Noise in music
[12] Athenaeus (The Deipnosophists xiv.38) quotes a passage from a now-lost play, Semele, by Diogenes the Tragedian, describing an all-percussion accompaniment to some of these rites: And now I hear the turban-wearing women, Votaries of th' Asiatic Cybele, The wealthy Phrygians' daughters, loudly sounding With drums, and rhombs, and brazen-clashing cymbals, Their hands in concert striking on each other, Pour forth a wise and healing hymn to the gods.
He describes "a Greek of mean condition ... a low operator in sacrifices, and a soothsayer ... a teacher of secret mysteries" who imported to Etruria and then to Rome a Dionysian cult which attracted a large following.
It is loud music meant for outdoor performance, played on percussion instruments such as the drums called janggu and puk, and the gongs ching and kkwaenggwari.
These bands vary in makeup, depending on the means of the families employing them and according to changing fashions over time, but the core instrumentation is a small group of percussionists, usually playing a frame drum (ḍaphalā), a gong, and a pair of kettledrums (nagāṛā).
Better-off families will add shawms (shehnai) to the percussion, while the most affluent who also prefer a more modern or fashionable image may replace the traditional ensemble with a brass band.
[23] The general enthusiasm quickly spread to opera and concert orchestras, where the combination of bass drum, cymbals, tambourines, and triangles were collectively referred to as "Turkish music".
[24][25][26] By the end of the 18th century, the batterie turque had become so fashionable that keyboard instruments were fitted with devices to simulate the bass drum (a mallet with a padded head hitting the back of the sounding board), cymbals (strips of brass striking the lower strings), and the triangle and bells (small metal objects struck by rods).
In 1800, Bernard Viguerie introduced the sound to chamber music, in the keyboard part of a piano trio titled La Bataille de Maringo, pièce militaire et historique.
His example was soon imitated by Justin Heinrich Knecht (Die durch ein Donerwetter [sic] unterbrochne Hirtenwonne, 1794), Michel Corrette (who employed a length of wood on the pedal board and his elbow on the lowest notes of the keyboard during some improvisations), and also in composed works by Guillaume Lasceux (Te Deum: "Judex crederis", 1786), Sigismond Neukomm (A Concert on a Lake, Interrupted by a Thunderstorm), Louis James Alfred Lefébure-Wély (Scène pastorale, 1867), Jacques Vogt (Fantaisie pastorale et orage dans les Alpes, ca.
[32] Carlo Farina, an Italian violinist active in Germany, also used col legno to mimic the sound of a drum in his Capriccio stravagante for four stringed instruments (1627), where he also used devices such as glissando, tremolo, pizzicato, and sul ponticello to imitate the noises of barnyard animals (cat, dog, chicken).
[33] Later in the century, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, in certain movements of Battalia (1673), added to these effects the device of placing a sheet of paper under the A string of the double bass, in order to imitate the dry rattle of a snare drum, and in "Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor" from the same programmatic battle piece, superimposed eight different melodies in different keys, producing in places dense orchestral clusters.
[35] Orchestras continued to use noise in the form of a percussion section, which expanded though the 19th century: Berlioz was perhaps the first composer to thoroughly investigate the effects of different mallets on the tone color of timpani.
The technique is best known, however, from somewhat later compositions by Arnold Schoenberg, who introduced it for solo voices in his Gurrelieder (1900–1911), Pierrot Lunaire (1913), and the opera Moses und Aron (1930–1932), and for chorus in Die Glückliche Hand (1910–1913).
Later composers who have made prominent use of the device include Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten (in Death in Venice, 1973), Mauricio Kagel, and Wolfgang Rihm (in his opera Jakob Lenz, 1977–1978, amongst other works).
[39] Another form of unpitched vocal music is the speaking chorus, prominently represented by Ernst Toch's 1930 Geographical Fugue, an example of the Gebrauchsmusik fashionable in Germany at that time.
This trend reached its apex in the music of Edgard Varèse, who composed Ionisation in 1931, a "study in pure sonority and rhythm" for an ensemble of thirty-five unpitched percussion instruments.
1 and 3 (1940 and 1942), Song of Queztalcoatl (1941), Suite for Percussion (1942), and—in collaboration with John Cage—Double Music (1941) explored the use of "found" instruments, such as brake drums, flowerpots, and metal pipes.
Solutions have included Denis Smalley using spectromorphology (1996), K.Saariaho and S.McAdams using the (pitched) sound/noise axis (1985), numerical methods in 'post-pitch' contexts by Arash Majd (2019), and by Juhani Vesikkala using a noise-pitch continuum (2022).
An early example of an electronic composition composed entirely by filtering white noise in this way is Henri Pousseur's Scambi (Exchanges), realised at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan in 1957.
[58] The popularity of these techniques quickly resulted in the development of electronic devices such as the fuzz box to produce similar but more controlled effects and in greater variety.
[49][61] The use of feedback was pioneered by musicians such as John Lennon of The Beatles,[62][63] Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds, Pete Townshend of The Who, Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground[64] and Jimi Hendrix.
[49][65] Hendrix was able to control feedback and turn it into a musical quality,[66] and his use of noise has been described as "sculpted – liquid and fire expertly shaped in mid-air as if by a glass blower.
[69] Jazz musicians who have incorporated noise elements, feedback and distortion include Bill Frisell,[74] David Krakauer[75] Cecil Taylor,[76] Gábor Szabó,[77] Garnett Brown,[78] Grachan Moncur III,[78] Jackie McLean,[79] John Abercrombie,[80][81] John McLaughlin,[82] Joseph Bowie,[78] Larry Coryell,[81] McCoy Tyner,[76] Ornette Coleman,[78] Pat Metheny,[83] Phil Minton,[78] Roswell Rudd,[78] and Scott Henderson.
"[84] Scholar William Jelani Cobb states that "though the genre will always be dismissed by many as brash, monotonous noise, the truth is that hip hop has undergone an astounding array of lyrical and musical transformations.
"[85] Scholar Ronald Radano writes that "no term in the modern lexicon conveys more vividly African-American music's powers of authenticity and resistance than the figure of 'noise'.
Radano states that "rather than radicalizing the stable binaries of race, noise inverts them; it transforms prior signs of European musical mastery — harmony, melody, song — into all that is bitchin', kickin', and black.
[87][88] Michael Eric Dyson describes the album as a "powerful mix of music, beats, screams, noise, and rhythms from the streets", and considers it an example of the revival of black radical and nationalist thought.
[110] In 2008 Trygve Nordwall, the manager of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, invoked new EU rules forbidding more than 85 decibels in the workplace, as a reason for dropping the planned world premiere of Dror Feiler's composition Halat Hisar (State of Siege) because it was "adverse to the health" of the musicians.
")[112] Orchestra manager Trygve Nordwall reported that "readings were taken during rehearsals and even when toned down, Halat Hisar measured about 130 decibels, equivalent to hearing a jet aircraft taking off",[111] and one member of the orchestra reported suffering headaches and permanent tinnitis after sustained exposure for three hours during rehearsals ("Ein Orchestermusiker habe nach der Probe des Stückes drei Stunden lang permanente Ohrgeräusche (Tinnitus) gehabt").
[113][114][115] Other claimants to the title include Motörhead,[114] Led Zeppelin,[116] Gallows,[117] Bob Dylan's 1965 backing electric band,[118] Grand Funk Railroad,[119] Canned Heat,[120] and the largely fictional parody group Spinal Tap.
