Text

theses

There was danger in the modern American soundscape; the danger of interruption and disorder. The rhetoric of postwar aural culture was preoccupied with containing sounds and keeping them in their appropriate places. The management and domestication of noise was a critical political and social issue in the quarter century following the Second World War. It was also an aesthetic issue. Although technological noise was celebrated in modern American literature, music and popular culture as a signal of technological sublime and the promise of modern rationality in the US, after 1945 noise that had been exceptional and sublime became mundane. Technological noise was resignified as "pollution" and narrated as the aural detritus of modernity. Modern music reinforced this project through the production of hegemonic fields of representation that legitimized the discursive boundaries of modernity and delegitimized that which lay outside of them. Postwar American modernist composers, reconfigured as technical specialists, developed a hyper-rational idiom of "total control" which sought to discipline aural disorder and police the boundaries between aesthetically-acceptable music and sound and disruptive noise. Leveraging the authority of the academy and the concert hall, they banished the danger in an idiom of total control that inscribed inviolable aesthetic boundaries that separated music from its other. The avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s introduced noise to the spaces of 20th century music and interrupted these boundaries, destabilizing the aural and aesthetic territories of modernism. Denying the authority of rationality and compositional intent, the avant-garde did not subsequently re-territorialize these spaces, producing a rupture in the discourse of modern music that shattered its hegemony and contributed to its eclipse by the end of the 1960s.

ETD_4624

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Matthew Friedman

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000068855

doi:10.7282/T3639NBR

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.