February 12, 2004
Aaron Copland Says Bring The Noise
(this is a continuation of the discussion here)
A while ago I singled out the "noise" as a missing piece in Jack White's definition of music, as applied in his negative assessments of hip-hop. My assertion was that the visceral quality of the sounds, as distinct from melody/harmony/rhythm/lyrics, always helps to shape our musical experience, and is a crucial element of hip-hop's appeal in particular.
From Marley Marl's seminal screeches on "The Bridge", on to the Bomb Squad's "Bring the Noise" aural manifesto, on to El P's funcrushery, on to Dizzee Rascal's grime, hip-hop has focused on cultivating and exploring this element of the music, the quality of the noise, more than any western pop form I can think of.
I recently came across some corroborating testimony on the subject from Aaron Copland, who unlike me possessed the musical vocabulary to express the ideas properly. This comes from an essay named "The Sonorous Image" in his book Music and Imagination (published in 1952):
One of the prime concerns in the making of music, either as creator or as interpreter, is the question of how it will sound. On any level, whether the music is abstruse and absolute or whether it is intended for the merest diversion, it has got to "sound."
...Yes, the sonorous image is a preoccupying concern of all musicians. In that phrase we include beauty and roundness of tone; its warmth, its depth, its "edge," its balanced mixture with other tones, and its acoustical properties in any given environment. The creation of a satisfactory aural image is not merely a matter of musical talent or technical adroitness; imagination plays a large role here.
...Most people's aural memory is remarkably strong; heard sounds remain in the mind for long periods of time, and with a sharpness that is also remarkable. From the early twenties I still retain an impression of fantastic sonorities after a first contact with Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire, or a little later, the astonishing percussive imaginings of Edgar Varese, especially in a piece called Arcanes, head once but not again. ...I can remember too the particular acid sound of a mexican small-town band playing in the public square on Sunday evenings in Tlaxcala. Were they playing out of tune, do you think? Perhaps, but nevertheless they were creating an aural image authentically their own. So was an English choir of boys' and men's voices that I heard in a London cathedral. They had a hollow, an almost cadaverous quality; not pretty, perhaps, but certainly memorable. Most unforgettable sound of all was that of a massed orchestra and band of some one thousand high school performers in an Atlantic City convention hall all simultaneously searching for the note A. It is hopeless to attempt to describe that sound. Jericho's walls must have heard some such unearthly musical noise.
I do not mean to suggest that sounds in themselves, taken out of context, are of any use to a composer. Interesting sonorities as such are scarcely more than icing on the musical cake. But a deliberately chosen sound image that pervades an entire piece becomes an integral part of the expressive meaning of that piece...
I'd like to see what Copland would say if he was around to apply his concepts to hip-hop..
Posted by jsmooth995 at February 12, 2004 01:19 AM
Are you saying that hip hop is noisier than rock, in general??
I thought the distortion pedal was standard issue for rock guitarists. And isn't the guitar the foundation of rock music??
Sure, production-wise... hip hop adds more noise in the recording/sampling process. But if you put a distorted guitar through an MPC, it won't necessarily sound better.
Also, drum machines are notoriously devoid of noise, and I thought the drum machine was the foundation of hip hop production (at least it was for the first 10 years of hip hop).
Posted by: eric at February 12, 2004 03:27 PM
You're using a different definition of "noise" than I am.. maybe the examples I chose in the 2nd paragraph confused the issue a bit, since those are all fairly abrasive "noisy" choices..
If you go back and read the original Jack White post it might be a little clearer.. or forget that I said the word "noise" and replace it with "sound" or Copland's "sonorous image."
"Noise" in the sense I am using it is what makes all the difference for a drum machine, as I was illustrating in the Primo/Celine Dion comparison.
Posted by: Jay Smooth at February 12, 2004 03:40 PM
The difference between a Primo snare and a Celine snare is a matter of distortion. An MPC creates that noise by virtue of its converting analog to digital. If I'm not mistaken, an MPC essentially degrades the signal, and thus creates "noise". Whereas a fancy Kurzweill sampler would reproduce the sounds without any detectable loss of quality.
In a sense, this degradation can be likened to a sort of digital acoustics. But acoustics is largely a function of echo and the resulting constructive and destructive interference. In other words, sounds can double-up or cancel out, based on the acoustics of a room. Live acoustic recordings take advantage of this.
The only reason I belabor this point is that it seems hip hop has shifted the focus from recording acoustics to playback acoustics.
For example... how often do we listen to a recording on a little clock radio, and aight. And then you take it out to your booming car system... and it sounds completely different. Or how about the fact that some average tunes sound amazing on a club system. A straight live recording doesn't necessarily have these dramatic differences, in my opinion.
And if you've ever recorded live drums and bass -- I have -- the limitations and obstacles are many. And if I'm not mistaken, Lee Perry recorded most of his bass lines "line in" at his revolutionary Black Ark studio. And nowadays everyone is using synth bass. Live recording is extremely difficult without a well designed studio. I have always felt that hip hop gives us a lot of power to do a lot with a little.
I guess my main point is that the main difference between the "noise" in hip hop and rock is that live rock recording attempts to caputre analog/acoustic noise, whereas hip hop engineers its music to have noise in the end result. In general, hip hop artists do very little, if any, acoustic recording.
But I would still argue, that for ever Primo or Pete Rock or Madlib crucnchy snare, there is a rock band with a distorted guitar and enough layering to render the recording "dirty". Black Sabbath, Steppenwolf, the Stooges, Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Dead Kennedys, etc.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that what is often considered "rock" these days is actually "muzak".
Posted by: eric at February 12, 2004 06:20 PM
Jay - when you bring up the idea of noise, you should also reference Jacques Attali's seminal long-essay by the same name (i.e. "Noise"). It's been a while since I've read it but Attali's point is that one society's concept of noise is another society's idea of music and that sound, itself, is a matter of perception and social consensus.
Posted by: Oliver Wang at February 13, 2004 04:25 AM
The difference between those two snares is not just distortion. It's context, what's before and after and during the sound. There may be only so much you can do with it by itself, but there are a million different kinds of snare drum, and a million ways to mike it and process it, and when you add whatever sound you come up with to the rest of the instruments, well, at best you got art.
Copland was brilliant, and more than a little aware of the world around him. If he were around today, I'd bet he'd change his opinion from that last paragraph. Thanks to technology, those sound-moments in and of themselves have become tools which which whole new houses can be rocked.
And for what it's worth, I'd bet Jack White was either shooting his mouth off or has rethought what he said. This whole discussion hits too close to what he actually does for him to believe that shit for long.
What an excellent discussion.
Posted by: Chico at February 13, 2004 11:39 AM
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