1) body, action, sound

Play a sound,
Play it for so long,
Until you feel that you should stop.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1968

The perception of sound in which all is poetry, finally became a modern theory of music in 1913 with Italian futurist Luigi Russolo’s manifesto “The Art of Noises,” which called for musicians to replace the limited tones produced by orchestral instruments for the infinite variety of tones that existed in world, e.g. “the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds.” This call for music based on a wider acceptability of and enjoyment for noise was answered with pieces such as George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique, John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Pierre Shaeffer’s first musique concrete piece Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul, and Edgard Varèse’s Poéme Électronique, to name a few (created before the year 1960!).






In this century, new philosophies of sound have developed parallel to innovations in technology. The very idea of what constitutes music has been evolving since the first translation of sound into electronic signals in 1876 with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. One year after the telephone, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which declared the age of the mechanical reproduction of sound. Twenty-nine years later, in the year 1906, a Canadian businessman named Thaeddeus Cahill invented the teleharmonium, which is the first electronic instrument known to our history of mankind and also a point of entry to understanding the ever-changing relationship between electro-acoustic sound and the human being.



The teleharmonium was a two hundred ton, sixty foot wide, $200,000 machine which used rotating electromagnetic generators to electric impulses which through a keyboard, knobs, and various other controls were sent down wires to a series of telephone receivers fitted with acoustic horns. This massive instrument was in many ways the first synthesizer in that its harmonic range was decided by the mix of different audio frequencies and each ton produced could be sculpted and reshaped with organ-like stops and foot pedals. Cahill’s idea of generating music to homes throughout the United States via telephone broadcasts was revolutionary and foreshadowed Muzak and online computer-accessed music. The teleharmonium inspired Ferruccio Busoni to write in 1907 Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, which outlined a philosophy that “music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny.” This text inspired Busoni’s student Luigi Russolo to write his manifesto previously mentioned. Busoni’s prophesized “the virgin birth of a new beginning” where “in the new great music, machines will also be necessary and will be assigned a share in it.”


Ferruccio Busoni wrote of Cahill’s teleharmonium, “Only a long and careful series of experiments, and a continued training of the ear, can render this unfamiliar material approachable and plastic for the coming generation, and for Art.” Alas, a very long series of experiments birthed a long list of electronic instruments, which along with the grating and grinding tremble of complicated, variegated every-day urban noise, due to “multiplication of machines, which corroborate with man on every front,” has “trained” the ear to find aesthetic appeal in electro-acoustic sound.



A new awareness of the body in relation to sound caused the realization to some that there is no difference between noise, sound, and silence. Russolo believed that the only difference between what was recognized as music and noise was that one was organized and the other was “irregular in time and intensity.” So, in order to make every-day noise into music, one would just have to organize it utilizing the available technology. Musique concrète is an early example of the organization of sound not produced by acoustic instruments. With the invention of the tape recorder, any sound recordable could be organized. Although the exact beginning of musique concrète is hard to pinpoint, many consider 1948, with music of Pierre Schaeffer to be the start.

Shaeffer considered instrumental music to be “abstract” because it was first conceived of the mind, then noted on paper, and finally only realized by instrumental performance. On the other hand, musique concrète, begins with pre-existing sound elements, which may be recorded music or other sound elements, then the sounds are experimentally manipulated, and a montage is created. Shaeffer claimed that the traditional way of creating music was to take an abstract notation of sound, and make it concrete by getting people to perform it, while the new way of making music was by taking concrete sounds, and abstracting them by manipulating the magnetic tape onto which the sound was recorded. The final composition of musique concrète is a result of experiments.

The technology of the time partially dictated the compositional procedures, aesthetics, and theories that led to the completed work. The ability to record sound was pioneered in 1935 with the first tape recorder, the Magnetophon K1, developed by the German electronics company AEG and based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer. Shaeffer spent several months experimenting with the technology available to him, and discovered that he could record sound material on locked- groove discs that repeated instead of spiraling inwards like normal phonograph records. He created rhythmic patterns with the use of repetition, and he discovered that by reproducing and recording sound at a slower or faster speed not only changed pitch but also created interesting timbral modifications. Shaeffer went as far as to make the act of repetition a creative tool: “Repeat the same sound fragment: It is not the same, it has become music.”



Shaeffer’s early revelation that no repeated sound is ever the same reached into the realms of Fluxus with La Monte Young and Takehisa Kosugi’s demonstration that any single sound was extremely complicated in its production, internal configuration, interaction with corporeal and environmental space. The human body and its environment changes sound from one moment to the next, so the “simple musical structure of repetition or sustainment is not simple at all.” La Monte Young made evident that true repetition is impossible with his piece X for Henry Flynt by making listeners aware that “factors of performing the task, of the physics of the instrument, the acoustics of the setting, the vicissitudes of listening, and the resonant complexity of the chosen sound itself forbid it.”


The human body’s now recognized power to transform sound by the act of listening helped to get right inside what it meant to create sound, no longer preoccupied with the external, but rather with the internal processes of becoming aware of what sound actually is like. As John Cage put it, “living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one’s ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one’s thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical.”



John Cage’s influence in electro-acoustic thought is unavoidable. Cage talked of electronics opening up “the entire field of sound, the entire field of time where no rhythm would be beyond the composer’s earth.” He embraced the Hindu philosophy of “using music to quieten the mind to its ultimate destination—silence,” and took inspiration from I Ching He once claimed that the music he preferred was “what we hear if we are just quiet.” With the musical philosophy of Cage, the relationship between the body and sound became a beautiful dance with chance.



Music to John Cage was a discovery of sound, not an exercise in illusions; the medium of sound was not to be ignored any longer and he believed that “the essence of music is sound, and the essence of making sound is ‘to wake people up to the very life they are living.’” He rejected the separation of music from life, and expressed a way of appreciating our ability to hear. For there to be music, “there need not be even any intention to make music for there to be music, only the willingness to attune to aural phenomena.”





The relationship between actions and sound is very exaggerated and dwelled upon with the music explored during the Fluxus movement. An important revelation made during the life of this art group was that “the making of a sound always was connected with a task, but the execution of a task was not always connected with an audible sound.” Their concentration of the body caused them to realize that sound-producing tasks do not always need to produce audible sound to produce works, because music is not just the perception of sound, but also performances, objects, bodies, technologies, texts, discourses, and institutions. An example of a Fluxus music piece is Erik Anderson’s Opera Instruction (1961), which asks the performer to “do and/or not do something universally.” George Brecht isolated a single, observed occurance and projected it into a performance activity:

Two Exercises, fall 1961:

Consider an object. Call what is not the object "other". Add to the object, from the "other", another object, to form a new object and a new "other". Repeat until there is no more "other". Take a part from the object and add it to the "other", to form a new object and a new "other". Repeat until there is no more object.

Douglas Kahn wrote: “Fluxus supported the idea that any performance could be “music” as they sought support in music to explain the performances that were occurring.” Fluxus embraced the body’s participation in making noise in the world, and while keeping the spirit that all noise is music, wanted to acknowledge action as a completely musical activity.