When Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the gang rioted in line with the cruel dissonance and jarring rhythms of its rating. This used to be noise, no longer track. In Sublime Noise, Josh Epstein examines the importance of noise in modernist song and literature. How—and why—did composers and writers contain the noises of recent undefined, war, and big-city lifestyles into their work?

Epstein argues that, because the artistic type engaged with the racket of cityscapes and new media, they reconsidered not only the cultured of track but additionally its cultural results. Noise, finally, is greater than a sonic class: it's a cultural price judgment—a method of abating and categorizing the sounds of a social area or of recent tune. Pulled into discussion with glossy music’s leading edge rhythms, noise signaled the breakdown of art’s autonomy from social life—even the "old favorites" of Beethoven and Wagner took on new cultural meanings while circulated in noisy sleek contexts. using noise additionally unfolded the closed area of artwork to the pressures of exposure and technological mediation.

Building either on literary cultural stories and paintings within the "new musicology," Sublime Noise examines the wealthy fabric dating that exists among track and literature. via shut readings of modernist authors, together with James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound, and composers, together with George Antheil, William Walton, Erik Satie, and Benjamin Britten, Epstein bargains a substantially modern account of musical-literary interactions that is going way past natural formalism. This ebook could be of curiosity to students of Anglophone literary modernism and to musicologists attracted to how song was once given new literary and cultural that means in the course of that complicated interdisciplinary period.