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Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts
by: Douglas Kahn

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 709
EAN: 9780262611725
ISBN: 0262611724
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 472
Publication Date: October 01, 2001
Publisher: The MIT Press
Sales Rank: 131945
Studio: The MIT Press

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Product Description:
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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Zang Tumb Tumb
Whereas our present technology upheaval is driven by the computer, about eighty years ago it was driven by audiophonic technologies: radio was new on the scene; film and animated cartoons were moving to sound; dramatic improvements were occurring in phonography, microphony, and other audiophonic technology; and the prospect of television was in the air. But artists were slow to take advantage of the possibilities opened by these new media; and radio art, audio art, asynchronous sound film, and soundscape experimentation based on recording technologies were postponed for decades. The discontinuity of these artistic traditions stands as a historical lesson that, even though the technological and conceptual requirements exist and have generated sporadic material realization, these requirements are still insufficient for maturation into an artistic practice.

Music was especially successful in protecting ... Read More

Rating:

- A new voice for the silent spots in audio-theories
If at times overly academic, Douglas Kahn's seminal work "Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts" should be required reading for any course related to sound and such audio-visual domains as film and television.

In his book Kahn adresses the historical changes (or, development?) in noise abatement, looking at noise as a cultural, musiological and essentially political phenomenon (with an apparent inspiration from Jacques Attali). Accompanying the different types of noise abatement in Western modernity (as voiced e.g. by Arthur Schopenhauer), are also - as Kahn illustrates - different experiments into the use of noise, whether defined as a strictly musical or cultural phenomenon. In music we thus find such experimental composers as John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer (exploring different types of musique concrète), in film we find early auteurs as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov ... Read More

Rating:

- invaluable content. challenging vocabulary.
The subject and content of this book is of great interest to me, and the book delivers quite well. The only fault I could find was in the use of a superfluously extensive vocabulary. I would compare it to listening to comedian Dennis Miller do stand up. It's often funny, but the guy is so knowledgeable as to leave me blank too often. It is such a good book that I'm discouraged by what I perceive as a limited audience potential.

Still, I give 5 stars without hesitation, since the book is a great read that got my creative juices flowing and brought me up-to-date regarding the history of art forms in which I am deeply involved. Setting aside the excessively rigorous verbiage, it is very well written. I highly recommend it.

Rating:

- fascinating, with a brilliant critique of Cage
Kahn's text sprawls over 358 pages, and is filled with innovative insights into the auditory component of the 20th century avant-garde. I found the most brilliant section to be his critique of John Cage. Cage created music with the aim of "quieting the mind, to open it to divine influence." Kahn is the first to articulate what I have felt, that Cage, the zen anarchist, is just as manipulative with this goal as any tonal symphonic architect! As Kahn puts in,

"...Cagean silence...has silenced other things, as it dwells at the problematic edge of audibility and attempts to hear the world of sound without hearing aspects of the world in a sound" (p. 4) Kahn turns on its head Cage's stated aim of "just letting sound be," speaking rather of "Cage's dominion of all sound and always sound," a project to turn all sound into music! (p. 197)

Much of the rest of the book, the sections on "Water Flows and Flux" ... Read More

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