Musique Concrète, 1948
Schaeffer turned trains and pans into material, making sound itself the stuff of composition.
Related
Time and place
Paris, 1948, in the experimental studio of French radio. In October, Schaeffer's Five Studies of Noises went on air, built from trains, turnstiles, saucepans and a piano.
What happened
Schaeffer did not begin with a score. He recorded real sounds, then cut and spliced them on disc lathes and tape. A closed groove repeated a fragment; speed changes altered pitch and length; reversal erased cause and effect; filtering kept one band. Sound was detached from its source and became material to place, layer and distort. He called this composing from sound musique concrète, against electronic music that began from abstract pitches. Pierre Henry joined in 1949, and the studio became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958.
What changed
The studio became an instrument. Composers no longer needed performers or notation; a work could exist only on tape, and the concert was no longer its only home. Film sound, radio drama, sampling and sound design all follow this road. It forced copyright and theory to answer a new question: with no score and no player, who is the author?
Listen to the turn
The library holds no Schaeffer studies, so listen to the prehistory. Antheil's Airplane Sonata drives machine rhythm into the piano, Cowell's Dynamic Motion turns the piano into percussion, and Ornstein's Suicide in an Airplane lets a gliding roar override melody. None is musique concrète, yet each teaches the ear to treat noise as material.
Related
This turn belongs to Contemporary; see Tape music machines, Sound Design and Timbre.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Pierre Schaeffer, À la recherche d'une musique concrète (Seuil, 1952)，用于核对1948年噪声练习曲与具体音乐概念
- Grove Music Online 的 Musique concrète 条目，用于交叉核对录音室技术与音乐研究小组的沿革
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.