Noise Music: A History

Hegarty comes at the topic from the standpoint of an avid listener and performer, explaining and exploring what the various artists are trying to achieve. His coverage of historical and contemporary performers/composers is exceptionally broad and adds a invaluable context for the work -- even if some influences are only mentioned in passing.The chapters on Japanese noise and Merzbow are spot on and alone make the book a worthy purchase. I have been listening to this stuff for over ten years and found the discussions both accurate and enlightening.I only give it four stars since while reading other parts of the book I kept wishing that he would describe what the music sounds like rather than engage its theory. One other minor point: the font on the paperback is a small narrow sans serif which increased the reading effort (although given the topic this might have been a design decision)

This book is wonderful. It could be part of a course on sound art. I am a jazz trombonist who has "crossed over". I totally recommend this. My personal favorite noise/sound artist is I'd m thfft able. Sometimes google misspells his name as I'd M Theft Able. Yet noise occurs in so many ways, including eco sounds, syn, tape, collage, and industrial. If you're cool enough to take it, try some noise. I am a 1st year MFA candidate concentrating on experimental music composition. That is what brought me to the doorstep of this book.

Great read. Used it as a reference for a paper I wrote in one of my communications classes. Really interesting look at the roots of the modern noise music genre I have seen over the past couple of years.

Hegarty's book is not a dry,excessively detailed history but rather a work much more usefull to myself and perhaps all noisicians and sound artists.It tries very well to reason why we make noise.If you make or dig noise,even if you are a philosophical novice,read this book.

Recommended if you are interested in the history behind all the use of noise in music to noise music itself, in philosophical and various critical angles, considering the vast bibliography studied for the making of this book.It effected me the way I intended it to when I bought it, listening to this kind off music in a different way.

First off, this book is long overdue; however, what undermines Hagerty's project is his theoretically dry and unconvincing writing (something the editor should have caught, unless the press wanted to publish the philosophical meanderings of the author). Thus, the reader is bombarded with concepts at the expense of offering insights into the production of noise (by actually interviewing the artists in question). This is a major problem with ethnomusicology and musicology in general-waxing and waning about the supposed post-modern qualities about music at the expense of the musician in favor of a totalizing reading of the subject.Here's some examples: If Japanese noise is zen, then it is also rope bondage (134). -That's really academically lazy, I might add.On John Zorn, "If he and others are some sort of neo-anthropologists, or exorcists, they are ethnographers of a future culture, and in the meantime, engage in neither the ethno-or the-graphy (137). - Am I'm supposed to be impressed with semantics here or what?All in all, it will satiate the need to fill the gap; however, the many gaps within this text will hopefully be filled in the near future before many of our contemporary "noise" artists are dead.

One of the books we had been longing for and dreaming of for a long, very long time, since the time when Pierre Schaeffer or Pierre Henry invented concrete music in the early 1940s. Finally out and so rich. Noise music is an old, very old human activity but it is finding a new vital energy in our modern world. There is no real difference between noise and music. Both have to be listened to to be heard and eventually appreciated in a way or another. If you don't listen you won't hear the thunder and you may miss the warning it may represent to us. And yet it is only noise. The only difference between noise and music is that music is noise that has been worked upon to create a rhythm and a harmony that did not exist originally in the noise itself and had to be worked into the noise. But any noise, any sound in the world is potential music. It only takes one composer to transform the noise of a rattle into music, or the noise of a washboard into music. The second idea of importance is the change of the general meaning of noise and music in our world over the last twenty-five centuries. It used to be only (was it really true) some dressing up of rites, mainly religious rites and rituals, but also military or festive rituals or actions. Little by little it became a pure entertainment (but is it only that) in our modern world with the invention of concert halls, theaters, museums, and particularly the radio that enabled jazz and some other types of music to emerge and impose themselves as pure entertainment. And television, not to speak of the Internet, Youtube or Myspace Music or the iPod. The final essential idea is that the world has completely changed technically. The radio was only the very beginning of that revolution. The final phase is that of digitalized music, sampling and virtual composition and performing. And that goes along with the change it all brings to the younger generations. They live today in a constant musical world and they develop new capabilities. The hearing band is getting wider. The sense and feeling of rhythm and harmony have completely changed in intensity and concerns so many more people than just twenty years ago, not to speak of two centuries ago. And now our modern machines and their tools, computers and digital music software enable everyone who is not deaf to gather sounds, then to sample them, then to build some kind of architecture that used to be called composition. That revolution leads more and more young people who live in continuous sound to reject the old discrimination between noise and music and they start using noise, plain ordinary everyday sonic pollution (meaning sounds that are produced as a collateral side-effect of some motivated and profitable activity), in order to produce music, to transform it into music. And that's exactly what the author tries to explain and explore, at times a little bit theoretically and not enough musically. But it sure is a rich and enticing introduction to what we used to call concrete music and is today called noise music.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

OK

Wann wird aus Lärm Musik? Worin liegt die Bedrohung von Lärm und Krach? Kann Stille auch eine Art Lärm sein? Worin unterscheidet sich ein Geräusch von einem Klang? Grundsätzlichen Fragen dieser Art geht der irische Philosophie-Professor und Kulturwissenschaftler Paul Hegarty in seiner weit ausgreifenden Studie über die „Geschichte des Lärms“ nach. Dabei spannt er den Bogen von Konzertsaal-Aufführungen im 18. Jahrhundert bis zu den Avantgarde-Bewegungen von Musique Concréte, Free Jazz und japanischer Noise-Art. Hegartys Ausführungen sind mit ihren Rückgriffen auf Denker wie Jean Baudrillard, Theodor W. Adorno oder Martin Heidegger nicht immer einfach nachzuvollziehen, entpuppen sich letztlich aber als Erkenntnisgewinn. Im Endergebnis hebt sich für Hegarty der Gegensatz von „Lärm“ und „Musik“ in den zeitgenössischen Spielformen der ‚Noise Music’ auf. Natürlich kommen in diesem Zusammenhang auch Krautrock, Punk, HipHop und Industrial zu ihrem Recht. Abstrakte Begrifflichkeiten werden von Hegarty immer wieder mit sinnlichen Beispielen aufgefüllt. Trotz ihres Theorieanspruchs ist die Sprache dieses Buches nie abweisend oder hermetisch – eine bahnbrechende Untersuchung!

My first "academic" module for university centered around the question 'what is music?' and this book was in my reading list.I found this book very helpful for my essay writing but I also reference it in convocations about music on a regular basis which is a testament to just how informative its contents are. The chapters on progressive rock and Merzbow where especially interesting.Although some may find the writing of this book to be a tad on the dry side the knowledge that it will give you is worth the read.If you are at all interested in the areas of music regarding the 'avant-garde', 'experimental' or 'noisy' then this is the kind of material you want and is an essential read within its subject matter.

I always was one for theorizing music (one of my favourite works beeing Lipstick Traces) but this book takes it one step further. Too academic. If you are expecting a lot on the music, forget it. Not much history and some bad choices regarding subject. Anyway you get to know a lot of new things and curiosities but it's not for the music lover, for the one interested in the details regarding the music itself and the artists. I am a fan of Bataille but after this book i don't think i'll EVER want to hear of him again, poor sod. Get this book and you will know why. This could've been a contender.