Uncertain Revelation: Noise from the Old Regular Baptists to Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge and Morton Feldman

Abstract

The question this essay turns upon is how noise functions in the American scene not only as an image of excess and degeneracy within a narrative of futurity but also as a performance of different kinds of vocality, temporality, and personality. To this effect, this essay analyzes four very different projects in contemporary American literary and musical history – the heterophonic lined-out singing of the Old Regular Baptists, the "mute" music of Morton Feldman, the associative poetics of Clark Coolidge, and the archival cut-ups of Susan Howe. In this discussion, the concept of noise functions not as an organizing principle but rather as a kind of horizon of listening that shadows and resists meaning and progress while remaining material and temporal – felt or sensed – in its circu­lation. Neither images of "the city upon the hill" nor the frontier (those two classic sites of American narrative), these works refuse prophecy in favor of a moment-to-moment movement. The intensity of uncertainty – in music, signification, theology, politics and eschatology – overwhelms the prescriptive and proscriptive charge of American narratives about reason, religion, order, and nation.