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About
the Music
a preface for five faces
by Jean-Christophe Thomas
Here are five tomes of classified archives The visitors of the concrete
adventure; the art of study; sound in numbers; the time of real time;
The GRM without knowing it). Classified? There is nothing worse than classifying.
It’s quite simply impossible to do. It is without doubt easier to
compose (and in particular concrete music which can be done any old how)
easier to make life i.e. disorder than it is to be the careful bookkeeper.
Or the presenter. But it is true that there is a certain amount of fun
to be had, for those who have a taste for this kind of thing in dreaming
up taxonomies. We all know the opening pages of The Order of Things where
Foucault reminds us of the text by Borges citing a Chinese encyclopedia
— very probably improbable — which offers the following wondrous
taxonomy Animals can be divided etc: a/ those that belong to the Emperor,
b/ embalmed, c/ tamed, d sucking pigs, e/ mermaids, f/ fabulous g/ stray
dogs, h/ included in this classification, i/which wave around madly, /
innumerable, k/ drawn with a very fine camel hair brush 1/ et cetera,
m/ which have just broken the water jug, n/ which look like flies from
a distance.
Foucault’s reply refers to the impossibility of thinking that (for
us modern Westerners) and takes great delight using this exotic classification,
in teasing out the frontiers of our familiar mental universe. The problem
for the pioneers of concrete music was different and exactly symmetrical.
Here what is strange is an established,, system of thought, which pigeon
holes every thing in a way which surprises us but which envisages the
world, it seems, without mystery. For our pioneers (let us think of Pierre
Schaeffer), it was precisely this mystery, the edgeless immensity, the
monstrous nature of the ocean of sounds..... which was the obstacle to
their efforts to classify which made the rationality of their experiments
waver so much. Hence, still today, the amusing and misleading eclecticism
of the classification created by these five discs of archives.
In the Beginning, it was a case of taming the animals,, of sound. In the
Beginning, there were no works, as yet. And so there were no genres (genres
are less numerous, and therefore easier to classify — more abstract
than the works, which themselves are easier to classify than sounds).
Only studies were required: because their very purpose is to test, to
demonstrate, to
simplify, to enhance the opaque expressive power of sounds.
Maybe electroacoustic music, essentially, is still at that stage (i.e.
misleading and necessarily superficial, pragmatic, amusing classifications).
Because in reality, sound is such an important affair that the music of
sound has not yet finished with it with this basic level of writing of
composition of the invention of sound — and despite the virtuosity
that has been acquired over the years, from the very start and still today,
that is the humble study, so dear to the heart of Pierre Schaeffer. Regardless
of that, let us have fun with the way this analytical grid has been assembled.
Let us cloud the issue, let us blur the labels on the five disks, these
overly assertive labels — let us de-catalogue the music Let the
listener if he wishes to think and to hear — and to classify —
‘all by himself,,, like a grown-up, listen to all five disks, for
a start! And then perform this same ordering exercise in his own way,
afterwards.
So
firstly, we meet the Visitors to find out just what they do, that is,
their etudes. Here, the classification (of our archives) is historically
relevant: here, we have brought together all or nearly all composers who
have spent some time at the Studio Schaeffer, the Club d’essai,
from the fifties. ... All diverse. Some from ‘abroad’, others
sometimes already famous abroad, others who will also return there; but
all wish to become acquainted with ‘concrete specificity’,
to come face to face with it and leave with something — or nothing
at all. Thus we encounter the étude, in vogue a genre of the period,
and not only at the Studio Schaeffer. The period was truly ‘experimental’:
the étude is seen as absolutely essential in the creative experience
a compelling entity where the self is immersed — yet also waiting
for better days — kept secret in the dark: it is in fact the genre
of the super self . . Puritanical renunciation of any expression (suspected
as ready made) and a calling into queston a testing of the ‘material’
(of syntax, etc). However original idiosyncrasy is the mark of the visitors,
each more or less playing the harsh game of this pedagogical time. Most
often, style cuts through, defying repression. And Pierre Boulez doesn’t
just provide his (renowned) ‘strictness’, his ‘quite
Webernian’ succinctness, his stoicism. Well perhaps he does in Etude
1 using just a single sound , but in the second one, the composer becomes
enticed by baroque qualities maté — far more typical of him.
And on the straight dotted line moving around an unperturbed axis, it
is a delight to encounter despite repetition — the motif so typical
of productions at the Studio at the time (that is- markedly concrete-club
d’essaimusic, exquisite anecdotal in style) with a rolling box ..
cut up into pieces (obviously to remove anecdotal or realist character);
thus emerges a punctuation using recurrent silence (very Boulezian) an
echo or mini- pause, resounding hollowness or absence thereof, following
each cluster of events), delightfully foreshadowing movements (No. 1,
No 4) of the Marteau sans maitre for example.
Jean
Barraqué has a more weighty style — and the author of Temps
restitué does not always respond with subtlety, using long presentations
of somewhat dull sounds in reverse. With its shrill and muddled polytonality,
la riviere endormie — although authentic — is more like ‘incidental
film music’! Symphonic and scored for voice, ‘generously lyrical’
dreamy bending simple refrains with uncomplicated reed pipes and pastoral
demonstrations, here we encounter very little concrete music or ‘etude’
and a lot of Darius Milhaud. However, this same genre (let us call it
elegiac) recurs elsewhere too. (For example, as in the piece with the
melancholic Debussy-like theme, by Henri Sauget). With utterly opposed
poetics, the ‘interpolation by Varése — suggesting
the first magnificent landscapes of his Deserts — is reminiscent
of the disorderly thundering sounds the composer positively developed
for orchestra. Boucourechliev as well offers unique style a surfeit of
thorny, spiny abundant elements — two parallel universes, bursting
forth from the broken yoke of their unquestionably ‘open’
structures. Xenakis reveals yet another style, finding in the concrete
dust of smelting coals the very dimensions, the sound nebulae he will
later measure before magnifying them for the orchestra. Quite the other
way round Claude Ballif achieves a truly concrete feat: with a marked
mood of control the etude emerges devoted to resonance, percussion and
deliberately focused on the object. The Messiaen case is delicate: the
composer had apparently been saying his study had ‘gone wrong’.
‘I believe in the future of concrete music, but I am not gifted’
Something in his style is hollow or empty, in this working drawing that
is utterly extremist and poorly developed (filled out) by its material,
like Varése proper contour is only achieved with the orchestra,
only then does tone rhythmic brilliance (between the concrete and the
abstract) pour forth with exuberance.
The Visitors and Concrete Adventure
By Françoise Bayle
Looking
back over more than half a century, the pervasive evidence of a new Muse
appears, that of technological art itself, forthrightly emerging since
then. However it undoubtedly fell to exponent Pierre Schaeffer himself
more critical or more ambitious, and certainly better placed than his
predecessors the futurists of 1913, J. Cage or even E. Varese, to considerably
enhance the scope of the first discoveries mode then with sound and music
by linking the adventure he called concrete music with another, more general
and unquestionable, thereby forming the background of our period, and
enabling research/creation through audiovisual communication.
Far more than just an avant-garde gesture, the sudden irruption of his
Concert de Bruits in radio broadcasts in June 1948 was a uniquely astonishing
signal for the social emergence of an art derived from the medium itself.
Twenty years later its inventor described it as follows: ‘We learned
to associate the lute with the Middle Ages, plain song with the monastery,
the torn torn with wild and primitive man, the viola da gamba with courtly
dress. How can we really not expect to also find that music in the 20th
century relates to machines and the masses, the electron and calculators
... The unbridled release of noises, the surge of sounds, all utterly
opposed to terms customarily used to describe music — harmony and
counterpoint, mellowness and subtlety expression and feeling -, was actually
the music of the period, brutal and disturbed in nature, born n the period
of the atom and missiles, power and speed, all unleashed elements’.
Whilst it is not be possible to give an account in just a few lines of
the upheaval brought about by such a disruption within musical practice
as already detailed in many writings by the author of Journal de cette
recherche (1952) or in his Traite des Objet Musicaux (1966) we must take
due note of an approach whose experimental essence clearly asserted itself
in the foreword to the very first Concert in 1950: ‘We trust the
meaning we attach to the demonstration today may be well understood. We
have taken the tool technical developments themselves have given us, we
have utterly applied ourselves to the task and yet, the result is not
entirely our own work. Child of the gods and mankind, of will and chance
the result is like some last item not actually desired, to be shown really
only to determine whether it can fulfill a purpose. The sound engineer
who has been able to extract something from the purring of machines is
entitled to relief; the ingenious musician then arrives to take over.
Of course, not a musician who just wants a prefabricated object, but one
who loves the material and the unexpected involved with playing a multistage
instrument, and who is able to do away with his interline spaced paper
in favour of the ever-changing shimmer of a record. Only such a musician
should come to the rescue, if he/she so desires’.
So,
an initial call had already gone out to the ‘visitors’ A commentator
of the time the musicologist Serge Moreux, issued this clear statement
The material of concrete music sound in its original state, as it occurs
in nature fixed by machines, transformed through their manipulations (…)
It is astounding that someone wanted to make veritable works of the mind
using this material. Despite so many imperfections in initial productions,
these works fully deserve our admiration due to their own logic, the psyche
challenging our own, their dialectics of the fortuitous. (…)
The
modern musician can try, as Pierre Schaeffer aptly expressed, to find
a breach in the surrounding wall around music encircling us sometimes
like a citadel . (18 March 1950 Inaugural Concert of Concrete Music)
In just a few years, several stages swiftly followed upon each other described
by the ‘hapless inventor’ conveying a sense of anxiety. ‘The
stroke of inspiration in 1948 came right out of the blue when I was on
my own. Had gone to the studio ‘to bring out life from noise, to
achieve the best result possible using a ‘dramatic sound setting
; this led me to the music. By dint of collecting sounds having some value
as a sign, I found these same signs gradually cancel each other out, no
longer call forth any particular setting or episodic structure of an action
but move of their own accord, forming amongst themselves resonance linkages
all hybrid of course. (...) Thus, a sort of poetry in sound, in the absence
of music, comes about ex abrupto. (...) Particularly relevant here is
the mechanism of the lost item, where the seeker stumbles upon an object
other than the one being searched for and expresses dissatisfaction, failing
to realise its actual significance rather like the lost traveler who discovers
a secret passage without actually knowing it. But following the suggestion
of Olivier Messiaen, a very exceptional first visitor appeared, Pierre
Henry, truly a providential encounter with definitive consequences. Two
men markedly different from each other in terms of training temperament
and calling, met as early as 1949 at the unassuming studio in rue de I’Université.
Like two explorers amazed at detecting a rise in water level, terrified
by the elements unleashed, the very nature of circumstances meant that
both of us, Pierre Henry and I stood side by side throughout all those
years - After the period of early experiments where ‘the main concern
was to firstly surprise the seeker, not only as regards the uncertainty
but also as regards the ambiguousness of his approach, as he tries his
hand at all sorts of noises’, the situation, as described in the
Journal’, appeared ‘desperate’.. Three periods follow
each other, alternatey poetic baroque, expressionist - ‘It is with
quiet audacity, despite the ambiguity of the means and ends, that both
authors worked on the Symphonie pour un homme seul benefiting, as may
be said, from the pureness of the hybrid formation mechanism (...) whilst
extending this dramatic art, itself born through radio broadcasting (...).
However, such an outstanding adventure could not continue for very long’.
A baroque period followed this poetic episode: Perhaps it was necessary
for someone to appear and try out forbidden regressive journeys whilst
demonstrating it was also possible to have characters dance and sing using
music on tape’.
Thus emerged the first opera concrete’ experience, Orphee 53, created
(despite catcalls) and performed at a famous contemporary music festival:
‘In this way we lost the battle of Donaueschingen becoming the object
of international disdain for many years after (...) But Orpheus, like
Phoenix, continued to emerge reborn. Pierre Henry working on his own account,
brought together all the remaining pieces in his own way for a magnificent
Bejartian ballet which enjoyed three successful world tours!
The success of an ‘expressionist’ period brought respect for
and a new focus on the Studio. The fascination exerted by machines on
the spirit of adventure in the 50’s was such that many wished to
explore its challenges: ‘Pierre Henry, at that time was like a child
amidst magic spells having become in virtually no time at all a tape recording
magician, having first been a true wizard with the record player and sound
recording achievements. (...) He also received Messiaen or Milhaud, Sauget
or Varése, with similar composure and skillfulness, offering to
create sounds upon request, to calibrate them and try to have them fit
into Timbres Durées formats, in scores for Aspects- sentimentaux
or Desert. Our distinguished hosts felt less forsaken, as did we.’
In view of these epic circumstances it is easy to imagine the various
expierences of our courageous visitors, some more or less prepared or
daring, others disappointed or grateful, slightly disorientated or definitively
transformed.
Whatever the case, when listening to the pieces all selected from various
significant moments of this beautiful adventure, we note the penetrating
style of the ‘astounding traveler’ Pierre Schaeffer, who,
it must be said in passing, only devoted very brief periods to sound art
— just a few weeks of his existence considering the sustained effort
made on the other hand in writing up scores, keeping a research journal,
developing a theory of listening, descriptive sound devices and methods
and approaches for mediation . -. Such continuous written reflections
provided him with greater assurance to pursue and closely define his research,
an endless search he took ever further towards an imaginary horizon, in
order to then offer it with resolute generosity to those who would take
it on as their instrument in exploration.
Those of us thus so fortunate and ever grateful to him, will always hold
him in high esteem.
In order to present the dozen or so musical works collected here, together
with their composers, we have taken the liberty of grouping them into
periods, reflecting affinities between them as far as possible. We begin
with the first ones, André Hodeir and Pierre Bouez, in 1951, then
Jean Barraque in 1952 It would have been chronologically appropriate to
include in these Etudes that of Karlheinz Stockbausen had his brief contribution
in 1952/53 not suffered over time. We do know that shortly after, the
composer deepened his involvement with the Cologne Studio through two
serious Etudes and especially also with the highly inspired Gesang der
Jung Linge an unquestionable triumph, thereby definitively putting an
end to the rivalry between concrete and electronic genres.
A second ‘strophe’ in 1954 draws connections between three
‘poetic’ experiments La rivière endormie by Darius
Milhaud, Amen de verre by Roman HaubenstockRamati, and l’Aspect
sentimental by Henri Sauget, in 1957.
A final crowning piece brings together or highlights contrasts between
one of the ‘Interpolations’ for les Deserts by Edgar Varese
1954 — and works of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, with Texte
2 by Andre Boucourechliev — 1959, PointsMouvements by Claude Ballif
— 1962, and the renowned Concret PH conceived by lannis Xenakis
for his Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair. Lastly, we conclude
with a rare piece, the only experiment of this kind by Olivier Messiaen
Timbres-Durees produced with assistance from Pierre Henry in 1952 and
first made available in this grand tribute to the history of musical research.
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