Customer Reviews

Noise Music: A History

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

Sometimes the writing tends to be a tad dry, but this is a serious work of scholarship regarding the "noise" movement through the history of music so one wouldn't expect a page turner. There is a whole chapter devoted to Japanese Noise music, as well as one specifically on Merzbow, who is like the god of noise. I appreciated the fact that in the introduction the author did mention that he only touches on Coil, Nurse With Wound, and Current 93 b/c they have their own book ("England's Hidden Reverse" by David Keegan). Several mentions of Throbbing Gristle are made as well, though the book "Wreckers of Civilization" by Simon Ford is an excellent read on that wacky troupe. I was entertained by the author's description of listening to specific pieces of music, and he raised my interest in several artists I wasn't familiar with. This was a gift, but I would have gladly paid full price for this excellent book.

Having listened to a variety of noisemusics over the years, I was really excited to read this bookk which promised an overview of the genre without the hipster leanings that so often prevail when this subject has been broached (i.e. - a lot of namedropping and a dearth of actual content). Unfortunately, this book fails to provide a good groundwork to continue personal research from and also so dry and 'intellectual' as to render one into a sonobulastic state almost from the get-go.

In essence, I learned no new information and the author is unbearably 'clever'. This reads like a college freshman's study. Avoid at all costs.

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.

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

Paul Hegarty does a good job jumping into the world of experimental/noise music headfirst. Up to now, this has been a whole area of music largely ignored by the musicological community. There is a distinct emphasis on Japanoise with a whole chapter on Merzbow alone, but then again, I think it's deserved.

We can forgive many of the book's faults because it is essentially the first of its kind. It's probably as comprehensive as possible considering that there's next to nothing to build upon. Hegarty has done a great service to future scholars.

The writing is scholarly and theoretically sound, but it's also approachable to those outside the field of musicology. It's a bit more dense than, say, an article on Wire or Pitchfork, but it's also structured so that a casual reader can simply skip over the more theoretically robust sections, while still getting a lot of useful information.

Noise/Music is an exciting first step and fans of the music (you know who you are) will not want to miss this. Highly recommended.

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)

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.

In high school physics I was given an assignment to comprehend the entire mathematical equation of the respiratory cycle. Fortunately, here the subject is noise music, a bit closer to my interests. To say this book is pretentious would be to do it a dissevice. In fact, "Noise/Music A History" is actually more scientific, an examination of noise, music, their relation and the various manifestations of which have existed and continue to exist. From John Cage to free jazz to industrial music to Merzbow, it has the feeling that someone is using sonar equipment to measure the sonic vibrations at a Masonna concert and presenting a thesis of the results. Fortunately, there are footnotes so that you can fill yourself in. Be prepared for a quiz.