As city dwellers we acclimate to the sound of our surroundings, most of the time with great disgust.

United with friends, we curse the timely arrival of trams grinding to a halt 15 metres from our window. A Frankensteinian neighbour above that finds pacing at all hours of the night soothing. Crying children on corners, in a passing pram, at bakeries, in parks, soothed in reverberated hallways, ad nauseum. Yet, I find some sounds inspirational and have even attempted to duplicate them in my productions. As an example, an electrical rod from a tram dislodging from the line above creates a resonance that is unmatched. Those rods swinging violently and quite at random, give me a distinct impression that this is what it must sound like to a fly suddenly caught in a spider’s web. There is a tone of liquidity in the flailing of the rods that sends its percussive output to surrounding buildings which then reflect and send back to us their notes. This thrashing of the rods alone, I believe, wouldn’t have the same impact on me in say, a desert, where there is nothing from which to reverberate. In our city, with its glass, cobblestone and flats, it’s almost a sound of struggle, and indeed it is to some degree.

A halted tram must move to keep its schedule.

I recall moving from Seattle to Berlin and noticing almost immediately the distinct differences in the sounds of the two cities - with particular attention to public transportation. In Seattle, the buses ran the same as our trams in that they draw their electricity from lines above. Obviously, buses are quieter. They have rubber tyres that roll on asphalt. We have metal wheels rolling on metal rails.

In my previous neighbourhood of Capitol Hill in Seattle, there were restaurants, cafés, bars, clubs, old storefronts with flats above and condominiums -- at most three to four stories. Most of these are wooden. So, obviously, this undoing of the rods from the lines above in Seattle is quite different in tone to that in Berlin. Wood will absorb, asphalt is far less reflective than cobblestone, etc. Nonetheless, though the reverberation may differ, that sound has held its own fascination for me. It is a living sound. It can be organic and mechanical at the same time. It never sounds the same, and it seems to have its own life swinging desperately on the top of a bus or tram. This is what I would like to achieve in my music. Something organic and living without denying the mechanical nature of my productions.

And this reverberation of rods plays only a very minor role in what might be euphemistically referred to as the symphony of a city.

If we are to examine the tonality of an orchestra and the tonality of Berlin simultaneously, we are most likely to view one as beautiful and one as cacophonous, respectively. But can we truly see the beauty in the soundscape of our city? Through deduction, I think we can. If we start in a park and admire a bird’s song for a second, we are admiring, to some degree, a sound in the city. Keeping that in mind, a mother humming simultaneously might be produced to magnificent effect. Add to this scenario a percussive sway of branches, or the infinite triplets produced by rainfall and we have the beginnings of what might be something beautiful. Of course these simple clichés can stand alone as something beautiful in their own right. And it’s easy to draw these comparisons, but what happens when we throw a jackhammer in the mix, or a distant wrecking ball? There’s the rub. Our clichéd beauty has disappeared into the overwhelming pounding and the so-called noises of city life. We are drawn more to the distractions than the precious moments of beauty. What if we were to first embrace the noises of our city, and then, what is conventionally regarded as beautiful?

When I first listened to Mahler I pretended to enjoy it as much as my then girlfriend–who was studying classical music at the time [she was a violinist]. It had taken her years but she was now at the point where she could genuinely enjoy his music. I was not, but in order to not be the lesser, I feigned excitement at attending a performance of his ninth symphony. Seven minutes into the performance I was nearly shaken loose from my seat. Why would such a composition start so gorgeously and be utterly annihilated within minutes? And then return again to magnificence only to be shattered by timpani being beaten to near bursting. I didn’t enjoy it, and I failed to see how others could. Where was the beauty she saw? It was nothing I had ever experienced, and I wanted no more of it other than to brag to my other friends that I had been there, understood it and enjoyed it. I walked away deflated that I had not been able to appreciate it. Then came Arnold Schoenberg and other dodecaphonic composers. Again, I pretended to embrace his music as she brought home scores to rehearse. A racket came from her practice room in our apartment. I had to leave on many occasions in order to catch my breath. I would sit in our car and listen to something I was familiar with lest my whole idea of music be ruined. Then came another day of reckoning when I agreed [again feigning happiness at the prospect] to attend Webern’s 6 Bagatellen, Op.9. It was excruciating for me.

What had this man done to music? I was lost, beaten and felt I was missing out. I held no ill will toward those composers at the time, but I couldn’t grasp what they were doing, but fortunately I wanted to.

My path was simple. I dug through her CD collection and found Berg/Schoenberg/Webern: Cabaret Songs. Musically speaking, this was an attempt by the composers [not dissimilar to my own experience] to make a living in the burgeoning nightlife of Berlin. This CD was by no means cabaret songs in the way we know it. This was not striptease music, but what it was, I could slightly understand. It was more in line with what I egotistically called music. There is overwhelming beauty on this disc, particularly, for me, in the Berg compositions. The first listen was a slight effort, the second went better, and by the third time I was where I wanted to be: at a stage where I could truly share my experience and thoughts of this wonderful music with another person. Once I sat with that music and took it out of the symphonic setting, understanding it as “songs,” a door opened for me–because I was willing. I had to truly let go of my previous interpretation of what music could/couldn’t be, which was challenging for me. However, a meagre comprehension of the vastness of this music was all that it took for me to gain a sense of musical patience. I felt privileged that the composers, unbeknownst to them, had reduced their amazingly complex compositions to pieces that were on my level of understanding. I was elated because what I learned most of all was that there was something about earning beauty in complex music, and by that I don’t mean earned through work but through patience. Sometimes I have to start with an adagio from a composition that I want to understand to get me on the right track–something to lead me. Some might call it impatient to skip through the movements of a composition like this–not dissimilar from reading the ending of a book first. Here I disagree, it is in my willingness to understand a piece of music that I do this, not to satiate my desire to know who killed whom in the cloak room. I must first establish a connection before exploring further.

Discovering that I could understand complex music was a springboard for me to delve deeper into THAT music. I went backwards. I started with the most difficult and found my way to Mozart and Bach [who I listen to almost daily] – not out of choice, but out of a desire to also understand. Do I appreciate all music with abandon -- no. Can I be one sided and impatient -- most certainly yes. 

[The tension of a busy sunset. Image: MSCTY]

If we can appreciate the small things that we are used to in a city -- a bird’s song, a mother lullabying her child with all of the noises that surround them, are we not interacting with a music we know and a music we don’t? A music we may quite easily describe as noise. Yet, they co-exist on a street corner and we gladly tell our friends to listen to the bird’s song while there are innumerable and indescribable crashes and clangs happening before us in simultaneous rhythm with what we know. There is no caveat to disregard the coffee cups clinking on a café table, the tram passing, two cyclists having a discussion, bottles being thrown in the trash, or to observe this or that sound...In this sense, we may also actually be enjoying the moment the wrecking ball hits, or the steady crash of a jackhammer when it is accompanied with our idea of music. And what better than a crash to bring us back to the present? The decay of that noise brings us to the calm of a bird chirping. Much like the decay of a resounding timpani from a wild first movement of a symphony brings us to the ease of a peaceful adagio in the second movement...We have earned our beauty in a sense. We have suffered what we didn’t know in order to understand more clearly what we did.

It is said that a Bach piece played now would be rendered differently than it would have been 300 years ago for the very specific reason that our ears have evolved into a different organ. And again, when we slowly allow the noise of the city to commingle with our perception of music, we thus redefine music to a degree. It is not that noise is music, it is much more that noise is becoming part of our definition of music, whether recognised or not.

Once, while making a track in my early days in Berlin, I had the idea that vocals might lend some warmth to a song that I found to be very digital. It was a summer day and all of the windows in my flat were open–I was still very young in producing music and didn’t have the foresight to close them. I sang my part -- it was short, a word, maybe two. Fine with my take, I went to edit. What I discovered was not an incredible vocal take, but instead that I had unwittingly captured the sounds of the street below. What I captured were the sounds of a world moving around me, uncaring of my art. When I played back my vocals I found, to my great surprise and elation, a perfectly syncopated beep of a car horn interspersed with a man shouting -- in perfect time and with all the microscopic sounds of a city supremely united within. Everything was there. It wasn’t the vocal take that stood out in this recording, but a world of music that I had always viewed, until that moment, as a horrible distraction that had no business in a professional production. Not only did it provide the warmth that I sought, but it captured my music in the present moment. The music was now eternally stamped with that date, that hour, that minute, that second, ad infinitum. There would never be a car passing with a man shouting so perfectly in the very moment I thought to sing again. Ever.

To this day, I still record my claps crudely–mostly in my room with the windows open –hoping to again capture that musical moment that only a city can provide. Often there is glimmer here and there of that moment, but nothing compared to the profound realisation that noise is music and vice versa.

– Bruno Pronsato, 2021