Musique Concrete

Musique Concrete

Say it with a French accent and it sounds a lot more impressive.

Musique Concrete was an experimental development in music using recording equipment to capture environmental sounds. Basically, if you took your phone out and recorded a voice memo while walking down a busy street, the resulting piece of sound would be a lot like Musique Concrete.

There's a bit more to it than that, as the idea for Musique Concrete was basically where a composer treated the Gramophone as an instrument, same as a violin or a piano. Composers traditionally wrote music that was specific to an instrument, it used notes that instrument could play, specific techniques and so on... but it still had the creative impetus behind it. The Gramophone (which was the first playback device commercially available) was viewed as a repeater, something that allowed you to hear a recording of another instrument. Musique Concrete was kind of a backlash to that, treating the gramophone more on a higher level than just a speaker for something else.

You could argue that it hasn't really worked, because it's still only playing noises recorded from other things that created them.

I certainly fall into that camp. It doesn't matter what the guy has recorded, he wasn't recording the gramophone.

Anyway, I digress.

Here's a few of examples of Musique Concrete. I wouldn't ask you to listen to the whole track of each one, but you might be into it.

Edgard Varese's Poeme Electronique

One of the pieces I had to study at college was this guy's Poeme Electronique. The reason I share this with you is because I think it would be interesting for you to see the context of this piece of Musique Concrete, what kind of a guy gets into that stuff, and what purpose it was serving.

So here we go...

Who 

Edgard Varese. Composer. Pals with Claude Debussy, Impressionist guy. Also pals with Richard Strauss, big German programme music guy.
He was originally from France and eventually moved to the USA. While he was staying there, he kicked about with some experimental types. One of the guys he met was Leon Theremin, inventor of the instrument, the "Theremin"... this guy! Watch the video, it's only a minute and a half.

 So obviously this Leon guy is into weird sounds. You can imagine the chats these two would have. Edgard had been composing for a while, apparently "scandalising" audiences with his symphonies and so on. Not entirely sure what was scandalous about them, except if he was into experimental noises they might have sounded a bit rough, which generally ruins your Saturday night if you're expecting nice tunes. Purely conjecture, I don't know, I wasn't there.

What?

Varese ended up writing some Musique Concrete, naturally. It was new, it was experimental. It wasn't confined to notes and instruments and conventions and so on. Very avant-garde.

We're gonna look at his Poeme Electronique, which was commissioned for a specific purpose.

Why?

It was commissioned for Philips (yes the lightbulb and tellys guys) to be played alongside a film inside a pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. The whole point in the pavilion was to showcase the newest and best in multimedia, and this guy Varese is busy using new technology to capture sounds and organise them into a bizarre effect of a piece of music. Similar modus operandi. He also specifically designed the piece to make use of the odd shape of the pavilion, especially its height. So he was really interested in which sounds would really benefit from the acoustics in the space. Look at the pavilion, his bit was played right in the middle, where it reaches quite a height. The speakers were also embedded into the walls, which were coated with good old poisonous toxic asbestos, which will eventually kill you but makes for a pretty boomy acoustic, like a cave. The speakers, by the way, were actually embedded all the way up and down those big high walls. Quality Surround Sound.

When & Where?

All this was happening around 1958 for that World Fair Expo in Brussels.

How?

Given the brief, given the context, given his penchant for a wee experimental bit of music, big Varese set to to work. He recorded the piece onto tape, because that's the best they had at the time - no CDs or mp3s, no iphones or that. He used stereo recordings to exploit the full effect of panning (which is where sound travels from one speaker to another, giving a movement effect, so he particularly used the speakers going up and down the way to do this).

Using recorded sounds from various places, he put it all together and actually bothered to score it out. Given the complexity of what he was trying to do with it, probably not a bad idea to put it on paper.

You can see it's reading like shapes and times rather than musical notation. This is pretty common for a graphical score.

Result??

Hear for yourself.

Extra Bonus Info - Concret PH

The guy who designed the pavilion was a music buff too. He was a Greek guy called Iannis Xenakis, and at the time was an architectural assistant, who ended up basically doing the big architect's job and designing this thing. So actually, he was totally into it. Varese was sort of external, whereas Xenakis was like, living and breathing and part of the organism of this thing. So he (obviously) did his own bit of Musique Concrete, called "Concret PH" which was played in the entrance and exit ways of the pavilion.

The piece was played over 425 different speakers, and he mucked about with the spatial possibilities too. His piece used only one sound source: burning coal. He recorded that and then went nuts with it, splicing, panning, transposing, overdubbing, amplifying, altering the speed and mixing.

Here's his composition.