Musique concrète
[5] In the same period the American composer Henry Cowell, in referring to the projects of Nikolai Lopatnikoff, believed that "there was a wide field open for the composition of music for phonographic discs".
This sentiment was echoed further in 1930 by Igor Stravinsky, when he stated in the revue Kultur und Schallplatte that "there will be a greater interest in creating music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophone record".
[12] In 1942, French composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer began his exploration of radiophony when he joined Jacques Copeau and his pupils in the foundation of the Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion nationale.
[14] These journals were published in 1952 as A la recherche d'une musique concrète, and according to Brian Kane, author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, Schaeffer was driven by: "a compositional desire to construct music from concrete objects – no matter how unsatisfactory the initial results – and a theoretical desire to find a vocabulary, solfège, or method upon which to ground such music.
Marc Battier notes that, prior to Schaeffer, Jean Epstein drew attention to the manner in which sound recording revealed what was hidden in the act of basic acoustic listening.
Epstein had already imagined that "through the transposition of natural sounds, it becomes possible to create chords and dissonances, melodies and symphonies of noise, which are a new and specifically cinematographic music".
He recorded the sounds of an ancient zaar ceremony and at the Middle East Radio studios processed the material using reverberation, echo, voltage controls, and re-recording.
Prior to their collaboration on Timbres-Durées (1952), Schaeffer’s acquaintance and serialist composer, Olivier Messiaen, periodically participated in broadcasts, round tables, and critiques surrounding musique concrète.
It quickly attracted many who either were or were later to become notable composers, including Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Michel Philippot, and Arthur Honegger.
A proposal was then made to "renew completely the spirit, the methods and the personnel of the Group, with a view to undertake research and to offer a much needed welcome to young composers".
Schaeffer created a new collective, called Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and set about recruiting new members including Luc Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, François-Bernard Mâche, Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, and Mireille Chamass-Kyrou.
[30] In 1966 Schaeffer published the book Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) which represented the culmination of some 20 years of research in the field of musique concrète.
In conjunction with this publication, a set of sound recordings was produced, entitled Le solfège de l'objet sonore (Music Theory of the Acoustic Object), to provide examples of concepts dealt with in the treatise.
Access to microphones, phonographs, and later magnetic tape recorders (created in 1939 and acquired by the Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (Research Group on Concrete Music) in 1952), facilitated by an association with the French national broadcasting organization, at that time the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, gave Schaeffer and his colleagues an opportunity to experiment with recording technology and tape manipulation.
A sound up to four seconds long could be recorded on the looped tape and the ten playback heads would then read the information with different delays, according to their (adjustable) positions around the disk.
[35] A contemporary eyewitness described the potentiomètre d'espace in normal use: One found one's self sitting in a small studio which was equipped with four loudspeakers—two in front of one—right and left; one behind one and a fourth suspended above.
The design of the desk was influenced by trade union rules at French National Radio that required technicians and production staff to have clearly defined duties.
The solitary practice of musique concrète composition did not suit a system that involved three operators: one in charge of the machines, a second controlling the mixing desk, and third to provide guidance to the others.
In taking the lead on work that began in the early 1950s, with Jacques Poullin's potentiomètre d'espace, a system designed to move monophonic sound sources across four speakers, Bayle and the engineer Jean-Claude Lallemand created an orchestra of loudspeakers (un orchestre de haut-parleurs) known as the Acousmonium in 1974.
[43] Although Schaeffer's work aimed to defamiliarize the used sounds, other composers favoured the familiarity of source material by using snippets of music or speech taken from popular entertainment and mass media, with the ethic that "truly contemporary art should reflect not just nature or the industrial-urban environment but the mediascape in which humans increasingly dwelled", according to writer Simon Reynolds.
[48] Bernard Gendron describes the Beatles' musique concrète experimentation as helping popularise avant-garde art in the era, alongside Jimi Hendrix's use of noise and feedback, Bob Dylan's surreal lyricism and Frank Zappa's "ironic detachment".
[50] The musique concrète elements present on Pink Floyd's best-selling album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), including the cash register sounds on "Money", have been cited as notable examples of the practice's influence on popular music.
[53] Another German group, Kraftwerk, achieved a surprise hit in 1975 with "Autobahn", which contained a "sampled collage of revving engines, horns and traffic noise".
Stephen Dalton of The Times wrote: "This droll blend of accessible pop and avant-garde musique concrete propelled Kraftwerk across America for three months".
[54] Steve Taylor writes that industrial groups Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire continued the concrète tradition with collages constructed with tape manipulation and loops,[55] while Ian Inglis credits Brian Eno for introducing new sensibilities "about what could be in included in the canon of popular music", citing his 1970s ambient work and the musique concrete collages on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), which combines tape samples with synthesised sounds.
Although there was no direct line traceable between the two Pierres and Marley Marl, it was as if musique concrète went truant from the academy and became street music, the soundtrack to block parties and driving.
[47] Chicago Reader's J. Niimi writes that when Public Enemy producers the Bomb Squad "unwittingly revisited" the concept of musique concrète with their sample-based music, they proved that the technique "worked great as pop".
He wrote that while Schaeffer and Henry used tapes in their work, Art of Noise "uses Fairlight CMIs and Akai S1000 samplers and the skyscrapers of multitrack recording to create their updated sound".
[58] As described by Will Hodgkinson, Art of Noise brought classical and avant-garde sounds into pop by "[aiming] to emulate the musique concrète composers of the 1950s" via Fairlight samplers instead of tape.
[60] Chuck Eddy writes that, by 1991, heavy metal bands began absorbing a wealth of esoteric outside inspirations, citing the "found-sound jackhammer-and-national-anthem musique concrète" on Slaughter's "Up All Night" (1990) as a key example.
