. Celebrating gay and
lesbian difference offers no real alternative to a dominant neoliberal
capitalist democratic culture that is only too happy to reinforce, include and
cater to them all as a dutiful rainbow coalition of subject-consumers. Which
is what makes hearing sound, rather than being hailed by music, so
powerfully odd and so potentially “queer.”
By contrast to vision, sound queers identity and in the process offers a
way out of the hailing game. It does so by being an involuntary solvent of
the self. As everyone knows, you cannot close your ears. Going further than
most, Jacques Lacan declares that we cannot even fantasize an alternative:
“In the field of the unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be
closed.”2 The promiscuous openness of the ear, a hole that takes all comers,
means that we as living systems are open to and invaded by the world.
Sound queers the self/world boundary, all day, every day. It blurs the edges
of any self that the subject-machine cares to hail; even in the midst of “Hey
you, here’s your House music,” there are other noises afoot, other sounds
playing, other ways to become something more or less than one more
obedient minority subject.
Which is why talk about gays and lesbians in music ought to
productively shift towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent
and a solvent of the political experience of antagonism encountered when
hailing fails and the promise of gay community peters out. Sound—not
music but sound—can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available
maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound might help us echolocate
the edges of subjection and encounter everything that stands outside the
hailing process.

The sound of the world

All sound is queer. The “all” means: any, and each, and their endless
summation, the sound of the world. To hear this sound is to become
queered. This is the lesson we are taught in “The House of Sounds,” a short
story written by West Indian pulp author M.P. Shiel in the 1920s. Here is its
opening paragraph:

A good many years ago, when a young man, a student in Paris, I knew the great Carot, and
witnessed by his side many of those cases of mind-malady, in the analysis of which he was such
a master. I remember one little maid of the Marais who, until the age of nine, did not differ from
her playmates; but one night, lying abed, she whispered into her mother’s ear: “Mama, can you
not hear the sound of the world?” It appears that her geography had just taught her that our globe
reels with an enormous velocity on an orbit about the sun; and this sound of the world of hers
was merely a murmur in the ear, heard in the silence of the night. Within six months, she was as
mad as a March-hare.3

A queer story, this. For what is this openness to the tune and tone of
experience, a twist inspiring horror and confusion in the bystanders who
represent the productive adult world, if not a kind of audio-orientation, a
sonosexuality? To hear “too much,” to hear what is “too quiet,” to claim to
hear what we all know is not there to be heard, is to be cut off from the
human community. And yet that occurs not as a flight from the world, but
as a flight into the world, a tunneling into the telluric grounding of the
ultimate Earth, the subtone of planetary hum. Heard in this way, Shiel’s
sound of the world seems somehow both entirely everyday and yet
inhuman, dangerous, seductive and alien.
We can hear the unacknowledged “sound of the world” as many things.
Perhaps it is the grinding daily rhythm of alienated labor in the streets and
the factories and the casual temporary contracts of the quasi-employed, the
ongoing hum and hiss of capital that the prevailing “distribution of the
sensible”—to use the formulation of Jacques Rancière—encourages us to
tune out and ignore.4 Now, after the bubble and the crash, do we even know
what work sounds like?
If music has served to distract us from work, it has also tried to help us
hear the sound of work in a new way. It’s rarely quitting time for the
musical citation of labor: the ship engine sequence in Fred Astaire’s 1937
film Shall We Dance offers a heavily swung and highly influential fantasy
of obedience, while the metallurgical hammering of Kollaps-era
Einsturzende Neubauten (1981) brings the Sturm und Drang; Annie
Gosfield’s ensemble work for industrial materials Flying Sparks And Heavy
Machinery (1999) zooms in upon the material space of work itself; while
the rhythmic labors of the workers in the factory scenes in Björk’s music for
Lars von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer In The Dark are made critically
complicit in the musical escape fantasy of job-as-song/song-as-job.
Working the other side of the street, the all-singing, all-dancing workforce
of the Brighton-to-Broadway musical theatre franchise Stomp! grin while
they grind, sweeping up ad nauseam for weary tourists. Work is ongoing,
all-consuming, yet—mostly—outside the range of what shows up for us as
a sound worth hearing. Work is that which we know exists and which
supports us or eludes us endlessly, but which we either silence and disavow
utterly, or render quaint by harvesting it as a compositional resource.
But then again, “the sound of the world” might also be the sound of sex.
The question of how sexuality can be directly captured as sound is fraught
with the basic problem of where one would delimit the boundaries of such
an elastic term in the first place. Is there a queer pitch to be heard in the
synthesized blurs of Coil, in the tangy alternate tunings of Lou Harrison or
Harry Partch? Is there a sexuality to the care with which Joe Meek miked
his vocalists, or the way John Cage plucked the needles of a cactus? Or the
cries and moans of aktionist Noise performer Sudden Infant? Or does real
sex have to be involved? And what would make sex finally “real,” anyway?
Listening to John Duncan’s infamous “Blind Date,” an audio document of
an act of necrophilia supposedly committed in Mexico in 1980 and released
on the Pleasure-Escape cassette in 1984, offers a usefully extreme case in
point: one cannot co-sign or verify anything other than the pressure of one’s
knowledge about its context onto the signal in question. Is this what
necrophilia sounds like? Or is it the sound of someone rummaging in a pi le
of clothing and having a good laugh at the listener’s expense? On the other
end of the vérité spectrum, the falsification of live, consensual acts of carnal
pleasure is an instantly familiar cliche that sutures together the breakdowns
of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (1969), Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je
T’aime … Moi Non Plus” (1969), Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You
Baby” (1975), Throbbing Gristle’s “Catholic Sex” (1981), Venetian Snares
& Hecate’s Nymphomatriarch (2003) and countless other orgasm-as-audio
experiences.
Quite simply, the implicit epistemological doubt about the fakery of
vocally sounded orgasm troubles every moment of seemingly obvious sex-
sound with the shadow of artificiality. Inner and outer vibrations might
correspond, but they might not. The recording moment promises to pin its
object securely to our ears, but that very fidelity is haunted by the
transcendental failure of sound to verifiably align itself with the signs we
use to describe it. This possibility of betrayal, always open, never sure,
constitutes the queerness of the sonic—its failure to show up, reliably, as
“sex.” And that too undoes the theory that “the sound of the world” the little
girl hears is, really, the sound of sexuality erupting.
Let us take the speculative thrusts and thought experiments of “weird
fiction” and science fiction at their word. What if the capacity to hear the
sound of the world is neither the effect of the repression of work nor the
effect of the repression of sex, but something else: what if there really is
something there, that we are trained to ignore? Describing his attacks of
precognitive psychic ability, the narrator of George Eliot’s supernatural
novella The Lifted Veil chimes in: “It was like a preternaturally heightened
sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find
perfect stillness.”5 Shiel’s little girl or Eliot’s psychic medium are not
particular cases, mad as March hares, but people who have failed to accede
to the prevalent distribution of the sensible, and so attain and access the
sound of the world itself, potentially open to all. Who are we to disavow
what they hear?
What these examples from literature, film and music collectively
demonstrate is the territorializing force of human language and human
knowledge upon the raw, inhuman fact of sound as a vibrational force. To
hear the sound of the world as capital, to hear the sound of the world as
sexuality, even to hear the sound of the world as the a-signifying outburst of
the inhuman real, in each case presupposes a certain stance towards the
sonic, a conceptual a priori that leans into sound in search of a meaning, a
thrust, a tint, a fundamental frequency. It’s a neat little feedback loop, a
vicious circle: perception produces knowledge, and knowledge filters
perception. I can’t hear the world turning until I know that the world turns;
but once I know the world turns and claim to hear that fact, questions
emerge: am I hearing my mind, the world, or some misleading combination
of the two? To hear and “to know what one hears” are in a constant battle
for priority, and there is no possible neutrality here. The world makes a
sound as it turns or it does not. There is something to hear or there is not.
But how would we know? And how might an attachment to “knowing,”
to the secure grounding of verification and proof, itself constitute a way of
protecting ourselves from the queer surrender of simply listening to the
voices of those who testify to the theft of their labor or listening to the
voices of those who testify to the pleasures of their bodies or the queer
surrender of simply letting the vibrational forces of the world enter us?
These are queer stories not because they recount a momentary realization
that isolates a young person from their playmates with the stigma of
difference, and thus resemble the basic “coming out” narrative (though they
do resemble that). Rather, they are “queer” because all sound is queer, and
the fact of the sound of the world—its universality, not its difference—
ruptures the commonsense of normative, “straight” life. It is in the
recalcitrance of its universal and inhuman force that the insistent queerness
of sound might offer a resource for politics and a challenge to aesthetics.
Could a new art and a new politics instruct us to listen harder and better? To
stand at odds with the expectations that tend to govern this very magazine
and its readership, might that listening require us to listen more, yet,
perversely, to know less about what we encounter? Conversely, might
listening to and for this universally available yet elusive sound of the world
occasion a redistribution of the sensible, and, with it, a differently oriented
art practice and a keener sense of political hearing?

A collective screaming
Against this opportunity, there stands an army of hypermobile
counterforces, seductive cottonballs that stuff the ears and dull the edge of
what sound offers. They’re called words, and I, too, dislike them. Sound is a
given material plenum of vibration, an unbroken and continuous surge of
turbulent information and noise, always there; a cascade of neverending
waveforms, subject to change, part of a continuum of vibration that
precedes and exceeds the spectrum of audibility. Pulling in and out of
range, breaking and building bonds in the process, sound claims us. But as
we know and name, we tame the queerness of sound with nominalist labels
that partition and de-intensify the raw queerness of the sonic on behalf of
the empire of signs. Here sound turns against itself, the partitioned sound-
symbolsigns replacing and effacing the flow of the sonic.
But queer encounters with sound still happen. In the night, I am roused
from dreams by a collective screaming. The night is torn by cries that pour
forth from a permeable darkness. Where do these hidden choruses begin?
Who makes up the we in which I am now entangled against my will?
Pulling at the curtains to look out into the street, I see that the bare tree in
front of the hospital suddenly has leaves again. Adjusting, coming back to
consciousness, I look again and see that they are not leaves, but gigantic
crows, whose croaks and shrieks have stopped me from sleeping again. Of
course, it’s only the birds. The sound of the world shrinks back, tamed,
relocated within a bestiary, taxonomised, found.
My attempt to sleep is a withdrawal into a privacy of self-ownership in
violation of the porosity of the body to its world, a little nocturnal secession
from participation, which these masterless and inhuman ambassadors from
the plenitude of sound have summarily revoked. Without consent and in
despite of the economically and politically defined property rights that
would delineate what is my own and protect me from such invasion and
violation, I have been included in the sound of crows in the night, enlisted
into the murder in my midst. The indifference of animal being to my desires
puts us into a partnership without community. We have nothing in common,
yet here we are, together in the night, sounder and sounded.
It had to happen, both the release of sound and its capture into the sign.
As I see and recognise and know and name the mysterious screaming as
“crow sound,” I become a second Adam, asserting dominion over creation
through the sorrowful descent into language. But I wish to rewind to the
moment of confusion, the primordial chaos in which the sound is within me
and I am ignorant, in the dark, traversed by vibrations I cannot yet place,
cannot yet hear as the sound of crows; to a moment of knowledge to come,
which opens out a potentiality contained in Steve Goodman’s purloined
translation of Spinoza and Deleuze: “We do not yet know what a sonic body
can do.”6 What can be made portable from that moment on behalf of a
queer politics and a queer aesthetics of listening to and with the world?
When faced with the hailing call of “French Kiss” at The Eagle’s door,
could it be as simple as cracking open a window to let the crows in to
disrupt its House music and identity-politics- as-usual with a multi-species
“Parliament Of Fowls” of their own? Less bears, more birds?
I am not talking about a top-down form of charitably
anthropomorphizing solidarity sealed by my electing to speak for or with
crows, thus magnanimously broadening the scene of political representation
across the species barrier. The crows do not seek the vote, nor have they
asked if I care to hear their screams, nor do I acquire some honorific new
status as their insomniac eavesdropper. They too live within the city, and
their sounds in the night obnoxiously insist upon their presence, without
regard, referendum or respite. ln the spirit of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter:
A Political Ecology Of Things, I have in mind a chastening encounter with
the minimal political agency of the crows as my neighbors along an ever
expanding rollcall of vital materialist presence with in the city. The sonic
disruption of crow-sound can reshuffle who appears within that community,
but it can also fail to have any other effect whatsoever beyond its own
dissemination into space. Thus its virulent queerness.
We can hear this sound of non-communication and purposelessness in an
ironic moment of failed animal mimicry: the climax of Josef von
Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel, when Emil Jannings as Professor
Immanuel Rath reaches his rock bottom of degradation and madness, and,
now turned clown, is pressed into service as a human sound effect by his
mocking employers. Expected to go “cock-a-doodle doo” at a precise point
in a skit put on for his former colleagues, Rath/Jannings erupts instead with
a hideously inhuman gargle, a grating outburst that leaps past any particular
emotion and achieves a kind of ur-sound of pure affective charge. To be
sure, one could claim that this sound above all is saturated with plot
significance: it is the character-driven expression of his impotent rage at
being cuckolded by Lola (Marlene Dietrich). But if we hear it as raw sound
intruding into the texture of the film, this noise manifests a pure sonic
expression that goes beyond even the timbre/music borderline phenomena
that Roland Barthes termed “the grain of the voice.”7
Barthes, alert to the point of contact between music and language, sought
to redefine what would count as the “musical object” in the first place—and
in his analysis of operatic voices he coined the distinction between “pheno-
song” and “geno-song” to capture minute shades of distinction in musical
performances. But to capture the point at which Emil Jannings’ throat
queerly opens onto the ragged terrain of something that isn’t culturally
specific or even species-specific, we shall have to abandon music in favor
of the sonic as such. Instead of the vowels and phonemes of this or that
language, when we hear Jannings’s human bird call we hear something
beyond emotion, language and humanity: the material sound of air
ferociously barked out of a tube of quivering flesh.
Of course, animal practices of soundmaking are not in any sense
purposeless: signals warn of the approach of predators, announce one’s
presence for mating purposes, rebound upon space as part of an
echolocation system, mimic the sound of a more successful organism, and
so on. Living systems that eat, mate and predate upon others are hardly
indifferent. Even a cursory listen to the sounds of vultures feeding on a dead
zebra captured on Chris Watson’s Outside the Circle of Fire (1998) or the
sounds of Weddell seal mothers nurturing their pups in Douglas Quin’s
Antarctica (1998) will convey the intentionality of animal soundmaking on
its own intimate terms. But it is even here that “the sonic” as a manifold
detaches from its causal connections to sources in intentional performances
from interested parties, human, animal or otherwise. The sound of the world
can be a truck passing by, a parade of drunken frat boys, tree branches
twisting in the wind, the settling of leaves upon themselves, the crush of
contrary air currents within the clouds; or it can be the nameless, colorless,
ambient drone of a nonspecific continuum of animate and inanimate matter
expressing nothing but its own being. Sound stands aside from the purposes
and aims that occasion its production. It is indifferent, universal and queer.
Going further, practices of recording, archiving and storage, in severing
that immanent occasion from its audio outcome, render everything
potentially “acousmatic,” autonomous, adrift. You only need to break the
linguistic bond of referentiality that ties source to waveform. Consider how
the Dalmatian fishing village immortalized in Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien
(1970), or the desert insect preserved within Hildegard Westerkamp’s
Cricket Voice (1987) would sound if they were robbed of their respective
signifiers of “village” and “insect,” and were instead set free to be
themselves prior to identification, prior to their entirely justified
canonisation as enduring classics of sound art annexed to an ecology of
preservation.
Queerness abides in the refusal to preserve, in the willingness to enter the
space of ruinous, risky anonymity, to let sound pull us with it into the black
hole of an experience that is not yet stable. No fixed coordinates to locate us
in geopolitical space, no identifiable genus and species left to taxonomize.
Where the labels come off and the designation of particularity ends and the
sound of the world subsumes and dissolves, the queer universality of sound
makes itself available to thought, not as some ineffable audio-mysticism,
but as the way we already hear, all day and all night long.
Purposeless indifference to production would then be one of the
hallmarks of the queerness of the sonic in itself, an orthogonal digression
from intentionality and subjectivity that Alain Badiou calls, in the second of
his “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,” “the impersonal production of a
truth that is addressed to everyone.”8 At once micro and macro, the sound
of the world turning resonates and resounds whether you are listening or
not, and it is addressed to all. A vibrational ontology manifests the
oscillations and Lucretian swerves of material being, whether you have ears
to hear it or not. You don’t need to know what you are hearing to be moved,
even changed, by what you hear. Sometimes, this purposelessness emerges
for someone who detects its very transience and is changed by the sheer fact
of passage. In Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s Convalescent attests to this as sound
momentarily upstages self: “For me—how could there be something outside
me? There is no outside! But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is
that we forget! … In every Instant being begins; round every Here rolls the
ball. There. The middle is everywhere.”9
Sound intrudes upon us with the fact of the world, an intrusion that
affords us the possibility of forgetting our “me-ist” attachments to our
subjective particularity and affiliation and instead forces us to register the
everywhere of an ongoing being, an outside where we thought there was no
outside. Yet it is this recognition of an outside that, as it becomes
transmissible and shareable, might also constitute our human community as
precisely the queer indifference of having nothing in common.
Sound, the confusing eruption of the sonic into our life, can reinforce our
privacy, our alone-ness. But it is also shared and shareable, and thus makes
possible a certain kind of collectivity, or better, a perceptual community that
we share by remaining perpetually open to the world beyond that
community. Sound constitutes a common “pluriverse” for its auditory
recipients, who partition and co-create that world through sonic practices of
spoken language and music making. Yet the capacity of sound to exceed the
human, in its ongoing expansion of frequencies above and below the human
thresholds of 20 to 20,000 Hz, also manifests a purposeless surplus, a
superabundance, an inhuman exteriority that precedes that world and resists
capture in the terms set by human hearing. Heard beyond its own bounds,
this pervasive and non-specific sound of the world signals a grounding
material indifference that potentially breaks mind-dependent
phenomenological scenarios upon a hard kernel of the real. Thus,
community is both the positive assemblage of partitionings made within the
sound-plenum by the total set of actors included within it (human beings,
citizens, slaves, immigrants, corporate advertising, sound art), and a
nihilistic exposure to a sonic remainder that is indifferent to those partitions,
folds and forms (crows, planets, magnetic resonance, VLF interference
generated by weather phenomena, and, yes, that old standby of
philosophical smalltalk, the tree in the forest that falls with no one to hear
it).
Having reached the widest possible theoretical bandwidth and the lowest
common denominator in a single bound, let’s return to the gay bar in which
Lil’ Louis’ “French Kiss” plays on. How might a capacity to listen out for
the sound of the world obtain here? Is there something not just reassuringly
gay but indifferently queer about this overcoded anthem? Must we abandon
the pleasurable familiarity of this dancefloor chestnut in order to hear the
sound of the world that supposedly lies beyond or behind it? The risk of
arguments such as the one I have been pursuing is that it will be
misunderstood as a transcendental declaration of a somewhere else and a
something else always better than the limited and oppressive world of
music and the cultures of human knowledge that contain, capture and
domesticate the raw queerness of sound. Like all transcendental arguments,
this can have the effect of soiling and rejecting what we have all around us
in favor of an “elsewhere,” a heavenly domain of purity, which we cannot
really access, except in traumatic and exciting flashes of insight.
But music too is part of the sound of the world. Human making and
human knowing fall within the open, endlessly plural totality of the world,
and it too can show up as queer for us, queer in its articulation of material
being, in its fusion of what is human with what merely is. There is, then, a
latent inhumanity within even the human, which is not the fact of our moral
failing but the fact of our sheer materiality, our continuity with the world
we use and change. As Jane Bennett points out in Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things with reference to our carbon composition, “we
are walking, talking minerals.”10 That is what links the grinding tectonic
plates that generate the sound of the world for M.P. Shiel’s little girl with
the grain of the voice in Emil Jannings’ bird-croak with the grain of the
voice in the orgasmic moans of Shawn Christopher, the vocalist on “French
Kiss.” Even her histrionic and theatrical cries of passion are just so much
air shoved through a tube of meat within the world, and the magical
synchronization of her moans and sighs with the ramping down and
ramping up of the tempo of the drum machine embodies a kind of synthetic
silicon/flesh interface that dissolves their boundaries. Beyond sexual
difference, the song registers an even deeper ontological continuum
between stomping drum machine and climaxing human being, suggesting
that the electrons pulsing through circuitry in the drum machine and the
neurons firing in the ganglia of Shawn Christopher’s brain are somehow the
same, deep down, in their essential physical reality as electromagnetic
charge. To take up a buzzword much bandied about within recent
metaphysics in the wake of Bruno Latour and Graham Harman, humans and
machines are all located within a “flat ontology,” a continuum of being that
levels distinctions of what is more or less important, more or less
actualized, by advocating for what Levi Bryant terms “the democracy of
objects” within a “pluriverse” of worlds.11
Sound is queer because this continuum of being is, in its very
indifference to human agendas of valuation, already queer. All sound is
queer because the world itself is queer. The totality of vibrational force is
not a deep secret hiding at the margins but, exactly, a totality that includes
everything we as humans do. Accordingly, the choice between listening to
Lil’ Louis or “the sound of the world” is, at the very least, a false one. Here
history has the last laugh. “Club Lonely,” the follow up single to “French
Kiss,” is credited not to Lil’ Louis, but to Lil’ Louis & The World.

Notes
1 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971).
2 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., 1998), 195.
3 M.P. Shiel, “The House of Sounds,” in The House of Sounds and Others, ed. S.T. Joshi (New
York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), 53.
4 Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics,” in The Politics of
Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 19.
5 George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (Hoboken: Melville House, 2007), 31.
6 Steve Goodman, “Unsound—The (Sub)Politics of Frequency,” Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect,
and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 191.
 7 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London:
Fontana, 1977), 181.
8 Alain Badiou, “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,” Lacanian Ink 22 (2003): 103–19.
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Convalescent,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175.
10 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 2009), 11.
11 See Graham Harman, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and
Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 207; and Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press/Open Humanities Press, 2011).

* From The Wire 333 (November 2011): 42–46. Used by permission of the author.
 9
The Quiet of Blackness: Miles Davis and John
Coltrane
Kevin Quashie

In the struggle against oppression and discrimination, African-American culture has often
celebrated forms of public resistance and defiance. “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,”
sang James Brown; and Public Enemy exhorted its black audience to “Bring the Noise!”
Without denying the importance of these forms of public resistance, cultural theorist Kevin
Quashie worries that the prevalence of this conception of blackness has a cost, preventing us
from perceiving black humanity. Quashie focuses on a very different conception of blackness
that he terms “quiet.” Distinct from “silence,” “quiet” points to a capacious and deep
inwardness, the affirmation and recognition of which is crucial to the struggle for racial justice
and the understanding of black cultural production. Quashie’s 2012 book The Sovereignty of
Quiet develops this notion through readings of literary texts by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander and others. Here, he turns his attention to music,
examining the work of Miles Davis and John Coltrane—not their personalities or public
personae, but “the black sonic subjectivity/possibility in their work.”

The idea of quiet

I was looking for refuge in quiet, a wilderness of being. I was looking for
the sovereignty I knew was mine, humanly mine, a sovereignty that was not
only about control and consciousness but something more exquisite and
threatening too. It, this sovereignty, was as incommensurate as was my
interior.
This is the idea that animated writing about quiet as a way to think about
black culture, as a notion that might help us undo the tendency to read
blackness through the terms of publicness. In The Sovereignty of Quiet:
Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, I try to make the case for quiet as a
concept that could surpass the common ways we think of blackness as
dramatic, expressive, or loud.1 The problem with these qualities is not that
they are wrong, per se, but that they establish an equivalence between
blackness and resistance. This equivalence is widespread and dominant in
our collective imaginations, nearly totalitarian in how unconsciously it is
applied. And as an uncritical frame for engaging black culture, resistance
obscures the capacity to notice other features, for example interiority. So
when one looks at the iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the
medal ceremony of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, both with gloved fists
in the air, one misses that their heads are bowed as well as what the bowed
head might mean conceptually. For me, it is interiority that is signaled in the
photographs from that moment: that I notice the supremacy of Smith and
Carlos’ humanity, on display but not fully rendered by display. A quiet, a
capaciousness and wildness of being; wonder and trembling at what is
unknown and unknowable.
So I use this moment, this quiet that is embedded in Smith and Carlos’
profoundly public and political moment, to try to think about interiority as a
way to reframe how we read black culture. And the idea of quiet here is not
about behavior or (in)action, but is instead a metaphor for the inner life.
Interiority is hard to describe, though it is generically the quality of being
inward. This notion of inwardness is apt for thinking about “life and
creativity beyond the public face of stereotype and limited imagination,” all
the chaotic and creative energies that shape one’s human self, that
expansive range of feelings and desires and capacities that are beyond one’s
control but that alight everything.2 And to avoid the conflation of the
interior with what is private or nonsocial, it is important to make clear that
interiority is expressive—that what is of one’s interior informs the social
world and also is impacted by the social, though sociality does not
overdetermine the interior. The interior has an indescribable integrity—
maybe even integrities—a sovereignty of its own.
Quiet, then, is the term I use to conceptualize interiority as well as the
expressive capacity of the interior. In this way, quiet is not a synonym for
silence, since the expressiveness of quiet is not about withholding or delay
or performativity. That is, the expressiveness of silence is often dependent
on an audience for meaning, in awareness of or in reaction to an audience.
And even as there are other understandings of silence that are kin to my
thinking about quiet, I want to avoid the noisiness of silence’s connotations
especially in regard to thinking about blackness and expressivity.
The case for quiet is about (re)reading black culture, about aesthetics and
form, but it is also about ontology—I am trying to confront the anti-black
legacy of the modern and colonial imagination where black people are
figured as nonbeing. This figuring is consonant with the exclusion of
interiority as a feature of black humanity—or at least as a feature of how we
think and talk about and characterize blackness. Because, it must be said
over again: inside every black person is aliveness, the wildness of the
interior, this chaotic full-world of being that animates everything; of every
person who is black, is human being-ness, regardless of the enduring
afterlife of the idea of nonbeing.3

Black men and quiet

It is striking that I start the thinking on quiet with Smith and Carlos, two
black men in an iconic register, and that now I want to think about two
other iconic black men from the same decade: Miles Davis and John
Coltrane. What makes this striking is that the notion of quiet comes from
my study of black women’s work—from the ways in which many black
female artists and writers explore subjectivity beyond the idiom of
resistance, their investment in representing the capaciousness of black being
and in which I found solace and deep intelligence.4 Of course it is not
inconsistent to think about black maleness through an idea that comes out
of this studying, since the intelligence of black women’s thinking is of all of
us, black us.
The easy link to quiet might be to read the stage persona of Coltrane and
especially Davis, almost as a parallel to Smith and Carlos’ iconic moment.
But in doing this, I would be reducing quiet to performative embodiment, to
the idea of black mysteriousness or inscrutability that is so prevalent in
American (entertainment) culture. This idiom of inscrutability is of
blackness as a location of white negotiation, fascination, and transcendence.
The examples here are plentiful, of black femaleness as that which is exotic,
foreign, repulsive, exceptional, crazy, perhaps most centrally rendered in
the terrible story of Saartije (Sarah) Baartman and the idiom of the Venus
Hottentot, or, more relevant to jazz, of the ways we think of and want to
consume Nina Simone or Billie Holiday. This conceit is familiar, too, in
conceptualizations of black maleness, especially the idiom of cool and that
of the bad Negro, both of which coalesce in how we idealize the black jazz
man.5
The legacy of thinking about black male jazz-ness through cool and
through mystery is troubling, since it is consonant with the racist project.
The writer Toni Morrison offers a telling example in her long essay Playing
in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, a work that explores
how white American writers used blackness as a site for figuring humanity
exclusively. In the preface, Morrison narrates her encounter reading Marie
Cardinal’s autobiographical novel The Words to Say It where Cardinal
“document[s] her madness, her therapy, and the complicated process of
healing in language as exact and as evocative as possible in order to make
both her experience and her understanding of it accessible to a stranger.”6
As she reads this unusual book, Morrison wonders about the precise
moment when Cardinal knew she was in trouble: “What was the narrative
moment, the specular even spectacular scene that convinced her that she
was in danger of collapse?”7 Soon enough, Cardinal describes just this
moment, her first anxiety attack that happens during a Louis Armstrong
concert. The passage from Cardinal is stunning and perceptive, as she
writes about the moment: “The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up
together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to
one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so
absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the
nerves of those who followed it.” As the music’s texture expands, so does
the intensity of Cardinal’s being, the ecstatic confrontation “compressing
[her] lungs so the air could no longer enter them”: “Gripped by panic at the
idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd
howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.”8 Morrison is
captured by this moment, wonders just what Armstrong was playing that
night. And her wonderment is not only in regard to Cardinal’s precise
characterization of what music can do but also the fact that Cardinal’s sense
of being destroyed is couched in a way that showcases something familiar
about the use of blackness:
 Unbearable equilibrium and duration; nerve-wracking balance and permanence. These are
wonderful tropes for the illness that was breaking up Cardinal’s life. Would an Edith Piaf
concert or a Dvorak composition have had the same effect? Certainly either could have. What
solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to
Cardinal’s “possession” as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been for a
long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis
in literature not written by them.9

This astuteness from Morrison captures the historic way that blackness
functions as a sign of being for the other, that is, not a sign of black being
but of the site and place of an encounter for the white subject. Morrison’s
insight is appropriate for thinking about the semiotics of that sign—a black
man playing jazz—and the potency it holds seemingly for everyone but the
player himself. As scholar Francesca Royster writes in Sounding Like a No-
No: “The marketing of the black male performer has often favored an
aesthetic of cool: distanced, beyond being affected by others, exemplified
by Miles Davis, back turned away from the audience, and Savion Glover’s
unsmiling face as he does hip-hop soft shoe.”10 So it is vital to be clear that
this performative aesthetic is not the idiom of quiet I mean. This coolness is
more akin to being aware, even hyper-aware, of an audience and of being
watched. Surely the performer in that moment of cool-pose has an inner life
that might be read through performativity, but I am not interested in this.
Coolness, too, becomes a part of a mythos that is troubling in its
authorization of a certain kind of black masculinity, which is the case if one
thinks of Davis’ history with violence towards women.11
If quiet is about mystery, it is human mystery, what is incommensurate
about life and the social identities we are conscripted to live by. Indeed part
of the excellence of Farah Griffin’s enduringly important book on Billie
Holiday, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, is that Griffin recasts the idiom
of mysteriousness as a cloak against our misreadings of Holiday, a way to
return to this black woman the human right to be unknowable. (Part of this
recasting, is Griffin’s demand that we read Holiday’s work rather than only
reading the narrations of her life gone awry.) Similarly, I am not interested
in Davis himself, or Coltrane either—I am not attracted to their public
personas; I am interested in the black sonic subjectivity/possibility in their
work. I am interested in their quiet sound, the way in which their sound
practice points to something illegible, something interior, something
inconsistent with the construction of blackness as rendered in the horror of
white imagination, or with blackness as recuperative expressiveness that
takes on this horrible. What I want to consider is quiet as a register of
something else, a gesture toward the inner life and its meaningfulness to
thinking about the expressiveness in Davis’ and Coltrane’s work.

After much delay, Miles Davis

So far this essay has only touched on the edge of what its title promises, a
consideration of Miles Davis and John Coltrane through an idiom of quiet.
The delay is not accidental, since I wanted to try to set a context for the
reading that might expand the enduring discourses around these two artists.
In truth, I wanted to avoid display since display is so integral to the
meaning of race and the logics of racism. And even if this attempt at
avoidance was futile, it was important to enact delay.
It is In a Silent Way that seems most apt for exploring Miles Davis’ work
through the idea of quiet as an aesthetic. Released in 1969, In a Silent Way
is noted as an experimental album, a nod to rock music with its prominent
use of electric guitars. The album is a mix of atmospheric and rhythmic
ambience over the course of two compositions, one on each side of the
physical record. Its first track, “Shhh/Peaceful,” is eighteen minutes long
and though it is listed as two pieces, the album titles it as three sketches:
“Shhh,” “Peaceful,” and the reprisal of “Shhh,” each of nearly equal length.
“Shhh/Peaceful” opens with an organ’s deep strumming, a clarion note that,
rather than being staccato, is sustained, continuous, trembling sound. This
organ benediction is followed immediately by a hi-hat snare that is such a
staunch rhythm that it nearly predicts the structural sublimity of the “Theme
from Shaft.” It is this riff, a hi-hat steadiness and a two-tone bass beat that
will repeat throughout the full composition and that is resonant of Davis’
modal work on Kind of Blue, though here, on In a Silent Way, the music is
far more chaotic and not at all “heroic,” as Phil Freeman terms it.12
Freeman is right, since if one is listening through a modal aesthetic, one
expects the track to unfurl and then to swagger into something, something
bigger or shocking—especially for the bassline to run wild and take the rest
of the track with it. But that never happens. There is a little flourished
pattering of the bass in “Peaceful,” but all three sketches stay in the space of
the experiment. As Freeman writes,

If [Tony] Williams [on drums] had cut loose, even a little, “Shhh/Peaceful” would have been an
entirely different kind of music. The electric pianos and organ, rippling the air and dancing with
one another, would have seemed like they were actually going somewhere, instead of hovering,
cloudlike. Dave Holland’s basslines would have felt more active. But because (one must
assume) Miles had told Williams not to let the groove explode, the track never breaks free,
either. It shimmers in place, like a distant flickering light seen through a moonlit fog.13

I love Freeman’s characterization of this hovering quality since it

captures the ambient aesthetic on the album, the sense of something present
that is vital and moving but without the full rage of singular force and
rupture. Again, not heroic. And it is here that it is possible to think about
quiet, about the illegibility to be had in sound piled on sound, and repeated
over and over as a hovering sequence. Indeed if the track titles are any
insight, we are being reminded to go beneath the expressive register of
speaking and are being shushed in preparation for another kind of hearing.
I didn’t want to come to the album’s title so soon but it is singularly
instructive since it moves against the yearning for something dramatic.
What Davis is offering on In a Silent Way is the capacity for wandering—
for experiment—that is underneath the sound. If this reading is apt, then it
is the second composition, the three-part but doubly named “In a Silent
Way/It’s About That Time,” that provides the best structural evidence. Here,
the three tracks are more dissonant than those on side A where all three
sketches were of the same relative length and tempo. Not the case on side
B, where “In a Silent Way” and its reprisal are exquisite and extremely slow
ballads, each about four minutes long, which is in sharp contrast to the up-
tempo twelve minutes of “It’s About That Time.” The contrast is heightened
by the fact that both iterations of “In a Silent Way” begin with pensive
electric guitars played with big spaces between the moments of sound-
making (notable, too, is Davis’ trumpet playing that is particularly
mournful, stretched out and winding up the sonic scale); and that the
transition into and from the bouncy “It’s About That Time” is nonexistent,
just a sharp drop into its back-and-forth vibe. “It’s About That Time” is
almost a jam-session, and its title implies that the piece is a breakout from
underneath the weight of the rest of the album. In keeping with this idea of
breakout, Freeman notes the explosion of the drums about half way through
the sketch:

then, out of nowhere […] something happens. Catharsis arrives at last. It’s not some huge thing
[…]. But in light of all that’s come before, the thirty-plus minutes of slowly deepening trance,
one riff repeating over and over until that’s all the ear/brain even registers anymore […].
Williams actually plays the drums for forty-five seconds.14

Freeman concludes this passage with the assessment that “[d]espite all
the album’s other virtues, it’s that moment that makes In a Silent Way worth
hearing.”15 It is instructive to track his logic here, since he is right about the
rupture that happens on the drums though there are other ruptures before
this moment, including a striking bass departure three minutes earlier, one
that is dancing and rangy and that inspires a piano riff too—this moment
prefigures what Freeman names as the album’s catharsis. So, in some ways,
there isn’t one catharsis perhaps, but many, smaller ones.
And in the face of his claim that the album is worthwhile because of this
explosive moment, I wonder about the fact of the title, “in a silent way”: In
a silent way, as in a philosophy or orientation toward that which is of quiet,
another habitat of being, a practice of expressiveness rendered in another
idiom. I have always been compelled by the audacity that Davis’
experimental album, the work that announces a shift in genre—that displays
his trying on of transformation—is titled “in a silent way”; there is
intelligence in the fact that his experimental gesture is tagged with an
idiomatic name that can also be read as an instruction for listening. The
catharsis Freeman wants might well be the kind of dynamic expressiveness
or explosion that the tracks are not interested in offering. It might be hard to
think of Davis (his persona) and his music in this way, especially since at
times scholars compare Davis’ showmanship to James Brown, that
exemplar of black performativity and publicness.16 But here, on In a Silent
Way, it is not sonic bigness that is at stake; that is, even in the midst of an
experimental venture, the mode is emblematic of the title. And though my
own preferred term is quiet, I read Davis’ “silent” as a term that slides away
from publicness into something else, another habitat that is no less lively
(indeed—perhaps more alive because of its sovereignty), one that might not
be easy to recognize but that is there nonetheless. It is an album of the
silent, quiet wilderness.

To be supreme: John Coltrane

And perhaps this claim about Davis’ album would make more sense if we
think about John Coltrane, in general and then in regard to his iconic album
from the 1960s, A Love Supreme. Note, for example that the specter of cool
as a cloak that corrupts how we encounter black men—this compliment that
is terror—is not necessarily descriptive of Coltrane, whose habitat of
reserve is not a performative display of masculine authority and seduction,
but something else: It is of wonder, capaciousness, dreaming. Spirituality.
Coltrane’s biography and his articulations about being an artist remind us of
the pursuit that is aliveness, the intensity of wandering and of possibility,
the supremacy and beauty that is there in ordinary human existence. If
Coltrane’s art-making (and his living) is an ethos, as the Saint John Coltrane
Church determines that it is, then its mantra might well be taken from
Erykah Badu’s song “Orange Moon,” which alternately hums “How good it
is/How good he is/How God he is.”17
Released in 1965, A Love Supreme is almost singular as a devotional
achievement: a spiritual sequence of four parts named “Acknowledgement,”
“Resolution,” “Pursuance/Psalm.” There is, too, the prayer poem included
in the liner notes and that is performed wordlessly by the instruments—for
example, the opening saxophone flourish on “Acknowledgement,” a call to
attention that is backgrounded by the piano, drums, gong, and timpani and
which mimics the “all praise” invocation of Coltrane’s note to the listener.
This literal performance of the word is Coltrane’s study of devotion, the
supremacy of and to be had in devotion. It is not just a display of surrender,
but surrender itself.18
In conceptualizing a notion of quiet, I use “surrender” to characterize the
capacity and ethic of black interiority. Here surrender is a term of
expressive action, which is how it signifies in religion—as a giving in or a
yielding to unknowable human depth, an act which requires faith but that is
also at once unsure.19 Surrender is the sonic subjectivity that is engaged on
A Love Supreme: Think, first of the cover animated by Bob Thiele’s striking
photograph of a pensive and determined Coltrane, an image of a black man
with his attention set on something not evident to the viewer. This
photograph is a profile, which is the emblematic form for the social
interpellation of black masculinity, though this profile seems to be in
motion; that is, the angle we see of the face is not completely flat (the head
is turned slightly forward so we see a little more than half of the face),
which creates dimension and movement, as does his gaze which is directed
off-the-page and that suggests that he is headed there, to somewhere. What
is signaled by the cover, then, is the capaciousness of deep engagement, the
surrendering to what is unknowable.20
The cover is another rendering of the album’s ethos, that quality of
devotion that is notable via the instruments on “Acknowledgement” and
through the other three tracks, though one could just say that nearly every
aspect of A Love Supreme idiomizes surrender. For example, the second
track is “Resolution,” which seems out of sync with the trajectory of
achievement (resolution, in the middle?) unless you read the word to mean
commitment, as in resolve, a synonym of devotion. This seven-minute track
begins with a bass interlude, a four-note simplicity that feels like rehearsal,
like trying out the scale, like dedication, followed by an explosive flourish
from Coltrane’s sax, ecstatic and tense to the point of screeching. As strong
as melody and modality is on this song, the variety of flourishes undermines
the simplicity of what it means to have resolve or to be resolved.
What follows on side B is “Pursuance,” a driving, percussive study that
begins with an extended drum solo and is akin to a racing heartbeat. The
fury of “Pursuance” seems to just stop, eight minutes in, with a reprisal of
the bass solo from the opening of “Resolution,” though the solo is nearly
three full minutes of slow melodic scaling. This extended wandering pulls
the listener back into re-hearing the previous eight minutes, an invitation to
reconsider what else might have been happening in the hot fury. And the
final track, “Psalm,” opens with grand shimmering cymbals, a mournful
sax, and sustained sounds that create circles and circles of echoes. This
track is nearly a vocalization of prayer, both the one that is in the liner notes
but also the “Our Father” prayer of the Bible. Here, too, the sax, working
like a singing voice, travels higher into tense screeches, more and more
ecstasy. That the album ends with prayer is in keeping with my argument
that prayer is a kind of quiet expressiveness which surpasses what is
conscious. So A Love Supreme’s pursuit of surrender and devotion—
remember, this is Coltrane’s gospel album, his album as gospel—is related
to how it works over and through the unspeakableness of the Word. And
even as the words of prayer are in the liner notes and are vocalized via the
instruments, the potency extends far beyond assumed precision of
language.21
The gospel of A Love Supreme echoes the capacious ethos articulated in
“The Thunder, Perfect Mind” from the Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels:

I was sent forth from the power,

and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
…
For I am the first and the last.
…
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
…
But I am she who exists in all fears
and strength in trembling.
…
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division.
…22

The specificity of those lines could well serve as an evocation of the sonic
subject of Coltrane’s album. Indeed the last four lines quoted above are
used as the epigraph to Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz, which makes
sense given how much Morrison’s novel reminds us that love, prayer, and
jazz are connected in practice or nature—all three have a reflective or
repetitive quality; all three are embedded in rhythm; all three rely on a sense
of faith.23 Most of all, love, jazz and prayer are about being on the
threshold, about surrender and falling, the agency of knowing that to be
alive is a wild and unsure thing—you pray or play or devote with ferocity,
and then there is silence, nothing, patience. And, as you wait, if you are
lucky, you realize that the fulfillment is not in what may come, but how you
became in the moment of praying, playing, loving, the literal remaking of
your subjectivity as you existed on your knees, a plea tumbling out to some
other who may not or will not answer.
Love, jazz, prayer—all three are systems where what is vital is not the
word, really, but the sound … and more so, the hunger and desire the sound
cannot name but reaches for all the while. This might be the way that jazz,
the musical form, and Jazz, the novel, overlap so seamlessly—the
capaciousness of it, as in expansive but also a sense of capacity, as in can
behold. This capaciousness is important to how we read and think of
blackness and of the work that is of black artists.
When I think about quiet and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, I can’t help but
think of the idea that in prayer, one speaks to a listener of one’s own
making. This practice of speaking to one’s imagined self is the intimacy of
prayer that also allows the self to travel, to become unfurled from being into
(another) being. If Coltrane’s prayer on A Love Supreme is a self-
transcendence, then it is similar to another iconic text from the 1960s,
James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, especially the letter Baldwin writes to
his fourteen-year-old nephew who is also named James.24 This letter is a
potent moment where we see Baldwin in prayerful study as much on behalf
of himself—and his own vulnerable fourteen-year-old self, who is the
subject of the second essay in the book—as he is on behalf of his nephew
… and as much as he is on behalf of every (black) person who is reading.
So, too, it is with John Coltrane’s sonic subjectivity on A Love Supreme,
where the invitation to surrender is made by one who is also the object of its
welcome.25 This is quiet—sublimely, supremely, sovereignly so.

Smith and Carlos, Davis and Coltrane—and Baldwin too: A black

boy dreaming
It was my looking, as a young boy, at the image of Tommie Smith and John
Carlos that set the early context for thinking about quiet, since in looking at
these two men, I saw awe and felt a yearning for intimacy that I couldn’t
fully name but that was vibrant nonetheless. They looked like grace to me,
and so years later, I wanted to figure out how to argue for an idea through
which their protest could be just that—grace. So, too, it was with Miles
Davis and John Coltrane, whose faces were part of my childhood
imagining: Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was in the family record stack and,
at some point, it was displayed on the top of a bookshelf; the same was true
of a Miles Davis album, though it wasn’t In a Silent Way but Kind of Blue.
My family didn’t listen to music together, though records—of many genres
—were often on in the house. I can’t say that I ever recognized Coltrane or
Davis playing, though it is possible that the playing happened and that is
lodged itself inside me. I do know that their faces took up residence in my
heart, and I coveted—and cultivated—an intimacy with them as I did Smith
and Carlos. It is this coveting that I brought to their work when I was older,
as I also brought to the work of another iconic black man from the sixties:
James Baldwin, whose image was also somewhere (was it a book cover?) in
our home.
As a black boy, a queer boy, I dreamed masculinity through these men: I
used them for my own neediness, to imagine grace.26 They had to be quiet,
then, since that was the refuge of my being, this wilderness of and in me.
They had to be quiet, which indeed is one of the ways for expanding what is
possible in the art and acts they make.

Notes
1 Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2012).
2 Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), x.
3 This last paragraph is in conversation with scholarly work in the field of “black pessimism,”
particularly the attention to the enduring meaningfulness of slavery and social death as
consequence of modernity and coloniality. See, for example, work by Saidiya Hartman, Fred
Moten, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Lewis Gordon, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe.
4 Here I am thinking especially of the ways that some black women’s work, in its intersectional
analysis, takes up an imagining of black humanity beyond the tropes of external conflict with
whiteness (and specifically with white masculinity), as Mary Helen Washington famously
argued in “ ‘The Darkened Eye Restored’: Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women,”
her introduction to the indispensable Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960
 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1987). Black women’s thinking is also relevant to the
conceptualizing of the interior, a conceit that is gendered female. See the discussion in chapter
two of The Sovereignty of Quiet, as well as my earlier arguments in Black Women, Identity, and
Cultural Theory: (Un)becoming the Subject (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
5 One could look toward Ingrid Monson’s “The Problem of White Hipness,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 48, No. 3 (Autumn 1995): 396–422, and Herman Gray’s brief
but stunning “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” Callaloo 18, No. 2 (Spring 1995): 401–5,
as excellent explications of the conceptualization of black male jazz subjectivity. Relevant here,
too, are the arguments in Leroi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) Blues People (New York: W. Morrow,
1963), which Monson takes up; Greg Tate’s reflection on Miles Davis and cool, “Preface to a
One-Hundred-and-Eighty Volume Patricide Note: Yet Another Few Thousand Words on the
Death of Miles Davis and the Problem of Black Male Genius,” in Black Popular Culture, ed.
Gina Dent (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1998); Krin Gabbard’s Black Magic (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), on the trope in Hollywood cinema; and Robin
Kelley’s explication of cool and the problem of authenticity in Yo Mama’s Disfunktional
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). I want to mention Farah Jasmine Griffin’s brilliant and beautiful
study of Billie Holiday, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: Free Press, 2001), which
I will come back to later in the text. Finally, one could look to work by Sander Gilman (“Black
Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century
Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 [Autumn 1985]: 204–42), Jennifer
Morgan (“ ‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the
Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 [January
1997]: 167–92), and Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment [New York: Routledge, 2000]), among others, to consider the
tropes of black femaleness. I also want to thank Michael Vorenberg for a conversation that
reminded me of the legacy of the idea of black inscrutability.
6 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), v.
7 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, vi.
8 Cardinal, quoted in Morrison, Playing in the Dark, vi–vii.
9 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, viii.
10 Francesca T. Royster, Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-
Soul Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 73.
11 Greg Tate’s essay on Davis is terrific in considering this dynamic. Also see Pearl Cleage’s
collection Mad at Miles (Southfield, MI: Cleage Group, 1990) and Royster, Sounding Like a No-
 No, 83.
12 Phil Freeman, Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis (San Francisco:
Backbeat Books), 26.
13 Freeman, Running the Voodoo Down, 25 (emphasis added).
14 Freeman, Running the Voodoo Down, 25 (emphasis in the original).
15 Freeman, Running the Voodoo Down, 25.
16 Freeman makes this comparison, and Davis himself, in his autobiography with Quincy Troupe
(Miles: The Autobiography [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989]), notes that critics regularly
compared him to Brown.
17 For a discussion of A Love Supreme’s spirituality, see John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest
for Freedom ed. Leonard L. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially essays
by Brown, Herman Gray, Anthony Brown, Salim Washington, and Emmett G. Price III. Also
see Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
18 My own affection for Coltrane, and for A Love Supreme, is akin to the ecstatic poetic quality
exhibited in Cuthbert Simpkins’ Coltrane: A Biography (New York: Herdon House, 1975), that
beautiful book and its evocative opening meditation on moments, love, courage and freedom.
Anyone who loves Coltrane’s work, should read at least the first chapter, “Equinox,” and the
last, “Embrace.”
19 This engagement of surrender is a turn away from W.E.B Du Bois’ classic notion of double
consciousness, a turn I accomplish through reading Marita Bonner’s gorgeous 1925 essay on
black female subjectivity, “On Being Young, a Woman, and Colored” (Crisis [December 1925]);
see Chapter Two of The Sovereignty of Quiet.
20 My attention to the cover will always be shaped by a conversation with writer and scholar
Lokeilani Kaimana in 2003.
21 Another thing to be noted, too, is that part of the attentiveness in prayer is related to formfulness
—the shape and make and structure that compels attention. In connecting form and quiet, I am
trying to push against the easy ways in which black art is (mis)read through the purview of
resistance, as if the notion of resistance alone can tell us everything about a beautifully made
thing. This case for form is applicable here, especially in noticing how much the repetition of
sound idioms is vital to A Love Supreme.
22 “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” trans. George W. MacRae and Douglas M. Parrott in The Nag
Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 297–301.
23 See Toni Morrison, Jazz: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1992). Lines from “The Thunder, Perfect
Mind” also open Julie Dash’s legendary 1991 film Daughters of the Dust.
24 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial, 1963).
25 Scott Saul makes a similar argument in his reading of “Psalm”: “Can we assimilate its journey
of spiritual inwardness and self-purification? The musical evidence suggests that ‘Psalm’ defies
literal emulation: few jazz musicians have performed ‘Psalm’ since its 1964 recording—a telling
sign, given that many free-jazz ensembles from the mid to late sixties did try to simulate the free
form of Coltrane’s less popular later suites like ‘Ascension,’ while almost any contemporary
jazz pick-up group can wing through early Coltrane standards like ‘Blue Train’ or ‘Equinox.’ A
Love Supreme seems like such an intensely personal religious statement that to cover it would
require the kind of chutzpah that does not shrink from the accusation of sacrilege. But perhaps
more forbiddingly, ‘Psalm’ is an oddly terminal performance, one that brings us to a limit of
stillness that is difficult to aspire to” (Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, 259). Of course, my own
sense is that this exemplary selfness is inspiring rather than only daunting or exclusionary.
26 I am riffing here on the title of Simone C. Drake’s When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and
Subject Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

* Commissioned for this volume.