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Musique Concrete: Music
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Musique concrète ( literally, "concrete music"), is the name given to a class of electronic music produced from editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds. It is the opposite of traditional composing (known to some as Musique Abstraite , literally, Abstract Music ) as 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. Concrète was pioneered in the late 1940s and 1950s , spurred by developments in technology, most prominently microphones, and the commercial availability of the magnetic tape recorder , utilized as tape loop s.
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Given today’s technological advances, it is rather impractical to construct Musique Concrete by splicing together and altering magnetic tape. While the methods of tape music construction may be out-dated, the pieces themselves are still sound innovative and the influence of Musique Concrete can be heard in all veins of popular music. The Beatles Edgard Varese-derived “Revolution 9” and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album were some of the most successful and and well-know examples from the 1960’s and early 1970’s. And even though the tradition of incorporating sound into music continues with many underground and (to some extent) mainstream acts today, the scope of impact reaches far beyond rock ‘n’ roll. Rap music is a genre of popular music relying on pre-recorded material for a sonic backdrop. While rap takes melodies and rhythms from familiar hit songs and reincorporates them into a new setting, many rap albums, such as It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (Public Enemy) and Three Feet High And Rising (De La Soul) take ordinary sounds and use them to create a finished product that is aurally awesome.
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Here’s an hour-long recording of two musique concrete pieces that should be required listening for anyone venturing into laptop music. Recorded back in 1971, it’s a textbook case of the effort required, in those days long before home-computing, to make electronic compositions built from found sounds. Now that audio-processing software comes preloaded with countless transformative plugins, the painstaking process of musique concrete — that is, of composing music based on real-world noise — has to be heard to be appreciated (MP3).
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These characteristics were published in his book, A la recherche d'une musique concrete (The Search for a Concrete Music), which went into detail defining sound to the most exact descriptions possible. He ... described the composer of musique concrete as one who"...Takes his point of departure the objets sonore, the sound objects, which are the equivalent of visual images, and which therefore alter the procedures of musical composition completely...The Concrete experiment in music consists of building sonorous objects, not with the play of numbers and seconds of the metronome, but with pieces of time torn from the cosmos." (3) Many composers of the day such as Milhaud, Boulez, Messian and even Stockhausen were enticed with the views Schaeffer put forth about sound. Many of them visited the studio and composed using the tools made available to them.
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Tod Dockstader's musique concrete turns out to have a surprising relevance to music created decades later; he's been described as "one of the godfathers of Nurse With Wound, and a distant cousin of rap and techno" (Option). Craig Anderton writes that Dockstader was one of the few to master "the art of assembling tape-recorded sounds and painstakingly splicing, cutting, dubbing, manipulating and mixing to create final compositions," then adds: "If you think that sounds similar to the procedures used to create today's cutting-edge pop music, you're right."
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From rock to rap, techno to reggae, the effects that Musique Concrete has had on modern music of all types cannot be overstated. It was, without a doubt, a radical innovation that changed the way the world perceives music.
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