Future Sounds by Stephen Kennedy

Author:Stephen Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

The modern musician, despite affecting the appearance of an independent artist, was in fact working at the behest of the great powers, and was the producer of the symbols of power. It was, for Attali, a power that confirmed the end of meaning.

Theoretical music’s response to ‘empty’ pop music, which occasionally allowed for quality output, was not to Attali’s liking. Rather it took repetition to a new level of absurdity. All that was meaningless in pop music of the 1960s and 1970s was emptied even further by the avant-garde modernists. Mass music and theoretical music were for him more tightly entwined than was immediately apparent. Both operated in the service of a dominant technocracy that had reached a critical turning point. Like most turning points, the future direction of travel involved a choice: In this case between a new kind of music with liberatory qualities and a newly encoded dictatorship. At its zenith, Attali believed, repetition imposed silence, and it did so by means of controlling noise. ‘One must then no longer look for the political role of music in what it conveys, in its melodies or discourses, but in its very existence’ (122). For music, in all its forms, in the mode of repetition was meaningless. Its very existence silenced noise. The mode of repetition demonstrated this never better than in the concert halls. For the elite it was an opportunity to remind themselves of their moral superiority, and for the rest it became a simulacrum of the festival, a representation of violence and release. The controlled environment of the concert hall had become a simulacrum of life. If an excess of life is death, then noise is life. In turn then too much noise, as another kind of excess, must mean death also, and this was identified by Attali as a feature of music, theoretical and mainstream, in the mode of repeating. What was required to overcome it, he thought, was a new language that could return meaning through new codes.8 ‘Today, the repetitive machine has produced silence, the centralised political control of speech, and, more generally, noise’ (122). So, noise needed to be liberated, but only to a degree. It would need to be a controlled noise and coded in a way that did not induce further death and silence, but that could disturb the silence of repetition. For Attali repetition had prevailed to such an extent that under its conditions, and within the framework of its codes, no one had anything to say any more. Their voices could not be heard above the ‘controlled noise’ of the system – a system that had succeeded in employing even dissenting voices as a central aspect of its control mechanism.

For Attali then noise implied dissent and negation, and was a force that although essential needed to be coded and controlled. The quite different claim here is that it is a universal ground of potential. It names a process of incessant destruction and renewal that can only ever be tamed temporarily.

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