"Cacophony" - the buzzword quickly came to mind when we were looking for a theme for our February issue. People associate it with carnival music without giving it much thought. And there are at least two reasons for this: On the one hand, carnival, a tradition that dates back to ancient times, celebrates the end of winter and drives it away with noisy and dissonant music. On the other hand, it is a festival of disguise. The poor are allowed to take the place of the rich or even the king for a day. And when the social order is symbolically upside down, you have to make music that is upside down, that parodies itself: Cat music with everyday objects that, far from their usual use, let off steam "disguised" as instruments. Hoses, pipes and funnels act as trumpets, pans and other kitchen utensils as drums.
It is a Swiss peculiarity that this roar was taken up by the festive and colorful brass bands. This gave rise to the Guggenmusik bands in Basel and Lucerne at the beginning of the 20th century.
Surprisingly, it was precisely at this time that avant-garde composers such as Luigi Russolo began to create music from sounds in a completely different genre. This approach reached its peak with Pierre Schaeffer, who in 1966 composed his Traité des objets musicaux a monumental work that classifies all possible and imaginable sounds according to a series of precise criteria. This also ennobled the concrete music that Schaeffer and his students created by processing the sounds themselves, which they had recorded on tape. The composition Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Variations for a door and a sigh) by Pierre Henry, an hour of hissing and creaking door hinges, is a telling example.
"That's not music, that's noise!" the critics never failed to say. But how often have we heard this phrase applied to all kinds of styles that stray off the beaten track? At the beginning of the 20th century, jazz was so disparaged with this phrase that for a while its name was synonymous with hellish noise. And only rock, fifty years later, or serial music! Today, jazz can be heard in the Salle Pleyel and the Rolling Stones have been ennobled by the Queen.
So it is a long time since music was merely the "art of writing beautiful melodies", as the dictionaries of the 18th century put it. A number on the subject of cacophony therefore opens up an extremely broad field. So let's conclude in the same way that rappers fire up their audiences: make some noise!
Have fun!
P.S. The following video shows just how much music can be contained in everyday noises Sound of Noise: Music for one appartement and six drummers.
