Noise is Essential.

Whereas a lot of thinking about noise out there focuses on the undesirability of noise, I am primarily interested in how it is not only desired in some cases, but is absolutely essential in music. The ebb and flow of musical style throughout history illustrates that there are competing desires for crisp clean clarity in musical precision and a desire for embellishing structures with lots of filigree. Case in point, music of the medieval through renaissance was embellished to the extreme in the baroque period. The baroque period was then chiseled down into more of a crisp, simpler style of the classical period. The classical period was then embellished by the romantic period. Some people may consider the advent of serialism as more of a noisy period. I think, to the contrary, that serialism (though quite complex), was intended to quantify and hence perfect music toward a new egalitarianism-hence, the interest in mathematical combinatorial procedures. This was met with resistance by composers such as Ligeti, Xenakis and Penderecki in the 50’s and 60’s. Which was then met with by the minimalist and post-modernist movements in the 70’s and 80’s. Who knows what’s happening now? Well, there is the noise movement of the 90’s that continues to a certain degree today.

Perhaps I’m overgeneralizing historical movements, and even taking considerable license with the term “noise.” I suspect, however, that there is something to this idea of the desirability of noise. Noise as a cognitive dissonance or as a “this is just too much to take in” element in music that is beautiful and essential.