Sound barriers

UNESCO Courier, July-August, 1993 by R. Murray Schafer

By the early twentieth century, urban noise had increased to a point where it began to affect writers in a similar way, and among the first were the Futurists, led by F.T. Marinetti. "Through a disjointed, feverish and posturing language Marinetti was able to capture something of the mood of a human crowd in motion. . . ." This is Istvan Anhalt commenting on Marinetti's rhetoric in a book in which he shows parallel developments in twentieth-century music. Marinetti's "the text of a poster, a proclamation, or prose is "the text of a poster, a proclamation, or a series of headlines. It is a throbbing, aggressive, insistent language, brooking no dissent, dismissing the need for reflection, intolerant and destructive."[2] In his Futurist Manifesto Marinetti had proclaimed: "We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals."[3]

The influence of these crowd-choirs is conspicuous in much contemporary music, first of all in the bloated orchestras of Berg and Schoenberg, then later in the statistical organization of Xenakis' works, as well as in the cluster and aggregate effects of Ligeti and the "mob" vocal outbursts of Lutoslawski and other members of the Polish school. Crowd power is everywhere present in rock music, which could not exist without it. "No-one goes to a rock concert unless they're stoned or stupid," a teenager tells me, and yet almost everyone has been there. And the music ricochets from car radios and ghetto blasters, through the streets, over the back yard fences, and dribbles out of the Walkman of the passenger next to you on the bus, where no-one speaks. It is almost as if music is haemorrhaging all around us, exploding out of its containers; and suddenly you realize that music is the glue of the modern multiracial, multilinguistic city, holding it together more effectively than any political or social system, and you allow yourself to hope that it will continue to do so, fearing the consequences if it fails. We know that there are more violent forms of intolerance than the tyranny of the loudspeaker.

RITUALS OF TRANQUILLITY

When modern humanity gave up life in the country for life in the city, when it deserted open spaces for the dense packing of the metropolis, when the alarm clock replaced the sunrise and factory noise obliterated wind, rain and the birds, when the drowsiness of natural life was surrendered to the mad dash to get ahead, the frictions of increased human contact, the hell of other people, as Sartre put it, replaced the great geobotanic garden that had been the scene of past existence and the quiet life it promoted. Has it been extinguished from memory or can a new ecological awareness help to recover it?

What we seem to need are rituals of tranquility in which large assemblies of people could feel the serenity of a shared experience without the desire to proclaim their emotions in destructive or disfiguring action. In this sense we might again study the model of the Western concert audience to determine whether it might have wider or evolving significance. When we think about it, how astonishing is the concert audience, quietly sitting before the music, scarcely breathing, engulfed by the mysterious vibrations in the air about them. I suppose every piece of music longs to be worshipped in silence, but few achieve such a distinction, and some achieve it only by the authority of habit rather than the privilege of beauty. I have often wondered whether the ritual of the concert could not be transposed to other environments and transformed into a collective contemplation of a bird dawn chorus, a summer solstice or an Earth Day celebration.