Looking at Noise, or Why We Love the Blue Cranes
We walk or drive around Portland, and we are bombarded – by signs, buildings, sound, traffic, information of all sorts, every possible corner filled with the cultural stuff of the modern city, the air a battlefield of warring noises. We rush by it and through it all quickly because we couldn’t possibly pay attention to all of it, maybe any of it, if we want to focus on things that matter.
Which is all another way of saying: The city sometimes sings out to us in unexpected ways.
A few days before the Great Christmas Whiteout of 2008, I found myself listening to the new CD by the Portland jazz band Blue Cranes, “Homing Patterns,” as I walked to work. I like the energy of the band, the collage of blues, rock and noise, and I like the melodies Reed Wallsmith and Sly Pig wander through on their saxophones. Every now and then, the horns in the band collide, often in a chord, an interesting chord, that expands into another chord and then another, each one pushed to the limit of breath, to the point of honking.
Anyway, I had reached the pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks on Portland’s east side (about where the photo above was taken), right before you get to the Esplanade and the Steel Bridge. The rail line at that place curves deeply, and as I approached a long freight train, with graffiti-embellished boxcars and flatcars, lumbered underneath. They do not do this silently. They grumble along, of course, but because of the curve, they also squeal sometimes, a teeth-gnashing vibration that makes your fillings hurt.
But here, at this particular intersection, something happened: The screech of that train finished off one of those bleating Blue Cranes chords. Slid up the scale a little and finished it off. It was exactly the right note, somehow, and it pulled me up short as the delight of it all dawned on me. Amazing. The perfect sonic accident.
I crossed the Steel Bridge, the chord still in my head, and started walking along the Willamette River, passing the new Mercy Corps headquarters, where construction was underway and a jack hammer was at its business. But now the song had changed, and the hammer’s staccato picked up the tempo of the new tune, the chattering in time to the snare on the CD, on and between the beats. And then I noticed that the two trucks chugging along Naito Parkway created a deeper, more rhythmic bass line.
My ears were on fire. And I wondered, idealistically, is this always the way it is when you’re truly attuned to the outside world? It becomes something “symphonic”? But then it all fell apart as the CD and random noises took different paths; the city stopped playing along with Blue Cranes.
I didn’t know quite to make of it, this moment of alignment, of private meaning, my city and its jazz band united in my head, and my head only, to make something special.
A few days ago, I called composer/Reed College prof David Schiff to talk it over. Actually, I called him to talk about an essay about Charles Ives, the first great American composer of the 20th century, that he’d written in The Nation. I’d been attracted to his idea of Ives as “differently eared” than most composers, which accounts for the strange, cacophonous and at times wonderful intersection of sounds (marching bands and church music) in his songs and symphonies. What made Ives differently eared, Schiff wrote, is that he was unable to do much filtering of what he heard — his songs and symphonies attempted to recreate complete soundscapes, often from his boyhood (perhaps a little like Caden Cotard in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, who attempts to turn the all the tiniest details of his ongoing life into an epic piece of theater, then comment on it, then comment on commenting on it, in an infinite series).
But before I knew it, I had blurted out my Blue Cranes story to him, seeking some explanation, I suppose. Schiff had many wise things to say to help me out –- about Ives, composers, the use of popular music by American composers as opposed to Europeans –- and he also related a history of noise. When Ives was composing his first modern pieces of music in 1906, America, specifically New York, suddenly realized that the industrial world had gotten noisy. Really noisy. And that this was both a change from the past and a big problem. Our first noise ordinances date back to this time, also, the invention of acoustical tile. And, I suspect, the ability to “close our ears” to noise, to ignore it.
Before this time, Schiff said, humans divided sound into two categories — those generated by the natural world and those that were man-made. But once noise, grating and crashing and clamoring, came into the picture, we started dividing it differently, into three sound categories: words, music and noise. “Because we live in a noisy environment, we filter out more now than ever.” One of the things we miss in the city these days, by the way, is the sound of the natural world, other than the odd blackbird or blue jay squawking.
But, of course, as soon as we started dividing sound into three parts, we started experimenting with the bleeding of one category into the other. Ives was part of that, turning the happy noise of his childhood into music. John Cage poked a microphone out of a Manhattan window and used the ambient sound in recordings. Steve Reich has turned spoken words into music. The Blue Cranes perform a song called “Beware the Pneumatic Nailer,” the opening measures of which approximate the title tool. And when we are concentrating (or daydreaming), almost everything becomes background noise.
But our ears, or rather the brain that makes sense of the sound waves our ears collect, are “permeable.” The outside world filters in. The categories collapse and reassert themselves. We start to make sense of the world we encounter and then we start to enjoy it. In Portland we might encounter trains and Blue Cranes, drills and jackhammers, Ives and Reich — a universe of notes that constantly changes. We are the audience for these notes, the way any of it makes
sense. We are transmitters, too, creating our own noise/music/words. And the way we talk about what we hear affects the way the rest of us “hear” differently, too, how we process the sound waves that come our way.
In that sense, we are all becoming “differently eared” all the time. We like to think that how we are hearing here in Portland, how we are making and transmitting culture, is special, that some of our cultural accidents, our meaningful collisions, are also special and particular, of and by and for this place. Not that the same thing doesn’t happen in other cities. It does. But our sounds are our sounds. And surprisingly, sometimes they sound very sweet.
January 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am
I’m surprised that Schiff didn’t mention Edgard Varese, the first to use magnetic tape to compose and a contemporary of Charles Ives who came to this country from his native France in the late Twenties, early Thirties, part of the European diaspora that Joseph Horowitz writes about in his excellent Artists in Exile, How Refugees from 20th century war and revolution trnasformed the American performing arts (and yes, he covers Hollywood, too). Varese incorporated the sounds of New York City in his work and when given a residency at Yado or McDowell lasted about three days because the rural setting was too damned quiet for him to compose.
Here in Portland, we have both the industrial urban music and the um sounds of silence–after I’ve been in New York, where industrial noise is everywhere, I’m struck anew by the quiet of my Mt. Tabor neighborhood, which can make it hard for me to sleep!
Beautiful photograph Barry–did you take it?
January 13th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Well, that paragraph on the blurring of categories came out of my own wee head, so Mr. Schiff can’t be held responsible for leaving out Mr. Varese. I don’t know much about Varese — I do like that he found rural settings too quiet to compose. After David Schiff had moved to Portland, he was talking his old teacher, Elliot Carter, and told him he was going camping the next day. Carter told him to take ear plugs, because it was so noisy! Meaning, I suppose, he wouldn’t be able to filter out new forest noises. Which, Schiff told me, proved to be the case.
Oh and yes, thanks, that’s my own photo!
January 13th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Wow. From snass to kamass to jass, you’ve been covering the waterfront recently (and a nice photo of the waterfront to boot). While the burgeoning use of iPods can isolate us from each other and from our environment, having one’s own personal soundtrack can also turn the walk to work into a symphonic or cinematic experience, enhancing rather than detracting from the experience. I rode the bus to downtown the other day with Elliot Smith playing in my earbuds and imagined I was in a Gus Van Sant movie, for example. It’s all about opening your eyes and ears to the moment and the place.
As a future topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts (Martha’s too) on the prevailing use of the “soundscape” motif as accompaniment to contemporary dance– by which I mean the noisy scritchy, scratchy sound samples, blips, bloops, fleeting text snippets, yelps, squeaks, electronic hum cycles …&c. I still find it mostly effective and compelling, and appreciate the historical context from which it sprang. At the same time, I find myself increasingly hearing it as a cliché. Or maybe my ear has become more attuned to it, and I’m better able to discern when it’s done well and appropriately and when it’s not.
Finally, I’m one of those people who has a hard time sleeping in quiet places thanks to a touch of tinnitus. I don’t know whether the ringing ears are the result of simple aging or too much rock n’ roll, but I only notice it when the world has really quieted down; I sleep better amidst the urban bustle than in the hush of the piney woods.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The sound that goes w/ dance is a great topic for discussion. I remember Twyla Tharp turning me on to Jelly Roll Morton through Eight Jelly Rolls, for example. I understand the idea behind non-musical “scores” for dance, but they CAN become tedious if not downright irritating! I’m gonna try a little Elliot Smith, myself — “so glad to meet you, Angeles” — though maybe the early Portland stuff. “…won’t you follow me down to the rose parade…”
January 14th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Barry,
thanks for writing about my boys, the Blue Cranes—wonderful sounds-of-the-city piece. Sly and Reed are my favorites to play with. You hit all my favorite high and scratchy, murky and specious notes from Ives, Reich, nail-guns, to Jelly Roll and Schiff. . .you should borrow my “self-guided metonymprovisational audio tour” I made for the So. waterfront. It’s designed for two people to listen to (you and Mighty Toy Cannon can have a listening date). I agree with MTC, urban bustle is good, what Franz Kline calls being “part of the noise.”
January 15th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I’m reminded that Mary Oslund’s work “SKY” used a dense soundscape score by John Berendzen, featuring fabulous percussion by the very talented Mr. Tim DuRoche. It stands out as an example of the powerful use of that style of sound accompaniment.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
I’d love to walk to that soundtrack! I hope it has a few down-tempo places so MTC and I can catch our breath… BTW, it was extremely cool of David Schiff to share his thoughts w/ me. Thanks, David.
January 19th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
As I’ve written in Willamette Week, Blue Cranes are one of my fave pdx bands, too, and I wonder whether it’s too much of a stretch to compare the evolution of the city’s music to its urban development. As we live more densely, do we more appreciate music in which so much is going on simultaneously?
Reich has been using found city sounds since at least the mid 1960s with “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out,” but maybe the apotheosis of this element of his work appears in his “City Life,” from a few years ago, which includes NYC car alarms and jackhammers. The first time I interviewed him, some 20 years ago, I asked how much the Manhattan soundscape had affected his music. “Probably a lot,” he mused. “New York is a pretty percussive place.”
After years of going to rural Vermont for composition sabbaticals, Reich finally moved there a few years ago, in the wake of the World Trade Center attack, which happened near his home and severely disturbed him. I wonder whether and how this will affect his music?
January 21st, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I too loved the sounscape for Mary’s “Sky” and hope I mentioned that to Tim at the time. And I’ve liked Tere Mathern’s soundscapes as well, which gets me to my point: for me it all depends on how the choreographer uses the music/sound, how well it’s integrated into the dancing and vice versa, even in the “chance” procedures of Cunningham/Cage. It’s not a question of music visualization, but how it all, as a package, strikes the eye as well as the ear. Does this make sense, anyone?
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 am
Reich will probably now focus on birdsong, buzzing meadows and the sucking noise of rubber boot pulling out of mud. Or maybe he will pull a reverse Ives: live in the country and pretend he’s writing in the city. It’s hard to imagine him rural, though, and I think that has to have SOME affect on him, don’t you?
Martha, I think I get what you’re saying. My way of saying it: It comes down to a question, does the sound have anything to say about the dance (and vice versa)? Either they inform each other in some way or they don’t, and if they don’t, maybe they don’t belong together…