DISSONANCE, SEX AND NOISE: (RE)BUILDING
(HI)STORIES OF ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC
Miguel Alvarez Ferndndez
Universidad de Oviedo
Departamento de Historia del Arte y Musicologia
ABSTRACT
This article presents a reflection on some ideological
problems that surround the creation of a history of
electroacoustic music. The analysis of the role and
evolution of a musical concept through the history of a
musical tradition can show the strategies used in the
creation of a historical narration. As an example of
these rhetoric devices, the article briefly tracks the
presence of dissonance and noise in diverse musical
traditions through the last century. Thus, two parallel
historical narrations are presented. Some apparent
differences between them are questioned when the
concepts of dissonance and noise are regarded as 'the
other' for each respective musical tradition. An analogy
connecting music and sex (as different ways for
contacting 'the other') is also discussed. The concept of
'the other', standing for what is and must be usually
hidden and repressed, works as a limit for the identity of
any ideological construction, including the Western
subject. The analysis of 'the other' and how it is
repressed or emancipated can therefore reveal important
aspects of the identity of a musical tradition.
1. INTRODUCTION
Thinking about the history of electroacoustic music
demands the definitions of the concepts of history and
electroacoustic music. The former would exceed the
purposes of this article, but some reflections on this
issue will be pointed out. Regarding the latter, such a
definition involves not only an idea of technology but
also (and as far as we don't include this into the concept
of technology) an aesthetical approach to music. Then
by analysing the history of each of these ideas about
technology', or the history of each of these aesthetical
approaches to music, we can find different histories of
electroacoustic music.
It's possible to trace one history of
electroacoustic music through the analysis of the role
played by dissonance in its development. We can also
use the concept of noise as a guide through the evolution
of the music that makes use of electroacoustic
technologies. Two different histories may appear, with
their own different pasts. And from each of these pasts,
we may be able to foresee even more diverse futures.
2. DISSONANCE
One of these histories roots itself at the middle of the
last century, with its center at the WDR studios in
Cologne. Names such as Robert Beyer, Herbert Eimert,
Werner Meyer-Eppler or Karlheinz Stockhausen appear
at the beginning of this history. Of course we could
track at least part of its origins in Paris during the
previous years, but that period can be also thought of as
only the preparation of what was going to born in
Germany some time later.
Part of this history of electroacoustic music, as
it was explained before, is constituted by the history of
the aesthetical approach to music present in the work of
the aforementioned. This particular approach is strongly
associated to serialism, and we can find a very good
testimony of the close relationship between serialist
thought and these early electroacoustic practices in the
first number of die Reihe journal [10].
Serialism was not only an aesthetical approach
to electroacoustic music. It had begun in the domain of
what we could name today as composition with
'traditional' instruments. Since 1948, it had its center at
the Summer Courses of Darmstadt (where most of the
authors mentioned before met each other), and it
nurtured many instrumental pieces and musical
thoughts.
There is one aspect of the serialist approach to
composition, and to music in general, that gains special
importance for the purposes of this article. It has to do
with the relationship between new music and history.
For the most representative composers of this
movement, new music was somehow detached from
history. The serial procedures permitted to compose
following completely different rules than the ones that
constituted tonality (which, by the way, could only be
considered as a system after the appearance of
serialism). And tonality was, according to this history,
the core of the Western classical tradition. From this
point of view, serial music could be easily seen as
something "out of history" or, if we prefer, a new "zero
point" in history.
From our growing historical perspective we
cannot avoid questioning these ideas. Strong
connections bind the serial approach to music with
previous musical practices. Serialism, through its
extreme interpretation of some aspects of Webern's
1 As Jonathan Sterne does in [16].
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