As we celebrated the 100th year of the birth of John Cage in 2012 it is worth considering some other significant milestones in the development and of an aesthetic of noise, an attention to those sounds that were formerly considered to be contrary to the refinements of Western music. 99 years have passed since Luigi Russolo’s manifesto, ‘The Art of Noises’ was published in 1913 - Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ was composed in same year.  In the 20s, 30s, and 40s composers such as Edgard Varese, George Antheil, John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer produced significant noise works that looked towards the promise and possibilities of electronics - enter the German wunderkind, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Explorations into sound as tonal density, sound clusters and noise continued in the concert-hall music of Olivier Messiaen and Gyorgy Ligeti.  Looking backwards from the perspective of 2012 there are too many names now to mention amongst those composers who have embraced noise over melody, harmony, sometimes even rhythm. Structural considerations have remained important to some, less to others. I might mention: Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, James Tenney, R Murray Schafer, Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, Fritz Hauser and John Luther Adams. 

In 1939 John Cage made his famous statement: “Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears we shall hear freedom.” I’m not sure if John Cage was suggesting that once the means to creating sophisticated electronic music was freely available that percussion music would no longer be considered revolutionary and might even be considered a little mundane. In the last few years, I began to believe that the possibilities of percussion music might have been exhausted. That is, until I heard the music of John Luther Adams. His music or should I say, his noise, would probably be considered magical and shamanic in certain cultures. It allows us, the listening participants, to enter a domain of natural forces, a field of sound that is both within and without, that while suggesting the infinite allows us to: “better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.”  Jacques Attali