Music, Noise and Conflict: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Acoustic Agency and Ontological Assumptions about Sound

Abstract

In a 1969 interview, the Italian composer Luigi Nono stated that, ‘If a score cannot provoke or incite revolution, it can contribute to it by participating in intellectual and revolutionary hegemony.’1 Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nono considered composers as intellectual workers with a responsibility to catalyse or amplify the social struggles of their times through the technical means and material employed in their works.2 The scores, tapes or concerts were sites of action and representation of revolutionary struggles: ‘A score can mature and evolve into direct and concrete participation of the struggle, which can be confronted and transposed into the score.’3 He believed that the musical experience was capable of reconfiguring reality through dual listening – the composer’s listening to revolutionary struggle, and audiences’ listening to the resulting musical works. Furthermore, Nono proposed a direct link between technology, hegemony and the use of sonic archives. As I have examined elsewhere, in the 1960s and the early 1970s Nono believed