Sound Experiments in the First Half of the 20th Century

This course explores the radical transformation of musical sound and thought from the fin de siècle through the end of the Second World War. Moving beyond the traditional canon, the course investigates a constellation of experimental practices that challenged the very foundations of music: its materials, its methods of organization, and its social and aesthetic purposes, the sound itself. The general focus is the emergence of modern sound studies through the prism of early 20th-century experimentation. We will examine the fundamental division and redefinition of sound from noise to tone, from tone to microtone, from acoustic to electronic, from notated to recorded.

Key themes include the emancipation of noise as championed by the Italian Futurists around Luigi Russolo; the liberation of harmonic and formal structures in the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, leading to atonality and serialism; the division of the tone in the microtonal explorations of Charles Ives, Alois Hába, Ivan Wyshnegradsky, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov and Julián Carrillo; and the conceptualization of spatial sound and rhythm as primary parameters in the compositions of Edgard Varèse. A central thread is the objectification of sound through new technology. We will study how the gramophone was reimagined as an instrument by composers like Paul Hindemith, how optical film soundtracks inspired pioneers, and how early electronic instruments the Theremin, Ondes Martenot opened new sonic realms, as heard in works by Olivier Messiaen. The course culminates by examining the postwar dawn of musique concrete with Pierre Schaeffer and the radical philosophical shift prompted by John Cage.

Ultimately, the course positions these sonic experiments within the broader intellectual currents of modernism, examining how figures like Russolo, Varèse, Cage, and Schaeffer responded to, and shaped, new ideas about time, space, perception, technology, and the human condition in a rapidly changing and often turbulent world. "