Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.(Review)

Douglas Kahn: Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts

Hardcover, 1999, ISBN 0-262-11243-4, 455 pages, illustrated, notes, index; The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142-1493, USA; telephone (800) 356-0343; electronic mail mitpressorders@mit.edu; World Wide Web mitpress.mit.edu

This book strives to provoke. Its arresting dust jacket, rendered in jangling green and blue, bears the nightmarishly distorted image of a human scream. Should contemporary musicians, particularly those involved with computer technology, expect to find anything inside relevant to their own activities?

The title presents a paradox. How could such disparate notions as "noise," "water," and "meat" have much of anything to do with sophisticated artistic concerns? And the subtitle--A History of Sound in the Arts--seems to presume and promise so much. Is it really possible for a single volume to adequately address such vast implications?

Anyone curious enough to crack the cover of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts certainly will find an intriguing premise stated at the outset: "Sound saturates the arts of this century ... None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array of auditive practices" (p. 2). Surely this seems reasonable--it actually is quite easy to imagine how other arts might be able to point toward new ways of thinking about sound. But which arts, which practices, and to what end?

A specification of the work's purview offers a compact answer:

 
   The book concentrates on the generation of modernist and postmodernist 
   techniques and tropes among artistic practices and discourses ... The main 
   ones discussed here are noise, auditive immersion in spatial and 
   psychological domains, inscription and visual sound, the universalism of 
   all sound and panaurality, musicalization of sound, phonographic 
   reproduction and imitation, Cagean silence, nondissipative sounds and 
   voices, fluidity at the nexus of performance and objecthood, William 
   Burroughs' virus, and the bodily utterances of Michael McClure's beast 
   language and Antonin Artaud's screaming. (pp. 2-3)