What is that noise?

I picked up a copy of The Daily Telegraph on the tube last week and turned to the music section. Despite the central article involving a huge picture of Sting looking like some retired estate agent who was welling up with pride after buying a villa on the Costa del Sol with the Missus, I read on. There was an article on Gustav Mahler's "Symphony No. 5". It described the first time it was performed to the public- October 18th, 1904, in Cologne. It was conducted by Mahler himself and, in a not unusual turn of events, the reception was "not friendly", as The Daily Telegraph put it. In an admirable display of self awareness, Mahler fully understood the reaction of his unsatisfied public. He said "And the public... what are they to say to this primeval music; this foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound?"

This got me thinking. That description is the kind of thing you'd see in music media nowadays to describe, perhaps, something like this:



Or, a decade or two ago, something like this:



Or, in the 1970s, this:



Or the 1950s:



Or even the 1920s:



Reading that article, I was really struck by the fact that what we call "noise" or just "sound" in music is totally, totally relative to the context and the music that's around at the time. As musical boundaries are pushed further and further with the progression of time, that which is defined as "noise" constantly changes. No sensible and informed music listener nowadays would call 1970s punk "noise", at least in a derogatory sense. Neither would they say the same of late 90s gangsta rap, or 1950s rock n roll. It would seem absurdly prim and conservative. As far as I'm concerned (and experience has nearly always demonstrated this to be true), only the uninformed and close minded will describe any form of arguably abrasive or intense music as "just noise".

A truly interesting thing though is the fact that, nowadays, that which literally is (in a purely clinical sense) "noise" i.e. arbitrary sounds recorded and produced, with no traditional musical instruments or structures, is considered a genre. It's given musical merit, and taken seriously and thought about. Take for example that first link above, from nosie music giant Merzbow. The stuff he produces genuinely fascinates me and a few of my contemporaries. There are plenty of other, more and less "listenable" examples of artists who use noise and present it as music: Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Rhys Chatham. For me, that is fascinating. It really pushes the question: what is music? If I record thousands of industrial machine sounds, slap them together and create an album, and I believe that it is music- designed to make you think and challenge all of your ideas and preconceptions- is it music? Is the definition of music limited to that which appeals to traditional structures? Or is it about what you take away from it, and what you think it is? Going back to my opening, Gustav Mahler himself despised the idea of producing programmes at performances which told audiences what the music was about. He declared "Death to all programmes... let the audience make up its mind!"

So was it left to that audience in 1904 in Cologne to decide whether or not what they heard was music or, indeed, a "foaming, roaring, raging sea of sound"? Mahler's 5th would now seem to those not really versed in music from the Romantic, Classical eras etc. as a boring piece of orchestration (although, having listened to the piece since, I can't imagine why, it is stunning!). But culture's views on what constitutes "noise" in the music industry are incredibly transient and subject to change. Perhaps more so than our opinions on any other area of music, though we may not realise it. So what is noise? Does it even exist as a legitimate derogatory term any more? Noise artists have hi-jakced the insult and turned it into an actual genre, proudly proclaiming "yes, this is noise! Now what do you make of it?!" For me, it's the last real area of active post-modernism in the mainstream creative arts. What do you think?