Musique Concrète (1948)
Sampling
Pierre Schaeffer locked himself in a studio with train recordings. He rejected sheet music and synthesizers: "The material of music is sound itself." Thus was born Musique Concrète: a collage of reality, created with scissors and tape.
Full text
Schaeffer worked as an engineer and utilized the 'locked groove' (sillon fermé) technique on vinyl records even before the advent of tape recorders. These were history's first loops: the needle skipped back, endlessly repeating a fragment of a train sound.
His philosophy of 'acousmatics' called for listening to sound detached from its source. When the sound of a train is slowed down and cropped, we stop visualizing the locomotive and start hearing the rhythm, timbre, and texture. 'Musique Concrète' is the work with sound as a physical object that can be sculpted by hand.
Sources
- Schaeffer, Pierre (1966). Tratado de los objetos musicales — Éditions du Seuil
- Chion, Michel (2009). La musique concrète/acousmatique, un art des sons fixés — Metamkine
- Teruggi, Daniel (2007). Technology and musique concrète: the technical developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and their implication in musical composition — Organised Sound
- Palombini, Carlos (1993). Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer... — CMJ
- Battier, Marc (2007). What the GRM brought to music: from musique concrète to acousmatic music — Organised Sound