Pierre Schaeffer’s Sound Revolution: A Journey into Musique Concrète
In the beginning there was no musical notation, there was no time signature and there was no sound recording. In the beginning there was only pure unadulterated sound. Cavemen would bang rocks and sticks together, and when some combination of these items produced a sound they liked they would return to it again and again. Over time more sophisticated instruments with greater tonal ranges would be developed, notes would be given names, combinations of notes would become chords, they would be played rhythmically according to a time signature (4/4 being the most common) and what was once pure sound, could now be understood and harnessed with greater accuracy and intention on the part of the artist. But was something lost with the development of music theory. Had music or sound art become too standardised and domesticated.
Various strains of 20th century musical currents felt that this was the case, and aimed to transgress the “rules” of music theory, in an attempt to return to the state of pure sound. You see this in the atonal contemporary classical music of guys like Luigi Nono or Gyorgy Ligeti. You see this in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor. And you see this in the sound experiments of early electronic music from guys like Luigi Russolo who we have already discussed and Pierre Schaeffer, the figurehead of the Musique Concrete movement. But where Atonal Classical music or Free Jazz were attempting to transcend the boundaries of music theory that had been imposed on their respective genres, Musique Concrete was coming from a different starting point altogether, where there was no formal theory or standardization to begin with.
Musique Concrete is music or sound art composed of various found sounds. The source material might be musical in origin but it didn’t have to be and often wasn’t. These sounds would be manipulated and reconstructed using tape editing techniques and thrown together to make a sort of sound collage, out of various sounds that on their own were nothing special, but when presented in this way would transcend their origins and become art.
Before we get into some of the notable works of Musique Concrete we will look at a few important precursers that happened between Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises and Musique Concrete.
First, lets talk a bit about Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is the pioneer of found object art. We all know about his Fountain and we’ve discussed the urinal before on this blog, but this wasn’t his only “ready-made” work. Take With Hidden Noise for example.
When the string is pulled out and plucked it produces a sound, which varies depending on how much string has been pulled. The point is the object itself is not anything particularly special but when interacted with by the audience, it can become sound art. Really it is more like an instrument than a sculpture.
Duchamp also composed his own works. An example of his approach to composition would be his work For Three Voices where various series of notes would be written down and thrown into a hat, and each performer would then perform the notes according to which card they pull out of the hat. This is similar to Tristan Tzara’s idea of composing a poem by cutting out each word in a newspaper article and pulling them out of a hat at random to produce a poem. It leaves a lot open to chance and also the interpretation of the performer. Like, how they choose to perform these series of notes. Whether the three voices will perform their notes seperately or together, and so on. You can hear some of Duchamp’s “compositions” performed by John Cage here.
Other Dadaists such as Kurt Schwitters or Hannah Hoch were also experimenting with collage art. Pulling visuals from various sources, pasting them together and creating a new work out of the fragments.
I will also give a brief mention to filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein whose montage techniques would splice seemingly unrelated images together to create something new, their medium was just film as opposed to audio.
So the Dadaists and various other avant-garde figures are experimenting with collage art, including sound collage art, but what sets musique concrete apart from these experiments is the usage of tape as a central component of their compositions. Marcel Duchamps sound art was still very much a performance art, and didn’t involve the manipulation of recorded sounds. A lot of the things Musique Concrete was doing were simply not possible until the invention of the tape recorder in 1935. Recorded sound itself goes back to the late 19th century with the invention of mechanical phonographs, and there were artists such as Igor Stravinsky and Henry Cowell, experimenting with the musical possibilites there, but tape allowed artists to do overdubbing, shift pitches, slow down/speed up the recording, splice the tape in creative ways, and completely reinvent what those recorded sounds were. As far as music technology goes the invention of magnetic tape and tape recording was one the most significant inventions of the 20th century and completely transformed the landscape of both what was possible in sound design but also how we as listeners experience music. And if the electric guitar was the primary instrument of rock music and turntables were the primary instrument of hip-hop then the tape machine should be regarded as the primary instrument of musique concrete.
Russolo got pretty close to the theoretical framework of Musique Concrete, but his approach was to build acoustic instruments that could reproduce the sounds of modern urban noise, Schaeffer was more interested in recording technology and sound design.
Before we get into some of the most famous works of musique concrete itself, I do want to draw a distinction between Musique Concrete and the Elektronische Musik of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Although these two tendencies have largely been synthesized with modern sampling. Musique Concrete should more accurately be described as electroacoustic tape music. Although technology is central to Musique Concrete, the sound sources were not always electronic in origin. Nature sounds were just as commonly used as industrial sounds. I’m not going to get too into the differences here as Stockhausen will probably be the next subject covered in this series. But, yeah, something of a rivalry existed between Musique Concrete in France and Elektronische Musik in Germany. The distinction was Musique Concrete’s starting point was the attempt to use concrete sound to build a new type of music, where Stockhausen was still much more tied to abstract music notation as his starting point. What I mean by this is when Bach heard a melody or a chord progression in his head he would write it down on paper and then go to an instrument, let’s say an organ, and play it out, and then through this process of performance it becomes something concrete. Schaeffer would hear a sound in his day to day life, let’s say a car engine being ignited, and would record it, and then play around with that concrete sound and see what he can make it do musically. So the entire process of creating music concrete is completely divorced from how composers had made music pretty much throughout the entirety of music history. The innovations of electronic instruments going on at the same time are opening up new types of sounds, new timbres, but the process of making music doesn’t actually change that much. The artists still hears a sound in his head, and goes to the instrument to make it a concrete thing. Pierre Schaeffers sounds are ‘ready-made.’ Compositions are built around how the artist manipulates those sounds.
But enough of the blah, blah, blah, let’s hear what this stuff sounds like.
Musique Concrete was revolutionary and completely redefined what music could be, and it’s influence was vast. Genre’s that I love, like hip-hop, would not be possible without the innovative work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry but I’m actually going to be a little critical of Musique Concrete. And these criticisms apply to Russolo as well, and avant-garde music in general really. But in all honesty, the theory behind this music is often more interesting than the music that was actually produced. Which is ironic as liberating music from the standardization of music theory was one of it’s stated aims. Technology allowed them to liberate themselves from the constraints of traditional music, only to impose a new theoretical framework, which, had it caught on, would eventually become just as stifiling and restraining as what they had left behind. Musique Concrete was influential, but I can’t say it really produced any classics, or tracks I find myself really thinking about often or going back to regularly. I understand why it’s important and I respect it, but I’m not sure I really “like” it, in the normal sense. It’s interesting, but my appreciation of it is all mental.
One thing that should be noted is avant-garde music wasn’t really developed by musicians. Luigi Russolo and Marcel Duchamp were both initially painters. Pierre Schaeffer was more of a philosopher and engineer than a musician. A musicologist, sure, but not a musician. I would actually draw a distinction between music and sound art. Musique Concrete is cool sound art, but it isn’t particularly musical, and if you approach it with that in mind you can get a lot of enjoyment out of it, but if you’re looking for the things you normally latch onto with music like melody, harmony, rhythm, you will quickly get bored. The Jazz music being created at the same time, like Coltrane for example, is bending the “rules” of traditional music theory pretty much as much as is possible, but he was still producing music that actually does have genre defining classics like A Love Supreme that are widely listened to, while still being extremely adventurous musically. This is because he was hyperaware of the “rules”, and so was able to bend and break them in ways that were both interesting and relatable to normal people. Check out how he re-imagines well known popular songs like My Favourite Things from the Sound of Music here. Much more musical than Pierre Schaeffer.
I found a cool interview with Shaeffer here. The interview is from his later years, so he’s looking back on Musique Concrete in hindsight. He actually echoes some of these criticisms.
”I was involved in music; I was working with turntables (then with tape-recorders); I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, 'Maybe I can find something different... maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.' Seeing that no-one knew what to do anymore with DoReMi, maybe we had to look outside that... Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi... In other words, I wasted my life.”
He goes on:
“In music there are new things, synthesisers, taperecorders, etc., but we still have our sensibilities, our ears, the old harmonic structures in our heads we're still born in DoReMi - it's not up to us to decide. Probably the only variations are ethnological. There are the different musical cultures, the music of ancient Greece, for example, in so far as we can know it, the music coming from the Hebrews into the Gregorian chant, the music of India, China, Africa, these are the variations, and it's all DoReMi...”
He concludes:
“The world of music is probably contained within DoReMi, yes ; but I'm saying that the world of sound is much larger than that. Let's take a spatial analogy. Painters and sculptors are concerned with spaces, volumes, colours, etc, but not with language. That's the writer's concern. The same thing is true with sound. Musique Concrete in its work of assembling sound, produces sound-works, sound-structures, but not music. We have to not call music things which are simply sound-structures...”
I would recommend reading the interview in full as it’s a good read.
Where these idea’s really become enjoyable in a normal musical context is when they are absorbed into genre’s that are more rooted in traditional music theory.
The usage of non-musical sounds, manipulated in a musical way is so common in hip-hop, for example, that naming off every producer that does this would be redundant. I’ll just drop Chinese Water Torture by Jedi Mind Tricks. The usage of water drops in the beat was always really cool to me.
The usage of tape as a musical instrument of course is not limited to musique concrete. The original delay effects were tape based. I bring up tape delay because entire genre’s of music from dub to shoegaze wouldn’t be possible without this effect, and comes from the same starting point as Schaeffer of manipulating sound with tape. JHS pedals did a good history of Tape Echo machines that is worth a watch.
That video however does not get into Frippertronics which I will mention now. Frippertronics was a method of tape delay developed by Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros, but popularized by Robert Fripp from King Crimson, namely on his collaborative works with Brian Eno, such as (No Pussyfooting).
How this worked was he would have two reel to reel tape machines side by side and record into one, while the other would play back the echo. He could then record in the moment on top of the echo and layer and create soundscapes.
While we’re talking about Tape Music in general, I can’t not mention William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, where he records found sounds onto an old tape reel on the verge of decay. As the tape reel slowly disintegrates you can hear the crackles and scratches of the tape increase. Has a cool affect. Worth listening to.
Tape Music in general has been experiencing a bit of a revival in recent years. Artists who use this medium typically do so for tapes lo-fi aesthetic quality. Here’s a short documentary about Amulets, a tape artist based out of Portland Oregon.
Alessandro Cortini from Nine Inch Nail’s has also been known to use tape in his performances.
Tony Rolando founder of Make Noise synthesizers talking about how he got into tape music in the 90’s.
Well, this has devolved into me just posting my favourite video’s on tape music on youtube. Lot’s of cool music to check out that utilizes tape as it’s primary instrument. And this is all downstream from Musique Concrete and the experimentation of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Musique Concrete is really cool and definetly worth checking out, but again the theory is usually more interesting than the music itself, especially in the context of now, where tape is no longer cutting edge technology and a lot of the techniques pioneered by Schaeffer are common place in more digestable “musical” contexts. Still, Musique Concrete is of high historical importance and an important chapter in the development of electronic music.
Great article Gio. I'm interested in learning more about Elektronische Musik. I never heard of that before.
What a comprehensive piece, thank you!