Before noise music had a name, a Futurist built machines to make it
In 1913 the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo argued that industry had trained modern ears for richer sounds, then built his own noise-making instruments to prove it. None survive. Yet his central idea, that unwanted sound can be the raw material of music, runs from Varèse's sirens all the way to Japanese harsh noise.
Deliberate racket is older than the avant-garde. The medieval charivari, a custom for shaming a neighbour, paraded through town banging pots and pans in what people called rough music. Beethoven put musket and cannon effects into Wellington's Victory in 1813, and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture of 1880 scored actual cannon fire. Even Beethoven's Grosse Fuge of 1825 struck its first listeners as noise, and his publishers talked him into swapping it for a lighter Allegro.
The French composer Carol-Bérard, born in 1885 and taught by Isaac Albéniz, was inventing a notation for noises in the early 1900s and wrote a Symphony of Mechanical Force in 1910. Russolo's manifesto, The Art of Noises, followed three years later. He assembled an orchestra of devices he called intonarumori, premiered Awakening of a City in 1914, and saw his Gran Concerto Futuristico of 1917 greeted with hostility and violence, just as he had forecast. A 1921 phonograph disc made by his brother Antonio, featuring Corale and Serenata, is the only recording of the original machines.
Edgard Varèse pushed further, thinking in blocks of sound rather than melodies. His Ionisation of 1931, for 13 players, used 2 sirens, a lion's roar and 37 percussion instruments, and is credited as the first piece built entirely on noise. John Cage later said Varèse had moved into sound itself while others were still sorting tones from noise. The critic Paul Hegarty instead dates true noise music to Cage's own 4'33".
After the war came Robert Ashley's The Wolfman in 1964 and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, then industrial music and cheap synthesizers. The English group Whitehouse coined the term power electronics, cassettes spread the sound through the 1980s, and Japan's Kansai scene produced Merzbow. In 2004 James Ferraro and Spencer Clark formed the Skaters, helping launch a softer style called post-noise. The Danish theorist Torben Sangild argues no single definition of noise in music can hold.
Source: Noise music
