Musical Violence, Pt.2: Noise and Disorder

Before continuing with some examples, let's ask a fundamental question: what is sonic violence? Since the perceptive apparatus of every individual is quite different, we can't ascribe the principle of musical violence to any of the technical parameters of music. Where a young man might hear a deep groove in a hip-hop track, an old man might hear nothing but repetitive noise in the same piece. Thus, dissonance is not in itself violence, although in Western music is has often taken the role of the deviant force that is purged throughout the work. Similarly, volume (amplitude) is not in and of itself violence. When we get into the realm of registration and timbre, however, certain sonic qualities can emerge that are - when combined with the proper volume - intensely violent. The motorcycles that drive under my window day in and day out, for instance, are an assault on my ears: to everyone except the individuals driving the machines, the combination of extreme decibel levels and that roaring, grimy quality of the timbre is enough to make me feel tortured, if just for three seconds. Sirens and alarms are similarly calibrated to be as conspicuous as possible.

"But Zach," you may ask, "motorcycles and alarms are noises, not music." This objection is indeed well-stated, but only to a point. If you were to define music as organized sound that has a melody, harmony, rhythm, etc., then certainly the phallically-challenged brutes that rev their motorcycles below my window are not making music. However, place those same dudes on a concert stage in front of an audience all holding programs for the debut of "Motor Sounds IV" by Z.T. Wallmark, and all of a sudden you have a different situation. Crudely put, music is sound that is contextualized by people to be music: is it pure sound that is willed into becoming music by the creative hand of the musician. There is no shortage of "noise" in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varése, John Cage, and Krzysztof Penderecki, and even in Beethoven and Wagner for that matter, yet few would doubt whether these composers' works are in fact music.

Over the next post (or two - we'll see how long this takes), I'd like to lay out some rough analytical categories that I've concocted over the last afternoon. With a few concrete examples, I will briefly explore the four scalar forms of musical violence as I see them: noise, disorder, order, and repetition. More importantly, you privileged readers will get to take part in the Mirth and Matter trial run of a free file-hosting service that I found online: hopefully the easy downloading of my (few) musical examples goes smoothly. So, without further ado, let's move on to the music!

Violence as Noise

Even Enya when played at extreme volume levels is torturous (many in fact would argue that her music is torturous all the time). Extreme volume levels aid in pulling the listener further into the music - witness the oblivious pod-zombies, pumping car stereo systems, and rave parties. However, extreme is extreme: if the music isn't what you want to be putting into your ears, loud music can seem like, well, noise.

Sound is a fascinating medium, really, because you are totally at its mercy. If I am confronted with a painting or sculpture that I detest, I can simply turn away - I don't have to look at it. But music is something different. If a piece of music I detest (Souljah Boy's "Crank That," for instance) is playing near me, I have to physically remove myself from the situation to escape the sound or I have to physically cover my ears. There is no other way to get away from it. Thus, oftentimes we are at the mercy of the music in our environments, not the other way around. Noise, then, can sometimes take the form of a sort of aural rape - it enters you despite your protestations.

I have found no other style of music that exemplifies the brutal aesthetics of pure noise more than extreme metal. Coming in subgenres as diverse as hardcore, death metal, math metal, grind-core, doom metal, sludge metal, and a host of other styles, the development of "heavy metal" (umbrella term) over the last 30 or so years has mirrored the last 400 years of Western music history in its continual progression towards a technical apex. The progression here, however, has been towards a greater and more versatile control and mastery over pure noise. Noise is the energizing aesthetic of metal music.

For a perfect example of some extreme contemporary metal, listen to "Sugar Coated Sour", by the New York thrashers The Dillinger Escape Plan. [click the link; go to "Badongo"; hit "download" - the file will magically appear on iTunes.] After the jumpy intro, the weight of their sound hits you like an Acme piano. Even when listened to quietly, this is high decibel music, complete with roaring drums and shredding guitars. There is close to zero dynamic nuance to this music: you have entered into a very noisy sound world indeed.

Let's put the extremely complex structure and the cartoonish morbidity of this tune aside to focus on the sound itself. In metal's ever-increasing mastery of noise, techniques were developed to bypass traditional musical devices entirely. The guitar sound is so distorted that it is very difficult to make out what notes exactly are being played; furthermore, using the palm of the hand, the players are able to mute the strings, cutting out about 3/4 of the resonating quality of the strings and adding another layer of rhythmic propulsion. What is felt by the listener is not distinct chord qualities but a shifting, hyper-rhythmic mass of noise that is punctuated by aggressive drumming. Over the top of this complex sound matrix is the singer, although you will have to work hard to decipher a single word he's singing. Indeed, in this genre of music, the lyrics are completely secondary to the timbral quality of a male voice pushed to extremes to create the trademark guttural scream. On metal blogs and fan sites, the best vocalists are the ones who are compared to beasts, not humans: "monsterous" is a common adjective.

The effect of well-executed hardcore metal is singular: it is confrontational, primal, and yes, violent. We must distinguish this form of violence, however, from the actual physical variety: like "no-touch torture," this is a violence of the mind, but it is an aggression willingly sought out by fans the world over. Like Antonin Artaud's "theater of cruelty," this sort of extreme metal is designed to push audiences into a psychological space where they are forced to encounter their own fears, aggression, and raging energy. For those who hate this style, it is noise pure and simple; for fans, a metal concert is a way to purge violent energy in a constructive, community-oriented, socially acceptable way. It is pure ritual music in the way Attali defined it.

Violence as Disorder

I have a friend who hates jazz. It's not even a matter of casually disliking the style; she legitimately hates it. When I asked her why, she said that to her ears, jazz is just a bunch of guys playing as many notes as they could in no particular order. It was chaos.

Of course, the fact of the matter is that jazz is not chaos - it is perhaps the most rigorously organized form of music in the world that is performed in dingy bars and not Houses of Culture. Yet, as I hear musical conversation and elegant negotiations of some tricky harmonic questions, she is hearing some hipster blowhard blatting away on a saxophone. It is violent on her ears. In this instance, the perceptual difference between the two of us has to do with training. But there is a form of jazz - free jazz - that is just as wild and unpredictable on my ears as Charlie Parker is on hers. (I just happen to like the discombobulation.)

Free jazz, since its very inception through the prophetic horns of Ornette Coleman and a cadre of west coast musicians in the late 1950s, is radical. It makes no concessions to melody, refuses to bend to harmony, pushes away steady rhythmic pulsation. It was, in other words, a form of music made to be listened to by only an elite handful that had the aural fortitude to experience disorder as sonic bliss. As segregation held the south in its hateful grasp and the Civil Right Movement was just gaining momentum, free jazz musicians met in smoky basements to proclaim their freedom through their instruments. If Schoenberg ushered in the emancipation of the dissonance, free jazz represented the emancipation of improvisation.

The previous example may have been noisy, but it was immaculately organized. There's a reason that high school kids rarely form hardcore metal bands: it is simply too technically demanding and structurally sophisticated for the average alienated teen. Free jazz is a different animal: while the improvisations are certainly based on patterns - they aren't completely random - they are not limited by strict structure. No one is dictating what harmonies to outline, what sort of tone to use, etc. Performing free jazz is engaging in a spontaneous, in-the-moment, group conversation between the players. Is is disordered, but it is still founded on the basic premise of saying something and telling a story. Free jazz stories just tend to be more extreme in their dimensions than, say, cool jazz stories.

In John Coltrane's final years, he pushed further and further away from the jazz mainstream with a series of uncompromising, brutal, and beautiful albums. Free jazz is just where Coltrane's ear led him in the search to express himself spiritually: he wasn't attached to the radical black politics of the movement. Unfortunately, the total recorded output from his "late phase" consists of only two and a half years worth of material, from 1965 to 1967. Still, it seems that these records are embraced more passionately by the cognoscenti than any of Coltrane's earlier material - it is harder to understand, but for those who take the time and energy to "get it," this music is full of profound treasures. I am drawn to these records very infrequently - about once a year - but when I'm craving late Trane, it's the only thing that satisfies.

"The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost" is the opening improvisation on the 1965 album Meditation. It begins with a static, incantatory duel between Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, each of them playing in a perfect fifth. The "head," if you could call it that, begins at 0:47 - really, this theme is simply an arhythmic ascending major scale pattern that Coltrane stretches at his will over Sanders's wailing drone. There is no clear periodicity in the rhythm section. From 2:15 in, Coltrane's wild, searching solo begins, filling up the next four minutes of the track with revelatory, shocking exploration. In the background, you will hear a rhythm section gone beserk: different rhythms rub up against each other; different pulses run side by side in a viscous, disorderly river of sound.

In many ways, the sonic violence of free jazz is tied to the quality of expectation (or the lack thereof). In a Beethoven symphony, The Dillinger Escape Plan, or any jazz standard, the composition is designed to be an in-and-out accordion of tension and release. As Attali wrote, the musician creates problems, then solves them, and the solution to each problem is a sort of rhetorical argument. Oftentimes, repetition is key to structuring an argument (just like Obama's "Yes we can!"). We can anticipate the return of the theme in Beethoven's fifth because we have heard it before. Even The Dillinger Escape Plan bounds their pieces in structured units that repeat - noisy as they are, they are at least orderly.

Not so with this example, and with free jazz in general. (Actually, this song begins and ends with the same 5th motive and "head," so perhaps there's a purist out there saying that it's not really free.) If metal is the art of noise, free jazz is the art of disorder. This music is completely unpredictable - it annihilates expectation so totally as to make it a completely electrifying experience to behold. You just have no idea what's coming next. At the same time, however, comes the violence of being totally lost in a swirl of noises. It is complete submission to chaos. There are no linear, logical arguments being spelled out in sound; if peace of mind is knowing what to expect and being secure, this is not peaceful music at all. Then again, that's not why people are attracted (and repulsed) by it. Free jazz possesses its fierce power because it resists the gravity of order, reveling entirely in the violent uncertainty of the present. There is no past and future while improvising freely - there is only now.

[As I suspected, this post has grown quite long and I'm not going to pummel our readers with yet two more categories, so I'll save those for the third and final (I promise!) installment of this post.]