Music and Life

Abstract

Music is increasingly reflecting the world around us, combining the rhythms, activities, and experiences of everyday life through electronic technology. A new integration of music and life has emerged utilizing sonic materials such as sounds and words, that establish dynamic interactive processes with the public. This essay examines relevant histories in order to identify when and how this union originated. From Pierre Schaeffer to Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), the author writes a history, chronologically mapping the numerous musical projects that help support and define this music and life concept.

History is written backwards from the present to the past. It is our perception of what is important now that guides our search for historical roots. We note something special and we ask: How did it develop?

So what is important now? Electronic technology has made it possible for music to reflect more of the world around us, integrating the rhythms, activities, and experiences of everyday life. This integration begins with the use of sounds and words that evoke thoughts and feelings relating to place, personality, and events. The structure of music as an ongoing dynamic process therefore allows for an interactive role to be played by the public so that music can be experienced and understood.

The relevant histories of the expanded uses of sounds in music and of music as a dynamic system are short but often confusing because of different motivations and contexts. What about the expanded use of sounds? Did Luigi Russolo, Futurist and inventor of the Intonarumori, really mean to open up music to all sounds in 1914, or was his goal merely the "industrialization" of chamber music? Did John Cage's Imaginary Landscape #1, with its inclusion of non-musical sounds, bring music closer to life in 1939? One could certainly argue in favor of Pierre Schaeffer's intentions in 1948 when he composed his Etude aux Chemins de Fer, his first essay in musique concrete. Yet years later, in the Traité des Objets Musicaux, he confused the situation by talking about identifying sounds not by their roles in life but by their morphologies.

The first distinctive moment of conceptual clarity in connecting sound to life was in R. Murray Schafer's World Soundscape Project in the 1960s. Schafer's goal was to understand how we interact individually and collectively with the sounds around us. The World Soundscape Project later led to a school of musical composition and a multitude of soundscape compositions. Hildegard Westerkamp's India Sound Journal (1993), for example, which grew out of her work with Schafer, is a narrative and audio-sonic journey into various aspects of India's culture, composed from soundwalks that she recorded in India.

Yet Schafer's project can also be seen as part of a larger movement from which we can extract a diversity of sound-and-life connections. John Cage's approach to sound composition, for example, was to define a territory, record all of the sounds within that territory, and then randomize the juxtapositions of the sounds to create an anarchistic world in which everything simply happens simultaneously in a cheerful, symbiotic whole. His Birdcage (1972) is a complex, exuberant, and joyful fabric of juxtapositions centered around birds recorded in aviaries, with Cage's voice and the sounds of the birds creating an atmosphere that is both good humored and ridiculous.

Representing a completely different perspective, personality, and mood, Cecile Le Prado's Le Triangle d'Incertitude (1996) is an evocative and haunting tapestry of sounds from the coasts of Belgium, France, and Spain. There are hints of ship-to-shore talk in various languages, nature sounds, and the sea, where the listener is placed in a world defined entirely by sound. And Jean-Claude Risset's Sud (1985), based on recordings of the sea near Marseilles, portrays the power of a nature that is shaped, filtered, and civilized by both technology and human creativity, bringing various rhythms into play, relating different emotions and forms, and creating an energy that bonds us to the sea.

Words are special sounds. An important aspect of sound-and-life connections in music is...