Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Musique Concrete
I begin this morning to discover that compact disks can and will explode in your cd player. Perhaps not playing music, but games. It is reported in Infoworld, and I have seen this elsewhere, that a computer disc shattered in a CD-ROM drive that the owner of was playing Age of Empires II. Computer games helpful hint number 101: wear safety glasses while sitting at the computer.
When I saw the message about the exploding cds, "Musique Concrete" as a term came to mind, but that isn't really music hitting the concrete. Pierre Schaeffer is acknowledged as the "father" of Musique Concrete, which is one of the derivitive styles of electronic music.
Schaeffer was not a musician, but an engineer and a broadcaster. He was experimenting with "lock-grooves," keeping a phonograph needle in the same groove, essentially playing the same sound over and over. He searched for sounds to isolate in this way, and created Musique Concrete as a form of putting these natural sounds (looped, in a fashion, from the record) into a musical form.
Electronic music was characterized by sounds created not only for the note sounded, but by the attack (the quickness of the sound developing) and the decay (how the sound trails off in volume and intensity.) Synthesizers from Bob Moog had controls for each type of sound generated so their attack and decay could be artificially simulated, just as the sound was. Pierre Schaeffer was the first person to explore attack and decay in his experiments.
In realizing the concept of collecting more sounds and stringing them together, measuring their individual presence by how short or long he presented the sound, Schaeffer speculated that an instrument could be built that would play prerecorded sounds. The Mellotron, a staple of early Sixties Pop music, was a realization by others many years after Schaeffer wrote about it.
Schaeffer eventually presented a composition, made from sounds collected from six locomotives, accellerating and slowing, as "Etude aux chemans de fer" (Concert for Locomotives.) The reaction was, predictibly mixed.
In 1951, Schaeffer was presented with a tape recorder, which he fitted with 12 heads. He documented his experiments in music in writings and in books, and created rule sets for the forms of musique concrete. Schaeffer died in 1995, and is remembered as "The Musician of Sounds."
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When I saw the message about the exploding cds, "Musique Concrete" as a term came to mind, but that isn't really music hitting the concrete. Pierre Schaeffer is acknowledged as the "father" of Musique Concrete, which is one of the derivitive styles of electronic music.
Schaeffer was not a musician, but an engineer and a broadcaster. He was experimenting with "lock-grooves," keeping a phonograph needle in the same groove, essentially playing the same sound over and over. He searched for sounds to isolate in this way, and created Musique Concrete as a form of putting these natural sounds (looped, in a fashion, from the record) into a musical form.
Electronic music was characterized by sounds created not only for the note sounded, but by the attack (the quickness of the sound developing) and the decay (how the sound trails off in volume and intensity.) Synthesizers from Bob Moog had controls for each type of sound generated so their attack and decay could be artificially simulated, just as the sound was. Pierre Schaeffer was the first person to explore attack and decay in his experiments.
In realizing the concept of collecting more sounds and stringing them together, measuring their individual presence by how short or long he presented the sound, Schaeffer speculated that an instrument could be built that would play prerecorded sounds. The Mellotron, a staple of early Sixties Pop music, was a realization by others many years after Schaeffer wrote about it.
Schaeffer eventually presented a composition, made from sounds collected from six locomotives, accellerating and slowing, as "Etude aux chemans de fer" (Concert for Locomotives.) The reaction was, predictibly mixed.
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Although the composition is considered to be more of an experimental essay rather than a serious composition, it was significant in four ways. 1. An act of musical composition was accomplished by a technological process. 2. The work could be replayed multiple times. 3. Replaying was not dependent on human performers. 4. Elements were "concrete." |
In 1951, Schaeffer was presented with a tape recorder, which he fitted with 12 heads. He documented his experiments in music in writings and in books, and created rule sets for the forms of musique concrete. Schaeffer died in 1995, and is remembered as "The Musician of Sounds."
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