Musique Concrete is a means of musical composition with the use of pre-recorded sounds. Essentially, sampling. It is commonly described through its invention: the musician, Pierre Schaeffer, was experimenting with recorded sounds in a radio studio constructing senseless structures – in which he considers music. (Teruggi, 2015)
Schaeffer held a Musique Concrete concert on the 18th of March 1950, describing it as “the very first audience to undergo an essential deprivation for concert listeners: the absence of musicians.”. I thought this was quite intriguing as we are so accustomed to hearing pre-recorded audio in concerts without live musicians on stage, though we can clearly see that this concept dates far back to the 1950s.
This photo demonstrates Schaeffer’s concept of the two different workflows that result in either “regular music” or “new music” (through musique concrete). One workflow is from an abstract point of view and the other a concrete point of view. This explains that regular music is formed from an idea, a concept which is then transcribed onto sheet music. Eventually it is played with a band resulting in a piece of music. However, the “new music” process is rather the opposite. We start off with pre-recorded sounds, then we experiment with those sounds, maybe in terms of arrangement, manipulating the sounds themselves, etc. eventually leading to a final production of music.
One example of Schaeffer’s work is a piece called “Thawed Words” in 1952. It was based on a battle that took place in 1552. A tale about crossing the Frozen Sea, the previous winter, there had been a battle between two warring tribes. Sounds of combat froze, eventually melting, pouring sounds of war cries, whinnying horses and clashing weapons. Here, Pierre Schaeffer alters the timbre of a voice, that is reading passages of the war aloud through various tape manipulation techniques, also known as musique concrete. (Young, 2012)
References:
Teruggi, D. (2015) “Musique concrète today: Its reach, evolution of concepts and role in musical thought,” Organised Sound, 20(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771814000429.
Young, R. (2012) Pierre Schaeffer and the birth of Musique Concrète, Frieze. Available at: https://www.frieze.com/article/music-22 (Accessed: November 22, 2022).