Musique concrète
Musique concrete ( French . For "concrete Music") is a composition technique in which with recorded sounds and stored in phonograms composing is. These recordings can contain played instruments as well as everyday noises. They are then electronically alienated through assembly, tape cutting, changing the tape speed and tape loops . Influences can be found mainly in Italian futurism .
The name goes back to an article in 1949 by the French engineer Pierre Schaeffer , who founded the Club d'essai in Paris on the French radio RDF for this purpose . The term should distinguish it from the classical direction of abstract music ( classical music , twelve-tone music , serial music ). According to Schaeffer, the movement in classical music goes from the abstract to the concrete (composition), the opposite is true here: from the concrete (everyday noises) the abstract is created by alienating the sound.
Since tape recorders were only used in Germany at that time , Schaeffer was initially limited to direct editing of records. The program Études de bruits was first broadcast in 1948, u. a. with the Étude pour chemin de fer , where the various noises of steam locomotives and railroad cars can be heard. During his work, Schaeffer developed the model of the objet sonore , a general and abstract scheme for classifying sound structures between the individual sound and the piece of music as a whole. Schaeffer's work inspired the British composer Daphne Oram (1925–2003) to set up the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC .
This view of music led to a bitter dispute with followers of the Cologne School (and also the Second Viennese School ); especially with the composer Pierre Boulez there were arguments about contemporary music aesthetics . Boulez accused Schaeffer of being more of a craftsman than a musician, and that his way of producing music resembled a “ bricolage ” (handicraft work), which Schaeffer did not reject; on the contrary, "the history of music itself [...] is a development through bricolage". So it was that African music was also used in his works. The composer Tod Dockstader comments:
“Pierre Schaeffer's original definition was to work with the sound in the ear, directly with the sound, as a contrast to the“ abstract ”music in which sounds were written. Like Schaeffer, a sound engineer at work, I had practice as a “worker with rhythms, frequencies and intensities”. As a non-musician, I couldn't write music, but this “new art of music” didn't need a notation. In the beginning, Concrete Music wasn't even recognized as music. Schaeffer's first retrospective was called A Concert of Noises "
Because of the opposing views, one even spoke of a second iron curtain .
In practice, the personal differences, too, were eliminated when Karlheinz Stockhausen , who had previously worked for Schaeffer, composed the Song of the Youngsters in 1955–56 , which not only mixed language, song and electronic sounds equally, but allowed them to merge into one another. Since then, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between these directions; Electronic music soon established itself as a generic term, which is why the delimiting but still controversial term electroacoustic music arose .
In 1951, Pierre Henry took over the Club d'essai , which has now become the Groupe de Recherches de (la) Musique Concrète . Henry later worked more on the involvement of rock music with electronic influences from Concrete Music and is even known as the father figure of techno since the re-publication (1997) of his mass pour le temps présent in 1967. He worked with the group Spooky Tooth and later the Violent Femmes together.
Musique concrète influenced noise music and gave the development of radio plays and acoustic features significant impulses through works by Luc Ferrari (1929–2005).
literature
- Pierre Schaeffer : Traité des objets musicaux - Essai interdisciplines , Paris 1966, Éditions du Seuil. Nouvelle Édition 1977 with a final chapter. Tract on the theoretical foundation of musique concrète with 700 pages, contains many tables and schemes. In addition, Solfège de l'objet sonore , a collection of sound samples on 3 LPs , was published in 1967 .
- Pierre Schaeffer: Musique concrète , appeared in the Que sais-je? No. 1287, Paris 1967, revised 1973. German edition under the title Musique concrète - From the beginnings in Paris around 1948 to electro-acoustic music today , revised by Michel Chion , translated by Josef Häusler , Stuttgart 1974, Klett Verlag. Basic introduction, determined the reception in German-speaking countries.
- Marc Pierret: Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer , Paris 1969, Editions Pierre Belfond. 193-page conversation in French.
- Michael Beiche: Musique concrète , in: Concise dictionary of musical terminology , 23rd delivery, Stuttgart 1995. Conceptual history that reflects the development of musique concrète .
- Christoph von Blumröder: The electroacoustic music, a compositional revolution and its consequences , signals from Cologne contributions to the music of the time Volume 22, Verlag Der Apfel, Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-85450-422-1
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Jo Hutton: Daphne Oram: innovator, writer and composer . In: Organized Sound . tape 8 , no. 1 , April 2003, ISSN 1355-7718 , p. 49-56 , doi : 10.1017 / S1355771803001055 ( cambridge.org [accessed June 18, 2020]).
- ↑ Timothy D. Taylor Strange sounds: music, technology & culture
- ↑ Unofficial website Tod Dockstader ( Memento from September 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive )