ABSTRACT
One theme of twentieth-century composition was to make music out of noise, to reclaim the everyday for art, as it were, to write works for jackhammers. Noise-as-music has as many instances as music-as-noise: Cage and Stockhausen wrote works including "live" radio. Avant-garde composers took up Pierre Schaeffer's and Pierre Henry's idea of musique concrète in a variety of genres. Television Commission in Britain to censure Independent Television News (ITN) for broadcasting a "sick and tasteless" sequence of news in which "the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York was set to music." The music may have been, as ITN claimed, suitable, with "a sombre, funereal tone," but the very attempt to show these images in time to music "was inappropriate and breached the programme code." And silence, as something valuable, to be bought, means not complete silence, but the absence of human or electronic or artificial sounds.
