Since I spend more time in an office with DJ Muppet (from The Cathouse's R.U.IN student rock night and
Sure Shot) than is strictly healthy, I am very aware of the dangers of music. Disruptive, exciting, even sensual (like DJ Muppet himself), a playlist can make the difference between a day filled with productive work or one where I have to go out to the CCA balcony every twenty minutes.
Sometimes it feels as if the history of twentieth century music is a series of attempts to describe madness. As Ninian Perry from the Paragon Ensemble just explained to me,
The Rite of Spring is a musical study of why someone would dance themselves to death. And Richard Strauss, when he heard his opera
Electra, expressed surprise that he'd actually written it.
Strauss - not the waltz one - was a fan of funky philologist Nietzsche (he wrote the theme tune to
Fred's best-seller). Nietzsche had a weird relationship to Wagner (kind of a daddy love/hate affair), but championed an almost irrational self-reliance, challenged God to a square-go before succumbing to madness. Like the enthusiastic crowd at Muppet's monthly Saturday night rock disco, all of these guys were up for some mayhem, making heavy metal the logical conclusion to Wagner's experiments with tonality.
I don't see noise music as part of this. Noise music is the domain of people who stand around and stroke their chins at the sound of hell let loose, and is a primarily cerebral, nay, Apollonian product.
Amplification may be a factor - free jazz is acoustic, though, and it shares this Dionysian ambition - but this history of twentieth century music accounts for the increasing wildness of popular music (Slipknot in the charts, Tyler the Creator allowed near a microphone) and the corresponding fears of cultural commentators. Music is becoming the place where the unthinkable, the unsayable, can be expressed.
