Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
and demonstrations were conceived, produced, and traded within a growing, no-profit and self-organised network. Through interviews with musicians and practitioners, analysis of musical artefacts of the time, memoirs, and documentaries, I will highlight the contribution of anonymous industrial centres in the cultural production of 1980s Europe.
The contemporary economic regime of accumulation has been described as ‘flexible’. Flexibility is used metaphorically to describe the shift from mass production to the individualisation and target-oriented diversification of what was offered, from more or less secure and uniform working life to precariousness, from manufacture to services, and from concentration to vertical disintegration of large firms through subcontractors. All these steps are used to sustain the idea of a new regime of accumulation, overcoming Fordism as paradigm of production and consumption and Keynesianism as paradigm of economic development (Lash and Urry 1987; Harvey 1989). European deindustrialisation is a consequence of this change. The flexible regime of accumulation was also capable of muting successful subaltern voices, by including them into its project of profit making.
Chapter 2
A Genealogy of ‘Industrial
City Music’
Genealogies of noise tend to associate noise to modernity (Payer 2007; Bijsterveld 2008; Goddard, Halligan, and Spleman 2013; Epstein 2014), as if pre-modern history were a place of silence, sometimes broken by the clashes of armies in warfare. In truth, noise started being a problem in the Middle Ages, and its regulation was carried out extensively, especially in relation to the night time or to festivities. In Turku (Finland) every year on Christmas Eve at noon, the mayor reads The Declaration of Christmas Peace; this tradition dates back to the 1300s and advises people to behave peacefully and quietly during Christmas time.
It is, however, with modernity and the industrial revolution that noise starts taking its toll on everyday life and becomes a constant preoccupation. From technology to law, from health care to political control, modern institutions have tried to classify, tame, channel, and avoid noise as the unwanted side effect of modernisation. Factory work, political demonstrations, motorised traffic, warfare, and simple human density have increased the level of noise in cities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are studies indicating that noise might be another component of contemporary urban inequalities, with the urban poor having to cope the most with living environments where noise is increasingly concentrated.
The French classic book Le Bruit (Botte and Chocholle 1984), part of the popularising science collection Que sais-je?, identifies some general characteristics of noise. These are physical, including intermittence, erraticness, and randomness of acoustic vibrations, but are also relative to their disagreeable effects on the human ears. The authors also refer to the subjective dimension of this last element: what can be indifferent or positive to someone might be really annoying to someone else. According to them, noise has, however, some general features that can be agreed upon. The first one is intensity; all sounds, even the most agreeable, become noise if they are too loud. The second is complexity, because noise is considered as not having a salient tonal character or a dominant component. However, not all complex sounds can be considered noise. Brevity and high modulations also belong to noise because it is intermittent and irregular in pitch, frequency, and intensity. Noise originates at the presence of some or all of the above-mentioned features and to the disagreeable experiencing of them. This definition is instrumental to classifying and therefore finding solutions to what the book defines as its most common typologies in our everyday life: traffic and industrial noise. According to Botte and Chocholle, noise is something that can be measured, and its propagation can be tested and somehow limited institutionally; their main interest is providing reflections on how to reduce it and who is paying the most due to its propagation, in social and political terms.
Industrial noise originates with industrialisation and is linked to major inventions, starting with the steam engine and followed by the construction of mines, factories, abattoirs, warehouses, power stations, and vast areas for heavy production.
As seen in chapter 1, an industrial city features the intense presence of visual material with high ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960), such as bare materials, like red bricks, bare concrete, and iron; forms that are linear, modular, and pattern-like; colours, like red and grey; and superficial phenomena, like rust and wear. Main architectural elements are chimneys, firewalls, and gasworks.
The visual dimension is a strong signifier of the industrial condition; however, its most debated and regulated features invest other senses, such as smell and sound. Industrial cities can smell of coal, gas, various chemicals used in production; of final products; and of a combination of the above. Modern cities began to tackle vapours and smells from sewers in the nineteenth century, and urban planning started taking into account the origin and entity of certain smells because of their supposed dangerous effects on health. For instance, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s study on Parisian sewers (1824), motivated both by medical and social purposes, offers an amazing example of the attempt to identify, understand, and classify smells by ethnographic means (Lindner 2004). New York City’s Metropolitan Board of Health has tried to limit and control the city’s bad smells since 1866. However, common knowledge, superstitions, and beliefs connected to smells, beside smells themselves, continued affecting the perception and reputation of certain districts, especially the ones where industrial production settled (Kiechle 2016). It is only in the early 1970s, nearly a century later, that, as seen in the previous chapter, Sheffield was able to boast smokeless air all over the city, thanks to the Clean Air Act and after decades of attempting to tame this problem.
Along the centuries, regulations also affected industrial soundscapes; however, production by heavy machinery continued making mechanical noise, mostly repetitive, rhythm-like noise, only lately accompanied by swift digital robotic bleeps and bloops. While smells were increasingly controlled and tamed by technology along the years, noise spiraled both in intensity and in sonic palette. Noises represent a sharp and distinctive feature of the industrial city and of its imaginary, and it is only by physically moving heavy production elsewhere that the industrial soundscape can be muted. Funnily enough, it is with music that factories tried to provide an antidote to noise. Music gave only a partial solution to noise pollution in providing working rhythms and maintaining productivity, but it definitely constructed a social feeling on tedious factory floors and a means for resistance among workers (Korczynski 2014, 2007).
Today, it is only cars that provide the lo-fi keynote sound of urban living. Noise can be understood as the main element of the industrial city’s material existence and sensorial experience. Noise was also one of the forging elements of the twentieth century. It was a constant interlocutor for music production throughout the century; however, there are two competing narratives in reference to this. The first is connected to the art world of contemporary classical music and to the avant-garde use of noise and found sounds in the context of music composition and of music work. The second is defined by popular culture and by the continuous intermission of mediated sounds in popular music. References to real places, locations, and individual stories have often enriched these two narratives, and musicians have justified their production in various ways.
Art Music and Industrial Noise
I use the concept of art music to refer to classical music production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Understanding itself solely as art, this music output has mostly used the industrial world as inspiration or reflected upon some of its aspects, such as repetition, from the aesthetic point of view. Rarely has an industrial city played a significant role in the evolution of industry-inspired art music. It is mostly in capital cities and cultural centres that art music flourished in the twentieth century. A few exceptions can be made: that of Milan, Italy, where futurist music was first conceived and Darmstadt, Germany, where serial music developed.
Luigi Russolo published L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) in 1913. Russolo was an Italian futurist painter who wrote this manifesto of futurist music as a letter to musicologist and musician Balilla Pratella, who himself had written a text about musica futurista. Futurismo belonged to the wave of avant-garde