the french and musique concrete

Hey Ascoltare
I never heard of those pronouncements/limitations re: 'Those who make Concrete'
and by now with many of the hardcore and trad makers of said musik no longer on the planet,
i think you can create without too much worry ...
Cheers on new creations

asco , i think you re refering to this

"the sounds are recorded first then built into a tune as opposed to a tune being written then given to players to turn into sound."

source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concrète

i suppose it's the difference between talking about Music Concrete as a distinct movement, when it is pretty much restricted to the output of the INA-GRM (and two record labels....) and talking about it as a set of tools.

me i'd probably describe Concrete as something quite particular and localised, and talk about other things under the banner of "avant-garde music". but then i'm just like that

one thing that's worth thinking about is that the INA-GRM isn't quite a closed academy. you can get in there. do classes etc as far as i'm aware. a friend of mine was taking lessons from parmegiani and bayle! so maybe its like a monastic order......

Some history, if you fancy it

I think the reference is to the two opposing schools of thought that emerged as the first experimental recording studios emerged in the early 1950s. These did, pretty much, fall down national lines (France v Germany, as so often...), not least because those were the two countries investing money in this stuff (there is also an American angle to this, Babbitt etc, but leave that to one side), and studios are by their nature geographically determined. Basically, electronic music was such a new medium, that all compositions at the time were essentially experiments in mapping out the territory, and in creating the first masterworks in the form. It's no surprise that two different approaches to electronic music emerged.

In Paris, you had Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer experimenting with recorded sound sources at the Club d'Essai (renamed the Group de recherche de musique concrete in 1951 (as became the GRM, then IRCAM)). They were joined at various times by Parmegiani, Xenakis, Varese and Ferrari. A model of electronic music developed in which the music was created through the manipulation of pre-recorded sound: this became Musique concrete.

Meanwhile, in Cologne, at the studios of West Deutsche Rundfunk (est. 1951), Eimert, Stockhausen and crew were working with electronic music as a way of realising complex, pseudo-mathematically derived musical structures. They worked with tape too, but their sound sources were artificial - sine generators, ring modulators, etc. As fervently as the French studio believed their way was best, so the Germans thought theirs was. For a while there was a strong ideological divide between the two (mediated by the likes of Stockhausen using pre-recorded singing in Gesang der junglige and Boulez working with abstract sound in Paris).

Needless to say, this is an attitude very much of its time, and should be redundant by now, although you do still find traces of it (although the national lines are long gone).

i agree with many of the comments here, Musique Concrete really describes a historical period of music made with a particular type of technology and driven by a certain aesthetic.

These days it would simply be called 'Electro-acoustic' a broad, all encompassing term for the manipulations of acoustic sources.

wonk_vitesse said:

i agree with many of the comments here, Musique Concrete really describes a historical period of music made with a particular type of technology and driven by a certain aesthetic.

These days it would simply be called 'Electro-acoustic' a broad, all encompassing term for the manipulations of acoustic sources.

Click to expand...

Wasn't there something of an ideological debate / schism in electro-acoustic music a few years back when people started using sounds made by identifiable real world processes rather than mashing them into complete abstraction? I'm talking from a half remembered interview on Mixing It here, so I'm not really sure...

I just picked up FEAR OF MUSIC and MORE SONGS..they sound cheesy in parts, but man, what a fine surround mix..SOme tracks, like DRUGS, LIFE DURING WARTIME and WARNING SIGN sound great with the 5.1 3D trippy mixes! NOw to track down REMAIN IN LIGHT & SPEAKING IN TOUNGES to really freak out!

speaking of...

i just got this record in montreal and it's pretty awesome...