Today I’m going to trace the realisation and development of musique concrète in Pierre Schaeffer’s seminal works; Étude Aux Chemins De Fer (Railway Study) and Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul in order to explore how the pioneer of the concept not only created and critiqued his own work, but challenged preconceived notions of music and listening.
As a writer, sound producer, composer and head of the Studio d’Essay, a French radio station, Schaeffer instinctively identified the potential of sound effects, which he had been using in various TV and radio shows, for compositional means. By 1948, Schaeffer also had a strong grasp of lock-groove records, which consisted of continuous circular grooves on a disk as opposed to the conventional spiral groove moving towards the centre. With the capability to play continuous loops, and a fervent interest in natural sounds, he began experimenting with recordings of percussion instruments struck in unusual ways and editing and manipulating bell sounds.
The result of such experimentations, Schaeffer coined, ‘Musique Concrète’. He deemed the compositional style – ‘a commitment to compose with materials taken from “given” experimental sound in order to emphasize a dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound fragments that exist in reality, and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects, even if and above all when they do not fit in with the elementary definitions of music theory’. Of course, the word ‘concrete’ highlights that, unlike traditional music, this art form is composed of tangible, physically produced recorded materials. In this way, musique concrète turned compositional practise on its head, with the process moving from sounds to their organisation as opposed to a score to its execution.
Etude aux Chemins de Fer (Study in Locomotives), of 1948, was one of the first pieces ever created to represent these ideals, as it was created entirely with audio technology, it existed only in recorded form, and the sounds used were non-musical, and not created by musicians. The piece was created from sounds he recorded at a railway depot in Batignolles. Interestingly he treated the train drivers almost like musicians, as he asked them to ‘improvise’ in a kind of imitative sense. In fact, his treatment of the composition is actually quite traditional as well, as he talks about the construction of the piece in this second quote.
In a way, I think this traditional construction was quite important in terms of the accessibility and credibility of his music at the time. If he had used an unfamiliar structure and these non-musical sounds, people definitely wouldn’t have believed it had any musical merit. And if people were going to connect with the music, for any kind of musical communication to take place between a composer and a listener, the sound needs to be organised into a kind of code which is commonly understood.
As you can hear, there are sounds of the trains whistling, the engines accelerating and the wheels moving over the rail joints… and this was a problem for Schaeffer. Despite Schaeffer’s attempts convey his musicality, most people’s initial thought upon hearing the music was its physical source, the trains, rather than its musical content. Of course, when any ambient sound is easily recognised, it carries with it the history of its non-musical past. In this case, the anecdotal aspect of the sound dominated over the musical construction, meaning the piece wasn’t recognised as the true study in sound evolution that the Schaeffer hoped it would be. In an attempt to aid listeners to disassociate sounds from their original source, in four further etudes he experimented with both musical instruments and ambient sounds, and this time layered the sounds by playing several discs at time through a mixer whilst also changing the speed of the turntables to affect the pitch, attack and decay of the sounds. All five etudes were broadcast in a program called Concert de Bruits (Concert of Noises) on October 5, 1948. Though the response was divided, the controversy it engendered ensured the continued support of Schaeffer’s work and attracted the attention of the young classically trained Pierre Henri who joined him at (Radio-diffusion et Télévision Française) RTF in 1949. This also encouraged Schaeffer to formulate his controversial theory of reduced listening and specification of the objet sonore (sound object) which he defined as sound, abstracted from its natural environment and place in time. As Michel Chion neatly paraphrases, Schaeffer proposed “a listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning. Reduced listening takes the sound-verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever-as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.” https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/32n/Chion_Modes.pdf.
His collaboration with Pierre Henri, symphony for a man alone (or solo as it could be translated) premiered in Paris in 1950 at the first official concert of musique concrète. While the original was presented in 22 sections, the final 12 movement version encapsulated many of the theories Schaeffer and Henri had been working on into a 20-minute piece.
However, whilst their declared intentions as composers of concrete music was to transform sound material into less recognisable forms, as to eliminate any anecdotal elements, the origin of the sound sources is usually identifiable. Of course, the task of creating this piece was by no means easy when taking into consideration the early stage of audio technology, but actually the significance of the work is tied into its connection with human life. They also chose to incorporate sounds of musical instruments, perhaps for this reason. Initially, this was a choice which Schaeffer was not sure of –but in the end felt concrete music did not have to be limited to just non-musical sounds. He commented that ‘The Man Alone had to find the symphony on himself, not only conceiving music abstractedly, but being his proper instrument’
In contrast to Schaeffer’s first Etudes, the work’s phrasing and shape is far more precise and subtle. For me, it’s quite captivating in the sense that it is both musical and cinematic. Whilst I don’t feel it is entirely possible to fully engage in reduced listening, I would be interested, in terms of my own composition, to find a balance between music and noise, by manipulating sound to blurs the two together, in order to treat typically non-musical sound in a musical way and vise-versa. Schaeffer’s aesthetic also emphasised the importance of playing with sound, using the recorded material as starting place for composition. Generally, I find this approach allows for a natural progression within a work.
In terms of electronic music, the legacy of Schaeffer’s work is undeniable. His ground-breaking conception of Musique Concrète rethought traditional practises and chose to redefine what we consider to be musical sound. Whilst his works did not always live up to his theoretical declarations, they highlight crucial technological developments of the mid-century, and inspired a whole new treatment of sound material.