Five Easy Masterpieces: an introduction to musique concrète
Experimental music boasts a fantastically rich history and an endlessly broad range of subgenres. While the exact origins of experimental music are often disputed, given the abstract and interpretative parameters of the genre, the impact of musique concrète certainly cannot be overlooked. From its early roots in post-war France, musique concrète completely revolutionised the ways in which music came to be viewed by composers and musicians, using a wealth of innovative techniques.
Musique concrète has arguably existed, in some form or another, for almost a century. However, its popular origins occurred in post-war France, when a sudden wave of support for the arts meant figures like Pierre Schaeffer could begin to experiment with composition via radio broadcasts from the infamous Studio d’Essai – a radio studio Schaeffer had founded in 1942 as a means of supporting the French Resistance against Nazi occupation. Soon, many other composers and musicians took note of Schaeffer’s pioneering experimentation, and so the movement grew rapidly.
In essence, musique concrète revolves around the creation of sound collages. Composers often use recorded sounds—field recordings, voices, industrial machinery, even the noises made by household items—rather than traditional musical instruments. These sounds are then spliced together or manipulated, often using cassette tape loops and electronic equipment, to create something entirely different.
This growing movement of experimental composition grew rapidly throughout the 1950s and 1960s, expanding from its origins in France across the globe. Even composers like Japan’s Toshiro Mayuzumi, who had been conditioned to favour traditional, classical music, began to incorporate elements of musique concrète into his work. Even today, the spirit and techniques of the style are still utilised and adapted by a wealth of contemporary artists, spanning countless different genres and styles.
So, join us on a whistle-stop tour through some of the greatest masterpieces of this mysterious movement, both old and new.
Five essential musique concrète albums:
Pierre Henry & Pierre Schaeffer – Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950)
No discussion on musique concrète can omit the incredible impact of both Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer. Together, the pair carved out some of the scene’s earliest origins, laying the foundations for countless future composers and fostering an unparalleled wave of musical experimentation in France and beyond. Their collaborative composition, Symphonie pour un homme seul, was vital in bringing the early sounds of concrète to a broader audience.
Originally performed as a 22-movement piece in March 1950, the pair used a variety of turntables and mixers in order to create a stunning symphony of non-musical sounds. Schaeffer once described the piece as “an opera for blind people, a performance without argument, a poem made of noises, bursts of text, spoken or musical”. Thus, the symphony was among the first to establish the conventions of musique concrète, and it has certainly stood the test of time in the 74 years since it was first performed.
Groupe de recherches musicales – Musique Concrète (1962)
If Symphonie pour un homme seul marks the beginning of the musique concrète movement, then Groupe de recherches musicales marks the moment that the scene started to take root within wider music circles. Founded, once again, by Pierre Schaeffer in 1958, the GRM was set up in order to explore these newfound techniques and influences that made up the landscape of musique concrète. This 1962 album includes works by the likes of Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari, Michel Philippot, Henri Sauguet, and Schaeffer himself.
It was during this time within the concrète movement that technology began to catch up with what composers like Schaeffer were trying to create. This record was released during the same year that the compact cassette tape was invented, a musical and recording format which would completely revolutionise the wider field of experimental music by making home recordings accessible to virtually everybody. Taking this along with the release of Musique Concrète, the experimental style would spread far and wide.
Delia Derbyshire, Barry Bermange & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop – Inventions for Radio (1964-1965)
Radio broadcasting has been an essential part of musique concrète from the beginning, but it is perhaps best exemplified by the compositions of Delia Derbyshire. After being hired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962, the musician pioneered styles of experimental and electronic composition. Given the Radiophonic Workshop’s history as a place to create sound effects and raw recordings for radio, it lent itself quite naturally to the creation of sound collages and musique concrète, which Derbyshire took full advantage of.
Inventions for Radio was a series of four unique compositions broadcast on BBC’s Third Programme (now BBC Radio Three) between 1964 and 1965. Derbyshire had created stunning soundscapes composed of electronic music, audio recordings, and spliced-in interviews to create various different narratives concerning dreams, mortality, and God, among other things. To have such pioneering concrète experimentation broadcast and paid for by a public service broadcaster is virtually unthinkable now, but it speaks to the impact of composers like Derbyshire at the time.
Pauline Oliveros – Deep Listening (1989)
Another figure who followed in the wake of musique concrète was the American composer Pauline Oliveros, who founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center during the 1960s. Oliveros compositions were often built around field recordings and everyday sounds, which she meticulously recorded on lo-fi cassette tape recorders before mutating and collaging them into profound narrative compositions.
The 1989 album Deep Listening is arguably her magnum opus, both in establishing her distinctive, often haunting composition style and her radical concept of deep listening as a form of meditation and even activism. Oliveros is an iconic figure within experimental music in her own right, but she certainly owed a lot to the radical nature of musique concrète, particularly when it came to her approach to creating soundscapes from various tape recordings.
Broadcast & The Focus Group – Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009)
Potentially a contentious inclusion on this list of musique concrète masterpieces is this collaborative record by Broadcast and The Focus Group. On a surface level, the album is a stunning example of late 2000s psychedelia, indebted to the counterculture age of the 1960s. However, if you dig a little deeper into its composition, its ties to the conventions of musique concrète are utterly undeniable. For starters, Julian House – the artist behind The Focus Group – has built his musical career on experimenting with old library recordings, splicing them together and distorting them in order to produce something new.
As such, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age features a wide variety of recordings – including old radio broadcasts, occult chants, nursery rhymes and such – which have all been deconstructed and stitched together in a very similar manner to the compositions created by the likes of Henry or Schaeffer, albeit with more mainstream appeal. Whichever way you look at it, the album is indebted to the pioneering sounds of musique concrète and the composers who first established the movement back in the 1940s.
