Noise water meat : a history of sound in the arts / by Douglas Kahn
Publisher: Cambridge : MIT, 2001Description: 455p. 23cm001: 10992ISBN: 0262611724Subject(s): Noise | Visual arts | Motion pictures | Theatre | Sound | Literature | MusicDDC classification: 700 KAHItem type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 700 KAH (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 2 | Available | 081903 |
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Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
An examination of the role of sound in twentieth-century arts.
This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it-to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.
Includes bibliography and index
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- Acknowledgments (p. viii)
- Introduction (p. 2)
- Listening through History;
- Prelude: Modernism
- Explanations and Qualifications
- Part I Significant Noises (p. 20)
- 1. Immersed in Noise (p. 25)
- Sentient Sound
- Interpolation of Noise
- Protean Noise
- Oscillator Noise
- 2. Noises of the Avant-Garde (p. 45)
- Bruitism
- Noise and Simultaneity
- The Future of War Noises
- Part II Drawing the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography (p. 68)
- 3. Concerning the Line (p. 72)
- Resident Noises
- The Gloss of the Gliss
- Beethoven at Fifty Times per Second
- "I, the Accelerated Line"
- 4. The Sound of Music (p. 101)
- Demarcated Sounds
- Drawing the Line in Theory
- Synesthesia as Noise Abatement
- 5. Ubiquitous Recording (p. 123)
- The Rotary Revolution
- Russian Revolutionary Film
- Part III The Impossible Inaudible (p. 158)
- 6. John Cage: Silence and Silencing (p. 161)
- Much to Confess about Nothing
- Canned Silence
- Silencing Techniques
- Cage and the Impossible Inaudible
- 7. Nondissipative Sounds and the Impossible Inaudible (p. 200)
- Inaudibly Loud, Long-Lasting, Far-Reaching
- Machines of Nondissipation
- 8. The Parameters of All Sound (p. 224)
- Loud Sounds
- Conceptual Sounds
- Part IV Water Flows and Flux (p. 242)
- 9. A Short Art History of Water Sound (p. 245)
- Water Music
- Dripping
- Surrealism and Submerged Women
- 10. In the Wake of Dripping: New York at Midcentury (p. 260)
- The Object of Performance
- Allan Kaprow: Immersed Noisician
- George Brecht's Drip Music
- Part V Meat Voices (p. 290)
- 11. Two Sounds of the Virus: William Burroughs's Pure Meat Method (p. 293)
- A Culture for Growing Viruses
- Schlupping
- On Goo Behavior
- The Cancer Virus
- Cellular Phones
- 12. Cruelty and the Beast: Antonin Artaud and Michael McClure (p. 322)
- Artaud in America
- Musical Artauds: Tudor and Cage
- Beats Language
- Beast Language
- Affected and Afflicted Screaming
- Seraphic Screams and the Tortuous Blast
- Notes (p. 360)
- Index (p. 446)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
The role of sound in the spectrum of artistic disciplines is one of unique and boundless dimensions. In his new book, Kahn (media arts, Univ. of Technology, Sydney, Australia) examines the history, philosophies, politics, patterns, technology, sociology, and impact of sound in art. Emphasizing that "none of the arts is entirely mute," he surveys the potential equality of aural and visual in the artistic hierarchy, the influence of aurality on various forms of art and cultural thought (and vice versa), the fluid boundaries between the concepts of noise and music, and Western vs. Eastern definitions of the voice. He covers everything from the poetry of Kerouac, the films of Bunuel, the compositions of John Cage, and the paintings of Jackson Pollock to dripping water and body sounds. Kahn's research is impressive, and his presentation is thorough and precise. Although certainly not for the casual reader, this volume will be an asset to scholarly and academic collections.ÄCarol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
"Sound saturates the arts of this century," writes Kahn, a professor of media arts at the University of Technology in Australia, in an illuminating but densely theoretical study of sound in 20th-century literature and art. Kahn begins by considering the early experiments at the Cabaret Voltaire of dadaist poets Richard Huelsenbaeck, Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, whose poetic and "musical" performances were intended to achieve a Rimbaudian "alchemy of the word." He then analyzes how noiseÄin the form of screams and bomb blastsÄfunction in such prose texts as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. But the artistic hero of the book is John Cage, whose monumental works with water provide the theme for the central portion of the book. Kahn devotes considerable energy to arguing that Cage's Water Music of 1952 was at least as revolutionary as his silent pieces. "Pollock's dripped and poured paintings and Cage's water sounds," he writes, "heralded a larger concurrence of fluidity, water, sound and performance" in the arts for years to come. This leads to a discussion of postmodern American composers, including LeMonte Young and Tony Conrad, who chose extreme amplifications of noise to bring the auditors back to "silence" once their ears stopped ringing. As for the "meat" part of the title, it comes from another source of theoretical inspiration to Kahn, William Burroughs's idea of "schlupping," defined as the sound of "soft innards being sucked out of a body," which is how the reader may feel attempting to get through this incisive but difficult book. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedCHOICE Review
As "sound saturates the arts of this century," the manipulation of sound stimulates this unique text by Kahn, coeditor (with Gregory Whitehead) of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-garde (1992). Kahn discusses noise factors, water representations in music and performance art, and auralities associated with the body. John Cage and his 4'33" are central to the first four sections; "Part V: Meat Voices" surveys methodologies in Burroughs and Artaud. All three men hold significant places in postmodernist theory, and Kahn explains modernism and the avant-garde through the vocabulary and spirit of the later movement. 4'33" compels attention to the absence, dimensions, and dynamics of sound and is a measure of Cage's impact on Allan Kaprow (a self-identified "noisician") and George Brecht. Kahn theorizes about sound in a fashion merely tapped by postmodernist critics. Among his other valuable inclusions are influences by composer Henry Cowell, author Anais Nin, and painter Jackson Pollack (whom Cage detested). Kahn acknowledges his lack of attention to women and artists of color, and certainly Gertrude Stein and a century of recorded popular music deserve to be worked into his theory. Despite this and his occasional forays into obfuscating postmodernese, Kahn furthers understanding of the eclectic, interactive, organic qualities of sound. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. R. Welburn; University of Massachusetts at AmherstThere are no comments on this title.