Hi there!

My name is Henry, and this is the blog I will be keeping to go along with my studies at LCC.

For my first blog entry I thought I would look at Musique Concrète, one of the earliest forms of modern sound art. The term was invented by Pierre Schaeffer, and was used to describe music made from recorded (sampled) concrete sounds, as opposed to music made with traditional instruments.

Schaeffer was one of the leading figures of the genre, and some of his most pioneering work can be found in Cinq Études de Bruits from 1948.

The five études (studies) in the piece are:

1. Étude aux Chemins de Fer – trains
2. Étude aux Tourniquets – toy tops and percussion instruments
3. Étude Violette – piano
4. Étude Noire – piano
5. Étude Pathétique – sauce pans, canal boats, singing, speech, harmonica, piano

Each of them utilises separate sounds, and my personal favourite is the 4th étude, ‘Étude Noire’. There is something about it that sounds so menacing and dark – completely separate to the popular music of the time. I think that the crackling vinyl sounds add something to the eerie atmosphere.

Another pioneering artist of Musique Concrète is Halim El-Dabh. El-Dabh was originally from Cairo, and his piece ‘The Expression of Zaar’ from 1944 is a precursor to Schaeffer’s Études, which were composed four years later.

For this piece, El-Dabh captured the sounds a traditional zaar ceremony (a public exorcism) with a wire recorder he had borrowed from Middle East Radio, and manipulated them.

El-Dabh best describes it himself – “I just started playing around with the equipment at the station, including reverberation, echo chambers, voltage controls, and a re-recording room that had movable walls to create different kinds and amounts of reverb. I concentrated on those high tones that reverberated and had different beats and clashes, and started eliminating the fundamental tones, isolating the high overtones so that in the finished recording, the voices are not really recognizable any more, only the high overtones, with their beats and clashes, may be heard.”

I find it very interesting to look at works of sound art that have been produced outside of traditional western contexts, and El-Dabh’s ‘Expression of Zaar’ is certainly an extremely pioneering and innovative piece of work, pre-dating pretty much all other works of Musique Concrète. This is not to downplay Schaeffer’s work though, and the two composers, amongst many others associated with the genre at the time, certainly left a huge influence on sampled music and sound art that was to come in the years following.

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite Pierre Schaeffer quotes – “Why should a civilization which so misuses its power have, or deserve, a normal music?”

References

1. MusicRadar. 2020. Everything you need to know about: Musique concrète. [online] Available at: <https://www.musicradar.com/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-musique-concrete> [Accessed 5 November 2021].
2. Patrick, J., n.d. A guide to Pierre Schaeffer, godfather of sampling. [online] Fact Magazine. Available at: <https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/23/pierre-schaeffer-guide/> [Accessed 15 November 2021].
3. Bradley, F., 2015. Halim El Dabh. [online] Ibraaz. Available at: <https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/139/> [Accessed 15 November 2021].
4. Fire Water, 2011. Halim El-Dabh – “Wire Recorder Piece” 1944. Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_kbNSdRvgo> [Accessed 15 November 2021].