Musique Concrète

Like much experimental music, musique concrète falls victim to compartmentalizing and misunderstanding. Pioneered in the forties and fifties by Pierre Schaeffer -- a French composer whose work at the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française gave him the time and facilities to experiment with manipulated tape -- musique concrète hoped to expand the palette of sounds available to a composer. The recorded medium allowed for non-musical phrases to be syncopated and altered in ways unforeseen by earlier composers. By this time, John Cage's 4'33" had appeared, which was similar in its deconstruction of traditional instrumentational and structural tropes, highlighting the dynamic ambient environments in which the pieces are recorded and performed. As Schaeffer's experiments became more well known, concrète passages began to appear in experimental compositions, most notably in Edgard Varèse's 1958 Poème Électronique, which was debuted in 1958 at a performance utilizing 425 (!) arranged loudspeakers. The piece is abstract and loose, full of church bells, crashes and unidentified whines. And the Flaming Lips get all the credit.

It's impossible to understate the importance of Schaeffer's work. In the sixties and seventies, artists like Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa utilized concrète in their studio work. By then, the genre was already a generation old, but was still regarded as revolutionary. From there, a straight line can be drawn through the evolution of modern analog and digital samplers. Terminator X of Public Enemy often employed concrète in his production. It Takes A Nation Millions To Hold Us Back opens with a wail of klaxons, and it's not uncommon to hear sampled helicopter and police sirens in hip-hop throughout the nineties.

Also posted is a song from Jean-Claude Vannier's L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches, the 1972 solo record by the Gainsbourg collaborator and arranger. While not straight concrète, it does incorporate recorded real-world samples in the song's second half, including creepy kids, ticking clocks, gunshots (?) and the crunching gravel of a man's gait.

Pierre Schaeffer -- Cinq Études de Bruit: Étude Violette
Edgard Varèse -- Poème Électronique
Jean-Claude Vannier -- Les Gardes Volent Au Secours Du Roi