Musique Concrète was pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer in the late 1940s and 1950s, facilitated by developments in technology, most prominently microphones and the commercial availability of the magnetic tape recorder (created in 1939), used by Schaeffer and his colleagues for manipulating tapes and tape loops.The method he used to make music starts to transform popular music to electronic music. One of Schaeffer’s ideas was that a sound should be characterized by its morphology, by which he meant that a sound should be characterized by the way its structure changed in time, as something “abstract” and independent of any reference to the real world.
The importance of Schaeffer’s work with musique concrète has three notable points:
1) He developed the concept of including any and all sounds in the musical vocabulary. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments, removing them from their original context. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound.
2) He was among the first to manipulate recorded sound in the way that it could be used in conjunction with other such sounds in the making of a musical piece. This could be thought of as a precursor to contemporary sampling practices.
3) Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of play (in his terms, jeu) in the creation of music. Schaeffer’s idea of jeu comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: ‘to enjoy oneself by interacting with one’s surroundings’, as well as ‘to operate a musical instrument’. This notion is the core of musique concrète.
Pierre Schaeffer, a Paris radio broadcaster, experimented in a studio starting in 1948-1949. He created the “Research Group on Concrete Music” (Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète – GRMC) in 1951 when he established himself at the R.T.F., the ancestor of the ORTF public radiobroadcaster. He began to use the classing of sounds to create what he called musical objects.
The “Group on Musical Research” (Groupe de Recherches Musicales – GRM) was then created in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer, along with Luc Ferrari and François-Bernard Mâche and for whom Iannis Xenakis also composed for. Thereafter, Schaeffer used this experience to redefine the notion of “acousmatic”. In 1975, GRM was integrated into the Audiovisual National Institute (Institut national de l’audiovisuel – INA).
Musique Concrète was combined with other, synthesized forms of electronic music to create Edgard Varèse’s “Poème électronique”, played at the 1958 Brussels, Belgium World’s Fair through 425 carefully-placed loudspeakers in a special pavilion designed by Iannis Xenakis.
• Edgard Varèse’s “Poème électronique”
Non ‘avant-garde’ uses of musique concrète include Ottorino Respighi’s use of a gramophone recording of a nightingale in his 1924 symphonic poem The Pines of Rome. Almost fifty years later the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara used the same technique (with tape) for the birdsong in his Cantus Arcticus. The fictitious ‘twelve-tone composeress’ Dame Hilda Tablet, created by Henry Reed, spoke of her creation of ‘Musique concrète renforcée’.