The Impossible Temptation of Noise in Late Eighteenth-Century English Music

As Hogarth’s famous print, The Enraged Musician, makes clear, “sound” and “noise” are antithetical notions. Noise is defined negatively as a disruptive element. “It works as a deconstruction”, Paul Hegarty claims. Historically, in the Aristotelian tradition, music used to be thought of as an art based upon harmonious sound and correct proportions, that is, as fundamentally opposed to noise, which did not depend on harmony or mathematical rules. Such a conception was, however, to be gradually overruled by theories of the sublime which accomplished a shift from the object (i.e. music) to the subject (i.e. the listener). Music was gradually “freed”, as it were, from its dependence upon mathematics, and since – for Burke – terror was considered the main cause of the sublime, the temptation arose to suggest sublime terror in music by procedures of imitation of natural noises. This, however, clashed with another dominant aspect of the theories of musical expression that directed that whatever was harsh or discordant could not claim the title of “music.” This paper attempts to analyse the epistemological and aesthetic crisis that resulted from the eighteenth-century theories of expression and of the sublime in England, and which made “noise” both something that one was tempted to introduce into music to create sublime effects, as well as something that was fundamentally incompatible with harmonious sound and expression.