Dirty Light - Marko Ciciliani

Disturbance in any signalling system. In electronics and engineering, noise refers to
any disturbance, that does not represent part of the signal, such as static in a telephone
or snow on a television screen. 25
While this is not the place to discuss in detail the different meanings that noise took on in the
course of the 20 th century, a few significant moments of music history will be pointed out.
Here the objective is to demonstrate that noise is not only a sonic aspect of sound, but also –
similarly to dirt in a social context – a contravention against an established musical practice.
Also it will be shown that the gradual acceptance of noise as musical material not only
liberated the range of available musical sounds, but also carefully maintained and redefined a
set of prohibitions. Certain points in the history of western music in the 20 th century have in
various ways torn down the barriers between accepted musical sound and noise, like the music
of John Cage, Fluxus, Punk or the Japanese Onkyo scene. The inclusion of noise as musical
material acquired new musical territories that were hitherto beyond the customary and thereby
widened the range of accepted musical sounds.
The line between sound and musical sound stood at the center of the existence of
avant-garde music, supplying a heraldic moment of transgression and its artistic raw
material, a border that had to be crossed to bring back unexploited resources, restock
the coffers of musical materiality, and rejuvenate Western art music. 26
It is important to notice, though, that every new musical idiom that came forth through this
development also depended on the establishment of a new set of taboos.
John Cage (1912-1992) for example placed the acceptance of all sorts of noise and activities
into the centre of his work. 27 A second sort of noise – in the sense of an uncontrolled procedure
– that he allowed to become part of the composition is chance, a method he used in order to
eradicate the supreme position of the composer as the mastermind that governs the sounds. 28
However, in order to let chance and the formerly suppressed noises step to the foreground, he
had to eliminate all sorts of traditional musical communication between performers, like
gestural cueing, expressive signalling or any other form of narrative activities. The liberation
of sound that Cage was after in his music could only work by turning musical communication
between musicians into a taboo. When musicians start to connect sounds as musical phrases
25 Schaffer, Murray: The Soundscape, Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books (1977), 182.
26 Kahn, Douglas: Noise Water Meat, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1999), 69.
27 Here I am exclusively referring to Cage’s music that used chance methods in the process of composition and/or
realisation of the music. This is that case with most of his music after 1951.
28 For another example of an artist who equates ‘dirt with ‘randomness’ see: Linde, Almut: “Radical Beauty”,
interview with Oliver Zybok, in Kunstforum Vol.199, Ruppichteroth: Kunstforum International (2009), 190.
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