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Musique concrète
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Musique concrète (French for "concrete music" or "real music"), is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as 'musical' (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s.
French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer is credited with originating musique concrete in five works for tape alone, including Etude violette and Aux chemin de fers.
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Encyclopedia
Musique concrète (French for "concrete music" or "real music"), is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as 'musical' (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s.
History
Pierre Schaeffer
The French composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer is credited with originating musique concrete in five works for tape alone, including Etude violette and Aux chemin de fers. The works were premiered at a concert given in Paris on the 5th of October 1948 (Chion 1983). The development of musique concrete was facilitated by the emergence of new music technology in post-war Europe. Access to microphones and magnetic tape recorders (created in 1939), afforded 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.
Schaeffer developed an aesthetic practice that was centered upon the use of sound as a primary compositional resource and emphasized the importance of play (jeu) in the creation of music. Schaeffer's use of jeu, from the verb jouer, carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. This notion is central to the musique concrète aesthetic.
Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète
In 1951 Schaeffer, along with the engineer Jacques Poullin, and composer-percussionist Pierre Henry, established the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (Research Group on Concrete Music) at RTF in Paris, the ancestor of the ORTF.
At RTF the GRMC established the first purpose-built electroacoustic music studio. It quickly attracted several notable composers including Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgar Varese, Iannis Xenakis, Michel Philippot, and Arthur Honegger. Compositional output from 1951 to 1953 comprised Étude I (1951) and Étude II (1951) by Boulez, Timbres-durées (1952) by Messiaen, Étude (1952) by Stockhausen, Le microphone bien tempéré (1952) and La voile d’Orphée (1953) by Henry, Étude I (1953) by Philippot, Étude (1953) by Barraqué, the mixed pieces Toute la lyre (1951) and Orphée 53 (1953) by Schaeffer\Henry, and the film music Masquerage (1952) by Schaeffer and Astrologie (1953) by Henry. In 1954 Varèse and Honegger visited to work on the tape parts of Déserts and La rivière endormie (Palombini 1999).
Between 1952 and 1956 Schaeffer's commitments to RTF led him to appoint Philippe Arthuys with responsibility for the GRMC, with Pierre Henry operating as Director of Works. Pierre Henry’s composing talent developed greatly during this period at the GRMC and he worked with experimental filmmakers such as Max de Haas, Jean Gremillon, Enrico Fulchignoni, and Jean Rouch, and with choreographers including Dick Sanders and Maurice Béjart (Gayou 2007: 206). Schaeffer returned to run the group at the end of 1957, and immediately stated his disapproval of the direction the GRMC had taken. 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" (Gayou 2007: 207) .
Groupe de Recherches Musicales
Following the emergence of differences within the GRMC Pierre Henry, Philippe Arthuys, and several of their colleagues, resigned in April 1958. Schaeffer created a new collective, called Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and set about recruiting new members including Luc Ferrari, François-Bernard Mâche, Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, and Mireille Chamass-Kyrou. Later arrived Ivo Malec, Philippe Carson, Romuald Vandelle, Edgardo Canton and Francois Bayle (Gayou 2007: 207).
GRM was one of several theoretical and experimental groups working under the umbrella of the Schaeffer led Service de la Recherche at ORTF (1960-74). Together with the GRM, three other groups existed: the Groupe de Recherches Image GRI, the Groupe de Recherches Technologiques GRT and the Groupe de Recherches Langage which became the Groupe d’Etudes Critiques (Gayou 2007: 207). Communication was the one theme that unified the various groups, all of which were devoted to production and creation. In terms of the question "who says what to whom?" Schaeffer added "how?", thereby creating a platform for research into audiovisual communication and mass media, audible phenomena and music in general (including non-Western musics). At the GRM the theoretical teaching remained based on practice and could be summed up in the catch phrase ‘do and listen’ (Gayou 2007: 207).
Schaeffer kept up a practice established with the GRMC of delegating the functions (though not the title) of Group Director to colleagues. Since 1961 GRM has had six Group Directors: Michel Philippot (1960–61), Luc Ferrari (1962–63), Bernard Baschet and Francois Vercken (1964–66). From the beginning of 1966, Francois Bayle took over the direction for the duration of thirty-one years, to 1997. He was then replaced by Daniel Teruggi (Gayou 2007: 206).
Traité des Objets Musicaux
The group continued to refine Schaeffer's ideas and strengthened the concept of musique acousmatique (Peignot 1960: 111-123). Schaeffer had borrowed the term acousmatic from Pythagoras and defined it as: "Acousmatic, adjective: referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it" (Schaeffer 1966: 91). 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.
Technology
Initial tools of musique concrete
In 1948, a typical radio studio consisted of a series of shellac record players, a shellac record recorder, a mixing desk, with rotating potentiometers, a mechanical reverberation, filters, and microphones. This technology made a number of limited operations available to a composer (Teruggi 2007):
- Shellac record players: could read a sound normally and in reverse mode, could change speed at fixed ratios thus permitting octave transposition.
- Shellac recorder: would record any result coming out of the mixing desk.
- Mixing desk: would permit several sources to be mixed together with an independent control of the gain or volume of the sound. The result of the mixing was sent to the recorder and to the monitoring loudspeakers. Signals could be sent to the filters or the reverberation unit.
- Mechanical reverberation: made of a metal plate or a series of springs that created the reverberation effect, indispensable to force sounds to ‘fuse’ together.
- Filters: two kinds of filters, 1/3 octave filters and, high and low-pass filters. They allow the elimination or enhancement of selected frequencies.
- Microphones: essential tool for capturing sound.
The application of the above technologies in the creation of musique concrete led to the development of a number of sound manipulation techniques including (Teruggi 2007):
- Sound transposition: reading a sound at a different speed than the one at which it was recorded.
- Sound looping: composers developed a skilled technique in order to create loops at specific locations.
- Sound-sample extraction: a hand-controlled method that required delicate manipulation to get a clean sample of sound. It entailed letting the stylus read a small segment of a record. Used in the Symphonie pour un homme seul.
- Filtering: by eliminating most of the central frequencies of a signal, the remains would keep some trace of the original sound but without making it recognisable.
- Microphone: for capturing sounds and also for magnifying scarcely audible sound sources.
Magnetic tape
The first tape recorders start arriving at ORTF in 1949; however, their functioning was much less reliable than the shellac players, to the point that the Symphonie pour un homme seul, which was composed in 1950–51, was mainly composed with records, even if the tape recorder was available (Teruggi 2007: 216). In 1950, when the machines finally functioned correctly, the techniques of musique concrete were expanded. A range of new sound manipulation practices were explored using improved media manipulation methods and operations such as speed variation. A completely new possibility of organising sounds appears with tape editing, which permits tape to be spliced and arranged with an extraordinary new precision. The ‘axe-cut junctions’ were replaced with micrometric junctions and a whole new technique of production, less dependency on performance skills, could be developed. Tape editing brought a new technique called ‘micro-editing’, in which very tiny fragments of sound, representing milliseconds of time, were edited together, thus creating completely new sounds or structures (Teruggi 2007: 217).
Development of novel devices
During the GRMC period from 1951-1958 time Schaeffer and Jacques Poullin developed a number of novel sound creation tools including a three-track tape recorder, a machine with ten playback heads to replay tape loops in echo (the morphophone), a keyboard controlled machine to replay tape loops at twenty-four pre-set speeds (the keyboard, chromatic, or Tolana phonogène), a slide-controlled machine to replay tape loops at a continuously variable range of speeds (the handle, continuous, or Sareg phonogène), and a device to distribute live an encoded track across four loudspeakers, including one hanging from the centre of the ceiling (the potentiomètre d’espace) (Palombini 1999).
The phonogene
Speed variation was a powerful tool for sound design applications. It had been identified that transformations brought about by varying playback speed lead to modification in the character of the sound material:
- Variation in the sounds length, in a manner directly proportional to the ratio of speed variation.
- Variation in length is coupled with a variation in pitch, and is also proportional to the ratio of speed variation.
- A sounds attack characteristic is altered, whereby it is either dislocated from succeeding events, or the energy of the attack is more sharply focused.
- The distribution of spectral energy is altered, thereby influencing how the resulting timbre might be perceived, relative to its original unaltered state.
The phonogene was a machine capable of modifying sound structure significantly and it provided composers with a means to adapt sound to meet specific compositional contexts. The initial phonogenes were manufactured in 1953 by two subcontractors: the chromatic phonogene by a company called Tolana, and the sliding version by the SAREG Company. A third version was developed later at ORTF. An outline of the unique capabilities of the various phonogenes can be see here:
- Chromatic:The chromatic phonogene was controlled through a one-octave keyboard made using twelve reading heads, each associated with a capstan of a different size. A tape loop was put into the machine, and when a key was played, the associated capstan made contact with the related head and the tape played at the specified speed. The machine worked with short sounds only (Terrugi:2007:217).
- Sliding:The sliding phonogene (also called continuous variation phonogene) provided continuous variation of tape speed using a control rod. The range allowed the motor to arrive at almost a stop position, always through a continuous variation. It was basically a normal tape recorder but with the ability to control its speed, so it could modify any length of tape. One of the earliest examples of its use can by heard in Voile d’Orphee by Pierre Henry (1953), where a lengthy glissando is used to symbolise the removal of Orpheus's veil as he enters hell.
- Universal:A final version called the universal phonogene was completed in 1963. The devices main ability that it enabled the dissociation of pitch variation from time variation. This was the starting point for methods that would later become widely available using digital technology, for instance harmonising (transposing sound without modifying duration) and time stretching (modifying duration without no pitch modification). This was obtained through a rotating magnetic head called the Springer temporal regulator, an ancestor of the rotating heads used in video machines.
The three-head tape recorder
This original tape recorder was one of the first machines permitting the simultaneous listening of several synchronised sources. Until 1958 musique concrete, radio and the studio machines were monophonic. The three head tape recorder superposed three magnetic tapes that were dragged by a common motor, each tape having an independent spools. The objective was to keep the three tapes synchronised from a common starting point. Works could then be conceived polyphonically, and thus each head conveyed a part of the information and was listened to through a dedicated loudspeaker. It was an ancestor of the multi-track player (four then eight tracks) that appeared in the 1960s. Timbres Durees by Olivier Messiaen with the technical assistance of Pierre Henry was the first work composed for this tape recorder in 1952. A very fast rhythmic polyphony was distributed through the three channels.
The morphophone
This machine was conceived to build complex forms through repetition, and accumulation of events through delays, filtering and feedback. It was basically made of a large turning disk, 50cm in size, on which a tape was ‘stuck’, with its magnetic side looking towards the outside. A series of magnetic heads were distributed around the disk, in contact with the tape and their position could be moved along the circle. There were twelve heads: a recording head, an erasing head, and ten playing heads. The principle was that a sound was recorded along the looped tape (four seconds of sound could be recorded) and then the ten playing heads would read the information with different delays in relation to their position around the disk. Each playing head had its own amplifier and a band-pass filter in order to modify the spectrum of that sound; feedback loops completed the system and could send the information towards the recording head. The result consisted of repetitions of a sound at different time intervals, with the possibility of filtering and creating feedback. Artificial reverberations or continuous sounds could easily be obtained through this system.
Early sound spatialisation system
At the premiere of Pierre Schaeffer's Symphonie pour un homme seul in 1951, a system that was designed for the spatial control of sound was tested. It was called a ‘relief desk’ (pupitre de relief, but also referred to as pupitre d'espace or potentiometre d'space) and was intended to control the dynamic level of music played from several shellac players. This created a 'stereophonic' effect simply by controlling the left–right positioning of a monophonic sound. The placement of loudspeakers in the performance space included two loudspeakers at the front right and left of the audience, one placed at the rear, and in the center of the space a loudspeaker was placed in a height position above the audience. On stage, the ‘relief desk’ consisted of two circular electro-magnets placed perpendicularly and in a manner that allowed both hands of a performer to move in and out the circles, or towards left and right, with the intention of manipulating the spatial intensity and the localisation of sound using electromagnetic induction. The central concept underlying this method was the notion that music should be controlled during public presentation in order to create a performance situation; an attitude that has stayed with acousmatic music to the present day (Teruggi 2007: 218).
The Coupigny synthesiser and Studio 54 mixing desk
The Coupigny synthesiser and Studio 54 mixing desk had a major influence on the evolution of GRM and from the point of their introduction on they brought a new quality to the music. The mixing desk and synthesiser were combined in one unit and were created specifically for the creation of musique concrete. 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 concrete 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. Because of this the synthesiser and desk were combined and organised in a manner that allowed it to be used easily by a composer. Independently of the mixing tracks (twenty-four in total), it had a coupled connection patch that permitted the organisation of the machines within the studio. It also had a number of remote controls for operating tape recorders. The system was easily adaptable to any context, particularly that of interfacing with external equipment.
Before the late 1960s the musique concrete produced at GRM had largely been based on the recording and manipulation of sounds, but synthesised sounds had featured in a number of works prior to the introduction of the Coupigny. Pierre Henry had used oscillators to produce sounds as early as 1955. But a synthesiser with parametrical control was something Pierre Schaeffer was against, since it favoured the preconception of music and therefore deviated from Schaeffer's principal of ‘making through listening’. Because of Schaeffer's concerns the Coupigny synthesiser was conceived as a sound event generator with parameters controlled globally, without a means to define values as precisely as some other synthesisers of the day.
A number of requirements constrained the development of the machine. It needed be modular and easy to interconnect (this meant that there would be more modules than slots in the synthesiser and that it would have an easy-to-use patch). It also needed to include all the major functions of a modular synthesiser including oscillators, noise-generators, filters, ring-modulators, but an intermodulation facility was viewed as the primary requirement; to enable complex synthesis processes such as frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, and modulation via an external source. No keyboard was attached to the synthesiser and instead a specific and somewhat complex envelope generator was used to shape sound. The synthesiser was extremely practical for producing continuous and complex sounds using intermodulation techniques such as cross synthesis and frequency modulation but was less effective in generating precisely defined frequencies and triggering specific sounds.
The Acousmonium
In 1966 composer and technician Francois Bayle was placed in charge of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and in 1975, GRM was integrated with the new Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA - Audiovisual National Institute) with Bayle as its head. 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 orchestra de haut-parleurs) known as the Acousmonium in 1974. An inaugural concert tool place at the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris with a presentation of Bayle's Experience acoustique (Gayou 2007: 209).
The Acousmonium is a specialised sound reinforcement system consisting of between 50 and 100 loudspeakers, depending on the character of the concert, of varying shape and size. The system was designed specifically for the concert presentation of musiques concrete based works but with the added enhancement of sound spatialisation. Loudspeakers are placed both on stage and at positions throughout the performance space (Gayou 2007: 209) and a mixing console is used to manipulate the placement of acousmatic material across the speaker array, using a performative technique known as sound diffusion (Austin 2000: 10-21). Bayle has commented that the purpose of the Acousmonium is to "substitute a momentary classical disposition of sound making, which diffuses the sound from the circumference towards the centre of the hall, by a group of sound projectors which form an ‘orchestration’ of the acoustic image" (Bayle 1993: 44).
Notable musicians/composers
See also
Further reading
- Dack, J. (1994), Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of Radiophonic Art, Contemporary Music Review. Vol. 10, No. 2: London: Harwood: 3-11.
- Dack, J. (1993a), la Recherche de l'Instrument Perdu, Electroacoustic Music - Journal of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Great Britain: Vol. 7. London: Sonic Arts Network.
- Kane, B. (2007), L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction, Organised Sound, 12(1): 15-24, Cambridge University Press.
- Schaeffer, P. (1952b), L'objet musical, La Revue Musicale: L'œuvre du XXe siècle, No. 212. Paris: Richard-Masse: 65-76.
- Schaeffer, P. (1967),La musique concrète, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Frances.
External links
- INA-GRM
- Francois Bayle's personal
- Electroacoustic Music Studies
- Bernard Parmegiani's personal
- ElectroAcoustic Resource at Du Montfort University
- INA-GRM 31st Season (2008/2009). Multiphonies program of .
- : An International Journal of Music and Technology.
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