In Search of a Concrete Music

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In Search of a Concrete Music

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First edition
Author Pierre Schaeffer
Original titleÀ la recherche d'une musique concrète
Country France
Language French
Subject Musique concrète, acoustics, music theory, music technology
Genre Treatise, journal
Published 1952 Éditions du Seuil
Media type Print (paperback)
Pages 228
ISBN 978-2-02-002572-0
OCLC 1705595
Website pierreschaeffer.com

In Search of a Concrete Music [1] (French: À la recherche d'une musique concrète), written and published in 1952, is a French language publication which forms a major part of the experimental composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer's collection of works written to record his own undertakings on the development of musique concrète.

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1952.

French language Romance language

French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

Experimental music is a general label for any music that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilites radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminate music, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may also approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.

Contents

The collection is discussed, among other works of Schaeffer's, in chapter two of Robert Martial's Pierre Schaeffer, des transmissions à Orphée. [2]

In this text, some have suggested, Schaeffer imagined a computerized music studio:

La cohérence de cette perspective nous mène […] aux machines de la cybernétique. Seules en effet, des machines de ce genre (probablement de plusieurs tonnes et coûtant des centaines de millions!), que des circuits oscillants dotent d’une certaine mémoire, permettront le jeu infini des combinaisons numériques complexes qui sont la clé de tous les phénomènes musicaux.

(The coherence of this perspective leads us to cybernetic machines. Indeed, only machines of this type (probably weighing several tons and costing hundreds of millions!), with oscillating circuits equipped with a certain memory, will permit endless play with complex numerical combinations, which are the key to all musical phenomena.)

— (Schaeffer 1952, p.119, quoted in Delalande's "D’une technologie à l’autre" -see below).

Contents

Notes

  1. ↑ Schaeffer, Pierre. À la recherche d'une musique concrète. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Searchable text available (to members of subscribing institutions) at the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL).
  2. ↑ Martial, Robert. Pierre Schaeffer, des transmissions à Orphée. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999. (ISBN   2-7384-7975-8)

Related Research Articles

Musique concrète is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material, assembling them into a form of montage. It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using synthesizers and computer-based digital signal processing. Compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, metre, and so on. It exploits acousmatic listening, meaning sound identities can often be intentionally obscured or appear unconnected to their source cause. Originally contrasted with "pure" elektronische Musik, the theoretical basis of musique concrète as a compositional practice was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the early 1940s. From the late 1960s onward, and particularly in France, the term acousmatic music started to be used in reference to fixed media compositions that utilized both musique concrète based techniques and live sound spatialisation.

Pierre Schaeffer French musicologist

Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician. His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime.

Acousmatic music is a form of electroacoustic music that is specifically composed for presentation using speakers, as opposed to a live performance. It stems from a compositional tradition that dates back to the introduction of musique concrète in the late 1940s. Unlike musical works that are realised using sheet music exclusively, compositions that are purely acousmatic often exist solely as fixed media audio recordings.

Michel Chion is a French film theorist and composer of experimental music.

Surrealist music is music which uses unexpected juxtapositions and other surrealist techniques. Discussing Theodor Adorno, Max Paddison defines surrealist music as that which "juxtaposes its historically devalued fragments in a montage-like manner which enables them to yield up new meanings within a new aesthetic unity," though Lloyd Whitesell says this is Paddison's gloss of the term. Anne LeBaron cites automatism, including improvisation, and collage as the primary techniques of musical surrealism. According to Whitesell, Paddison quotes Adorno's 1930 essay "Reaktion und Fortschritt" as saying "Insofar as surrealist composing makes use of devalued means, it uses these as devalued means, and wins its form from the 'scandal' produced when the dead suddenly spring up among the living".

Pierre Henry French composer

Pierre Georges Henry was a French composer, considered a pioneer in the musique concrète genre of electronic music.

Annette Vande Gorne Belgian composer

Annette Vande Gorne is a Belgian electroacoustic music composer currently living in Ohain, Belgium.

Maurane Belgian singer

Claudine Luypaerts, better known as Maurane, was a Belgian singer and actress.

Pierre Emmanuel French poet

Noël Mathieu better known under his pseudonym Pierre Emmanuel, was a French poet of Christian inspiration. He was the third member elected to occupy seat 4 of the Académie française in 1968, president of PEN International between 1969 and 1971, president of French PEN Club between 1973 and 1976, and the first president of the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel in 1975.

Edmond Couchot is a French digital artist and art theoretician.

Christian Zanési French composer

Christian Zanési is a French composer.

Gérard Patris was a French film director and television director who died in a car accident in 1990 in Chailles. His works include the documentary film Arthur Rubinstein – The Love of Life.

Symphonie pour un homme seul is a musical composition by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, composed in 1949–1950. It is an important early example of musique concrète.

Nadine de Rothschild French writer and actor

Nadine de Rothschild is a French author and former actress. She is the widow of banker Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild family.

The Studio d'Essai, later Club d'Essai, was founded in 1942 by Pierre Schaeffer, played a role in the activities of the French resistance during World War II, and later became a center of musical activity.

Pierre Bouteiller (1655–1717) was a French Baroque composer. His surviving works comprise 13 petits motets and a requiem for 5 voices and basso continuo.

French electronic music, a panorama of French music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production.

Marcel Frémiot was a French composer and musicologist.

Danièle Pistone French radio producer and musicologist

Danièle Pistone is a French musicologist, emeritus professor at the University Paris Sorbonne 4.

Norbert Dufourcq was a French organist, music educator, musicologist and musicographer.

References

Delalande, François. "D’une technologie à l’autre." Enjeux et initiatives. 6-10.


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