Sound Studies: Framing Noise

Abstract

'a shower of meteors of sound'1In a 1937 lecture, John Cage issued his now commonplace statement: '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' (1961: 3). Just four years earlier, Cage was studying with Henry Cowell at The New School, where German composer Hanns Eisler was also teaching. In 1928 Eisler had written: 'When you are composing and you open the window, remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise, but is made by man' (1978: 30). In a later interview Cage returned to the theme:I had the lights turned out and the windows open. I advised everybody to put on their overcoats and listen for half an hour to the sounds that came in through the window, and then to add to them - in the spirit of the sounds that are already there, rather than in their individual spirits. That is actually how I compose. I try to act in accord with the absence of my music.(1982: 176)The purpose of this exercise is not to locate the origin of a now wellcirculated idea; it is simply to hear the words of two composers describing what it means to study music within an 'entire field of sound', outside conventional distinctions between music and non-music, noise and sonority. It is not surprising that sound studies would begin in elemental studies of its rational language: music. Yet what might be surprising is that this circulation of ideas took place not in a conservatory, but at The New School, an institution founded by dissident, radical scholars, refugees from the increasingly authoritarian culture of Columbia University. At around the same time, young radical American composers called for the rejection of European musical idealism and, in the voice of Aaron Copland, instead embraced a modern music that would be 'principally the expression in terms of enriched musical language of a new spirit of objectivity, attuned to our times' (Copland 1941: 18). The New School listened.In 1927, Copland was appointed to the faculty and organised the famous Copland-Sessions series of lectures and concerts. The series brought recognition to a new American music - to Copland and Roger Sessions, and to other composers, including Roy Harris, Virgil Thompson, and Walter Piston. Copland's appointment to the faculty was followed by those of musicologist Charles Seeger and composers Henry Cowell, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch. Copland's jazz influences, Eisler's worker's songs and twelve-tone music and Cowell's non-Western musical influences privileged innovation and multi-disciplinarity that displaced European musical idealism. This experimental approach not only realised in praxis the radical ideals of The New School's founders, but it also modeled the interdisciplinarity that would influence curricular planning. This was not a 'music school'. It was a school where musical performance and listening collaborated with dance, film, visual art and architecture.In 1928, when The New School's townhouse headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan were slated for demolition, its president Alvin Johnson sought to create a new structure that captured the institution's progressive approach to education. He commissioned modernist architect and theatrical set designer Joseph Urban to design The New School's new home at 66 West 12th Street. On the ground floor of that building, the first International Style structure in New York, was the eggshaped Tishman Auditorium - an acoustical achievement in its own right, but also a rehearsal for Urban's Radio City Music Hall. The rounded ceiling presented acoustical challenges, which designers overcame by hanging concentric plaster rings from the ceiling, a strategy later employed at Radio City (Landmarks Preservation Commission: 1997). While Tishman marked a milestone in modern acoustics, The New School's scholars were engaging in groundbreaking research on modern sounds and sound technologies. The New School Film Music Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Eisler and Theodor Adorno, sharply criticised the synthesis of music and image in Hollywood film. …