As certain as it is that New Music must bring the language of music and the material of music into full congruence, this congruence is not to be achieved by simply abrogating the language of music and abandoning the remains — shorn of every qualitative distinction — to their own devices, nor by simply spinning a web of schemata around this remainder instead of penetrating it. One is reminded of that popular etymology that translates “radical” as “radically empty.” Artistic consistency, the fulfillment of the work’s own obligations — without which esthetic seriousness is inconceivable — is not there for its own sake, but in order to present what was once called the artistic idea, and what in music might be better called the composed. In music, however, that is all construction, nothing at all is composed any more. Music regresses to the pre-musical, the pre-artistic tone. Many of its adepts logically pursue musique concrète or the electronic production of tones, But to date, electronic music has failed to fulfill its own ideas; even though it theoretically disposes over the continuum of all imaginable sound colors, in actual practice — similar to the musical tin-can taste familiar from the radio, only much more extreme than that — these newly won sound colors resemble one another monotonously, whether because of their virtually chemical purity, or because every tone is stamped by the interposition of the equipment. It sounds as though Webern were being played on a Wurlitzer Organ. The compulsion toward leveling and quantification seems in electronic music to be stronger than the goal of qualitative freedom and release. Of course it is quite possible that the narrowness and limitation of technological development in contemporary society bears more responsibility than does technology itself for the present state of affairs.

Theodor W. Adorno in “The Aging of the New Music”

“A network can be destroyed by noises that attack and transform it, if the codes in place are unable to normalize and repress them. Although the new order is not contained in the structure of the old, it is nonetheless not a product of chance. It is created by the substitution of new differences for the old differences. Noise is the source of these mutations in the structuring codes. For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information. This may seem strange. But noise does in fact create meaning: first, because the interruption of a message signifies the interdiction of the transmitted meaning, signifies censorship and rarity; and second, because the very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. The absence of meaning is in this case the presence of all meanings, absolute ambiguity, a construction outside meaning. The presence of noise makes sense, makes meaning. It makes possible the creation of a new order on another level or organization, of a new code in another network.”

- Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music

- The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way at long intervals until 1906. Seven years later, at the age of 71 Amrbose Bierce left for Mexico “with a pretty definite purpose, which, however, is not a present disclosable.” He was never heard from again.

“Subconsciously we’re all bastards,” he used to say, judging the behavior of others by his own. A rather banal truism, but, then, Tenzer was not much of an authority when it came to life’s vicissitudes or to theorizing about life.

“Time will tell,” he said. “Only art can do justice to the greatness of being. Art is the mystery of existence staring us in the face like a boar on a platter, as something tangible, see, and not as a system of ideas. The thing you’re talking about I render in the form of sensuous material. But I don’t hear it in the orchestra – and that’s disastrous. Someone has said that music is a lower art because people use hammers to bang on sheep guts and wire, rub against gut-strings with horsehair, and blow away on slobbered-up horns. Noise– what a marvelous thing it is: it can deafen us, blind us, overpower the will, and produce a real Dionysian frenzy in an abstract dimension. And yet it is; it’s not just some intellectual tease. Silence is death. Painting, sculpture – they stand still, they’re static, while poetry and theater are too freighted with life: they’ll never be able to give you that …” He went up to his treasured Steinway, the one luxury in which he had indulged himself after a long and protracted battle with his father-in-law (…) and commenced playing (did he ever!!!). It was as if a peal of thunder from man’s subterranean guts had banged against the sky – not an earthly sky, but the cosmic sky of nothingness, truly infinite and vacuous and from whence, blossoming from metaphysical storm clouds, it crashed, bottoming out in a creeping, fire-engulfed, flattened-out, barren mystery. The joist of the world trembled; in the distance glowed death’s tranquility, transformed into the peaceful sleep of a mysterious deity broken on the wheel of superdivine tortures: the unmediated perception of the real infinity. The eye of satanic knowledge of ubiquitous evil bulged over the desolate expanses of ultimate, seemingly benign concepts; a glare, insufferably hurtful, pierced the thick armor of primevally dark Being, and went painlessly berserk, in a sort of French malaise raised to the power of a continuum.

S.I. Witkiewicz – Insatiability (1930)

… more to come about this and other topics each week going forward.