ABSTRACT
As noise spreads as concept, its status as sound recedes. Its status as other, same or interlocutor for music can also be heard as diminishing. Whilst granting that there are many, maybe even an infinite number of ways of thinking about what noise is or does, something essential inheres in the relation of noise to music, something that can help with other variants of modelling. Music is present and presented through performative structures, such as concerts, plays, rituals, that make music have meaning, either as music, or as vector of other meaning, as derived within, against or around social structures which are often highly normative. The experience of rejection, exclusion and confusion would affect a sequence of other noise-introducers through the twentieth century, right through to minimalism, drones and chance procedures. Erik Satie gives us a good example of how to think about noise in more than the terms of the introduction of actual noises.
