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

Douglas Kahn,
Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.
ISBN: 0 2621 243 4
464 pp
US$46.00 (hb)
Review copy supplied by MIT Press)

Uploaded 25 July 2002

Douglas Kahn’s Noise, Water, Meat is a highly valuable book for anyone interested in sound. Of course, its value extends beyond the notoriously fractious audio arts community; it also reaches past the academic field of sound studies. Kahn’s achievement is to refigure the understanding of twentieth century art in the terms of sound. In the wake of this book, Modernism has a thoroughly delineated aural dimension, one that had previously been concealed beneath its high-profile visual counterpart. To have the twentieth century described in aural terms is not only gratifying for “soundies”; it is of interest to anyone concerned with modern art, culture and ideas.

Kahn contends that the twentieth century “becomes more mellifluous and raucous through historiographic listening”. He guides us through the various uses of sound made by avant-gardists, of whom the Futurists, thanks to Russolo’s Art of Noises, are only the most well-known. But Kahn is dealing with more than the noises cranked out by a legion of provocateurs: he traces the significance of sound as an idea, across a range of art forms and media. Noise – “the forest of everything” rendered in sound – functions as a concept in much of Modernism. It stands for disruption, the “unruly intrusion of an other”; it generates a “productive confusion” in culture.

Some of this territory was previously visited in the collection Wireless Imagination, co-edited by Kahn. Yet Noise, Water, Meat has the advantage of a sustained and detailed analysis, in which questions of technology, aesthetics and politics are elaborated within a specific historical context. The compendious information on early Modern artists, composers and film-makers is particularly revealing: it highlights the various configurations that formed around ideas of art, society and new technological means. The technological production of sound was integral to the artistic-political programs of Dadaists, Constructivists and many other protagonists of noise.

Kahn’s style is lyrical and assured, imposing an agreeable pattern over this mass of detail from “the hitherto muffled regions of the sensorium”. On occasions, however, the eloquence comes at the expense of clarity. Describing the advent of phonography, Kahn remarks: “The voice no longer occupied its own space and time. It was removed from the body where, following Derrida, it entered the realm of writing and the realm of the social, where one loses control of the voice because it no longer disappears.” Who or what is following Derrida here? The voice? Or Kahn? Elsewhere, Kahn confirms that he construes phonography as inscription, a Derridean influence that is nowhere justified and skews some of the analysis. Derrida’s ahistorical privileging of graphic metaphors is more a baleful influence than a help in Kahn’s book: tactility or physicaility may have been a more productive means of figuring phonography than inscription.

Another contentious issue is Kahn’s treatment of John Cage. While acknowledging Cage’s achievements and his success in tilting the sensorial balance “in favor of the ear”, Kahn is critical of the composer’s selective appropriation of noise. Cage may have ventured “to the sounds outside music”, but, according to Kahn, “his ideas did not make the trip.” For Kahn, Cage shied away from a full-scale confrontation with noise, because he wanted to preserve a notional music, in which noise – “social and ecological” as well as auditory noise – was “muted”. Noise is either “musicalized” in Cage, or it is excluded. Kahn admonishes the Cagean aesthetic on the following grounds: “When [Cage] hears music everywhere, other phenomena go unheard. When he celebrates noise, he also promulgates noise abatement. When he speaks of silence, he also speaks of silencing.”

Kahn’s critique is not satisfactorily supported by his analysis; indeed, his rebuke of Cage is difficult to understand – unless there is something of “killing the father” about it. Kahn concedes that later composers and artists developed their own practice by engaging with Cage: Stan Brakhage claimed that Cage “laid down the greatest aesthetic net” of the century. The musicality of noise proved an enduring legacy into the postmodern era of sampling and electronic manipulation of sound – but this aspect of the Cagean legacy is not pursued by Kahn. His history finishes in the 1960s; its tenor is Modernist avant-garde rather than Modern/Postmodern. The later sections of the book pursue the viral, the visceral and the “meat” in art: the presiding angel is not Cage but Artaud. Even here, however, Kahn must acknowledge the productive intersection of Cage and Artaud, “odd” as the former’s fascination with the latter may seem (to Kahn).

If I mention these disagreements with Kahn’s argument, this is no major criticism of Noise, Water, Meat. Any book of this scope and ambition will engender dispute as well as fascination in the interested reader. It will spark ideas and make connections. The sheer detail of Kahn’s account will make this book a valued resource. More than that, however, Kahn has succeeded in his aim: he allows us to hear the art of the twentieth century.

John Potts

About the Author

John Potts

About the Author


John Potts

John Potts is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Radio in Australia (UNSW Press). He is also a radio producer and sound artist whose works have been broadcast on ABC Classic FM.View all posts by John Potts →