Musique concrète

Beginnings In 1928, music critic André Cœuroy wrote in his book, Panorama of Contemporary Music, that "perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will be able to represent through recording, music specifically composed for the gramophone". 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 that "there will be a greater interest in creating music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophone record". The following year, in 1931, Boris de Schloezer also expressed the opinion that one could write for the gramophone or for the wireless just as one can for the piano or the violin. Shortly after, German art theorist Rudolf Arnheim discussed the effects of microphonic recording in an essay entitled "Radio", published in 1936. In it the idea of a creative role for the recording medium was introduced and Arnheim stated that: "The rediscovery of the musicality of sound in noise and in language, and the reunification of music, noise and language in order to obtain a unity of material: that is one of the chief artistic tasks of radio". Possible antecedents to musique concrète have been noted; Walter Ruttmann's film (Weekend) (1930), a work of "blind cinema" without visuals, introduced recordings of environmental sound, to represent the urban soundscape of Berlin, two decades before musique concrète was formalised. Ruttmann's soundtrack has been retrospectively called musique concrète. According to Seth Kim-Cohen, the piece was the first to "organise 'concrete' sounds into a formal, artistic composition." Composer Irwin Bazelon referred to a sound collage in the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), during the first transformation scene, as "pre-musique concrète". Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome (; 1924) calls for a phonograph recording of birdsong to be played during the third movement. Pierre Schaeffer and with the phonogène 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. The studio originally functioned as a center for the French Resistance on radio, which in August 1944 was responsible for the first broadcasts in liberated Paris. It was here that Schaeffer began to experiment with creative radiophonic techniques using the sound technologies of the time. In 1948, Schaeffer began to keep a set of journals describing his attempt to create a "symphony of noises". These journals were published in 1952 as , 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." The development of Schaeffer's practice was informed by encounters with voice actors, and microphone usage and radiophonic art played an important part in inspiring and consolidating Schaeffer's conception of sound-based composition. Another important influence on Schaeffer's practice was cinema, and the techniques of recording and montage, which were originally associated with cinematographic practice, came to "serve as the substrate of musique concrète". 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's reference to this "phenomenon of an epiphanic being", which appears through the transduction of sound, proved influential on Schaeffer's concept of reduced listening. Schaeffer would explicitly cite Jean Epstein with reference to his use of extra-musical sound material. 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". Halim El-Dabh As a student in Cairo in the early to mid-1940s, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh began experimenting with electroacoustic music using a cumbersome wire recorder. 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. The resulting tape-based composition, entitled The Expression of Zaar, was presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo. El-Dabh has described his initial activities as an attempt to unlock "the inner sound" of the recordings. While his early compositional work was not widely known outside of Egypt at the time, El-Dabh would eventually gain recognition for his influential work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in Manhattan in the late 1950s. Club d'Essai and Cinq études de bruits Following Schaeffer's work with Studio d'Essai at Radiodiffusion Nationale during the early 1940s he was credited with originating the theory and practice of musique concrète. The Studio d'Essai was renamed Club d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française in 1946 and in the same year Schaeffer discussed, in writing, the question surrounding the transformation of time perceived through recording. The essay evidenced knowledge of sound manipulation techniques he would further exploit compositionally. In 1948 Schaeffer formally initiated "research in to noises" at the Club d'Essai Five works for phonograph – known collectively as Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises) including Étude violette (Study in Purple) and Étude aux chemins de fer (Study with Railroads) – were presented. Musique concrète By 1949, Schaeffer's compositional work was known publicly as musique concrète. According to Pierre Henry, "musique concrète was not a study of timbre, it is focused on envelopes, forms. It must be presented by means of non-traditional characteristics, you see … one might say that the origin of this music is also found in the interest in 'plastifying' music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture…musique concrète, in my opinion … led to a manner of composing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing". Schaeffer had developed an aesthetic that was centred upon the use of sound as a primary compositional resource. The aesthetic also emphasised the importance of play (jeu) in the practice of sound based composition. Schaeffer's use of the word jeu, from the verb jouer, carries the same double meaning as the English verb to play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. During this early development of music concrete, Schaeffer continued participation in his Club d’Essai. 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. Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète By 1951 the work of Schaeffer, composer-percussionist Pierre Henry, and sound engineer Jacques Poullin had received official recognition and the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète, Club d 'Essai de la Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française was established at RTF in Paris, the ancestor of the ORTF. At RTF the GRMC established the first purpose-built electroacoustic music studio. 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. Compositional "output from 1951 to 1953 comprised Étude I (1951) and Étude II (1951) by Boulez, Timbres-durées (1952) by Messiaen, Étude aux mille collants (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''". In the early and mid 1950s Schaeffer's commitments to RTF included official missions that often required extended absences from the studios. This led him to invest Philippe Arthuys with responsibility for the GRMC in his absence, 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 Grémillon, Enrico Fulchignoni, and Jean Rouch and with choreographers including Dick Sanders and Maurice Béjart. 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". 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 Michel Chion, Luc Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, François-Bernard Mâche, Iannis Xenakis, Bernard Parmegiani, and Mireille Chamass-Kyrou. Later arrivals included Ivo Malec, Philippe Carson, Romuald Vandelle, Edgardo Canton and François Bayle. At the GRM the theoretical teaching remained based on practice and could be summed up in the catch phrase do and listen. 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". 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==

The development of musique concrète was facilitated by the emergence of new music technology in post-war Europe. 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. Initial tools of musique concrète In 1948, a typical radio studio consisted of a series of shellac record players, a shellac record recorder, a mixing desk with rotating potentiometers, mechanical reverberation units, filters, and microphones. This technology made a number of limited operations available to a composer: • Shellac record players: could play sound forwards or in reverse; could change speed at fixed ratios, permitting limited 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 an artificial reverb effect. • Filters: two kinds of filters, third-octave octave filter banks and high- and low-pass filters. They allowed the elimination or enhancement of selected frequencies. • Microphones: essential tool for capturing sound. The application of the above technologies in the creation of musique concrète led to the development of a number of sound manipulation techniques including: In 1950, when the machines finally functioned correctly, the techniques of the studio were expanded. A range of new sound manipulation practices were explored using improved media manipulation methods and operations such as continuous speed variation. A completely new possibility of organising sounds appeared with tape editing, which permitted tape to be spliced and arranged with much more precision. The "axe-cut junctions" were replaced with micrometric junctions and a whole new technique of production, less dependent on performance skills, could be developed. Tape editing brought a new technique called "micromontage", in which very small fragments of sound were edited together, thus creating completely new sounds or structures on a larger scale. Development of novel devices During the GRMC period from 1951 to 1958, Schaeffer and Poullin developed a number of novel sound creation tools. These included a three-track tape recorder; a machine with ten playback heads to replay tape loops in echo (the morphophone); a keyboard-controlled machine to play tape loops at preset 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 an encoded track across four loudspeakers, including one hanging from the centre of the ceiling (the ''potentiomètre d'espace''). A third version was developed later at ORTF. An outline of the unique capabilities of the various phonogènes can be seen here: • Chromatic: The chromatic phonogène was controlled through a one-octave keyboard. Multiple capstans of differing diameters vary the tape speed over a single stationary magnetic tape head. A tape loop was put into the machine, and when a key was played, it would act on an individual pinch roller / capstan arrangement and cause the tape to be played at a specific speed. The machine worked with short sounds only. Morphophone This machine was conceived to build complex forms through repetition, and accumulation of events through delays, filtering and feedback. It consisted of a large rotating disk, 50 cm in diameter, on which was stuck a tape with its magnetic side facing outward. A series of twelve movable magnetic heads (one each recording head and erasing head, and ten playback heads) were positioned around the disk, in contact with the tape. 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. A separate amplifier and band-pass filter for each head could modify the spectrum of the sound, and additional feedback loops could transmit the information to the recording head. The resulting repetitions of a sound occurred at different time intervals, and could be filtered or modified through feedback. This system was also easily capable of producing artificial reverberation or continuous sounds. 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 centre of the space a loudspeaker was placed in a high position above the audience. The sounds could therefore be moved around the audience, rather than just across the front stage. On stage, the control system allowed a performer to position a sound either to the left or right, above or behind the audience, simply by moving a small, hand held transmitter coil towards or away from four somewhat larger receiver coils arranged around the performer in a manner reflecting the loudspeaker positions. 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. The Coupigny synthesiser, named for its designer François Coupigny, director of the Group for Technical Research, and the 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 concrète. 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. 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 (24 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 concrète 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 envelope control was something Pierre Schaeffer was against, since it favoured the preconception of music and therefore deviated from Schaeffer's principle of "making through listening". The development of the machine was constrained by several factors. It needed to be modular and the modules had to be easily interconnected (so that the synthesiser would have more modules than slots and 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. This synthesiser was well-adapted to the production of 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. An inaugural concert took place on 14 February 1974 at the Espace Pierre Cardin in Paris with a presentation of Bayle's Expérience acoustique. 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 musique-concrète-based works but with the added enhancement of sound spatialisation. Loudspeakers are placed both on stage and at positions throughout the performance space 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". As of 2010, the Acousmonium was still performing, with 64 speakers, 35 amplifiers, and 2 consoles. ==In popular music==

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. Composers such as James Tenney and Arne Mellnäs created pieces in the 1960s that recontextualised the music of Elvis Presley and the singer's own voice, respectively, while later in the decade, Bernard Parmegiani created the pieces ''Pop'electric and Du pop a l'ane, which used fragments of musical genres such as easy listening, dixieland, classical music and progressive rock. Reynolds writes that this approach continued in the later work of musicians Matmos, whose A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure'' (2001) was created with the sounds of cosmetic surgery, and the "pop-collage" work of John Oswald, who referred to the approach as 'plunderphonics'. Oswald's Plexure (1993) was created using recognisable elements of rock and pop music from 1982 to 1992. 1960s In the 1960s, as popular music began to increase in cultural importance and question its role as commercial entertainment, many popular musicians began taking influence from the post-war avant-garde, including the Beatles, who incorporated techniques such as tape loops, speed manipulation, and reverse playback in their song "Tomorrow Never Knows" (1966). 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". In The Wire, Edwin Pouncey wrote that the 1960s represented the height of confluence between rock and academic music, noting that composers like Luciano Berio and Pierre Henry found likeness in the "distorting-mirror" sound of psychedelic rock, and that concrète's contrasting tones and timbres were suited to the effects of psychedelic drugs. Following the Beatles' example, many groups incorporated found sounds into otherwise typical pop songs for psychedelic effect, resulting in "pop and rock musique concrète flirtations"; examples include the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" (1966), Love's "7 and 7 Is" (1967) and The Box Tops' "The Letter" (1967). Popular musicians more versed in modern classical and experimental music utilised elements of musique concrète more maturely, including Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on pieces like the Edgard Varèse tribute "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" (1966), "The Chrome Planted Megaphone of Destiny" and Lumpy Gravy (both 1968), and Jefferson Airplane's "Would You Like a Snack?" (1968), while the Grateful Dead's album Anthem of the Sun (1968), which featured Berio student Phil Lesh on bass, features musique concrète passages that Pouncey compared to Varèse's Deserts and the "keyboard deconstructions" of John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow. The Beatles continued their use of concrète on songs such as "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" and "I Am the Walrus" (all 1967), before the approach climaxed with the pure musique concrète piece "Revolution 9" (1968); afterwards, John Lennon, alongside wife and Fluxus artist Yoko Ono, continued the approach on their solo works Two Virgins (1968) and Life with the Lions (1969). 1970s 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. Also in 1973, German band Faust released The Faust Tapes; priced in the United Kingdom at 49 pence, the album was described by writer Chris Jones as "a contender for the most widely heard piece of musique concrete" after "Revolution 9". 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". Steve Taylor writes that industrial groups Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire continued the concrète tradition with collages constructed with tape manipulation and loops, 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. 1980s and beyond With the emergence of hip hop music in the 1980s, deejays such as Grandmaster Flash utitlised turnables to "[montage] in real time" with portions of rock, R&B and disco records, in order to create groove-based music with percussive scratching; this provided a parallel breakthrough to collage artist Christian Marclay's use of vinyl records as a "noise-generating medium" in his own work. Reynolds wrote: "As sampling technology grew more affordable, DJs-turned-producers like Eric B. developed hip-hop into a studio-based art. 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." He described this era of hip hop as "the most vibrant and flourishing descendant – albeit an indirect one – of musique concrète". 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". In 1989, John Diliberto of Music Technology described the group Art of Noise as having both digitised and synthesised musique concrète and "locked it into a crunching groove and turned it into dance music for the '80s". 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". 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. In a piece for Pitchfork, musicians Matmos noted the use of musique concrète in later popular music, including the crying baby effects in Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody?" (1998) or Missy Elliott's "backwards chorus", while noting that the aesthetic was arguably built upon by works including Art of Noise's "Close (to the Edit)" (1984), Meat Beat Manifesto's Storm the Studio (1989) and the work of Public Enemy, Negativland and People Like Us, among other examples. 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. In 2025, Daniel Blumberg's Oscar-winning score for the film The Brutalist used a concrète style. Other film composers have cited musique concrète as an influence, such as the French composer Mathieu Lamboley, who scored the television series Lupin and Jean-Paul Salomé's 2026 film ''L'affaire Bojarski'', which uses the sounds of a banknote‑printing press. ==See also==