The origin of sound collage can be traced back to the works of
Biber's programmatic sonata
Battalia (1673) and
Mozart's Don Giovanni (1789), and certain passages in
Mahler symphonies as collage, but the first fully developed collages occur in a few works by
Charles Ives, whose piece
Central Park in the Dark (1906) creates the feeling of a walk in the city by layering several distinct melodies and quotations on top of each other. Earlier traditional forms and procedures such as the
quodlibet,
medley,
potpourri, and
centonization differ from collage in that the various elements in them are made to fit smoothly together, whereas in a collage clashes of key, timbre, texture, meter, tempo, or other discrepancies are important in helping to preserve the individuality of the constituent elements and to convey the impression of a heterogeneous assemblage. What made their technique true collage, however, was the juxtaposition of quotations and unrelated melodies, either by layering them or by moving between them in quick succession. A first documented instance of sound collage created as
electronic music is
Wochenende (in English,
Weekend), a collage of words, music and sounds created by film-maker and media artist
Walter Ruttmann in 1928. Later, in 1948,
Pierre Schaeffer used the techniques of sound collage to create the first piece of
musique concrète,
Étude aux chemins de fer, which was assembled from recordings of
trains. Schaeffer created this piece by recording sounds of trains onto several
vinyl records, some of which had lock grooves allowing them to play in a continuous loop. He then set up multiple turntables in his studio, allowing him to trigger and mix together the various train sounds as needed. According to music theorist Cristina Losada, the third movement of
Luciano Berio's
Sinfonia is often considered "the prototype of a musical collage." In an essay written in 1937,
John Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical sound materials and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called
noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Cage began in 1939 to create a series of found sounds works that explored his stated aims, the first being
Imaginary Landscape #1 for instruments including two variable speed
turntables with frequency recordings. Important modern sound collage pieces were created by
Pierre Schaeffer and the
Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1950s and early-1960s Schaeffer,
Pierre Henry,
Olivier Messiaen,
Pierre Boulez,
Jean Barraqué,
Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Edgard Varèse,
Iannis Xenakis,
Michel Philippot, and
Arthur Honegger all worked with sound collage. Examples are
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 score Masquerage
(1952) by Schaeffer and Astrologie
(1953) by Henry. In 1954 Varèse and Honegger created Déserts and La rivière endormie
". John Cage created his influential collage piece Williams Mix in 1952. More recently, George Rochberg used collage in Contra Mortem et Tempus
and Symphony No. 3''. In the 1980s
Minóy made many palimpsest-like multi-tracked
soundscape compositions that used sound collage. ==Micromontage==