YouTube via apopcollapse.
Anyone confirm this was the first piece of musique concrete?
"The first piece of "musique concrete," composed by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948 out of sounds produced by trains.
This is posted as a reference to a series of articles on the problems of composition posed by musique concrete. The article on Peirre Schaeffer can be found here:
http://againstthemodernworld.blogspot...
If you like this music, please purchase the album:
http://www.amazon.com/L-Oeuvre-Musica..." on Amazon
Update via Joe of Electronic Music Teacher:
"I just want to note that Etude aux Chemins de Fer may be the first piece of Musique Concrete, but it is not necessarily the first piece of "sound collage" tape music. Schaeffer coined the term Musique Concrete (also called "acousmatic music") to describe non-narrative music using "sounds" as the primary source material, divorcing the actual content of the sound from what it represents. (When listening to Etude aux Chemins de Fer we are not supposed to hear trains as trains, but simply as abstracted sounds - elements in the composition.)
The earliest piece of tape-style electronic music might be Walter Ruttman's "audio film" titled "Weekend", from 1930. According to The Transparent Tape Music Festival:
"Weekend is a pioneering work from the early days of radio, commissioned in 1928 by Berlin Radio Hour. In a collage of words, music fragments and sounds, the film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann presented on 13 June 1930 a radically innovative radio piece: an acoustic picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape.
Before making Weekend, Ruttmann had produced the experimental documentary Berlin-Symphony of a Great City (1927) as well as a number of short, experimental abstract animations. After his experience with his films, Ruttmann deliberately sought possibilities for producing an audio-film for radio. "Everything audible in the world becomes material," he wrote in a manifesto in 1929, prefiguring Schaeffer, Varese, Cage and the other giants of the musical avant-garde."
Source : http://www.sfsound.org/tape/ruttmann.html
You can hear "Weekend" at this link:
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/weekend/"
verified. This is definitely the canonical first musique concrète.
ReplyDeleteThis is one great electronic song! Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte is amazing as well.
ReplyDeletetake a listen to the early experiments of
ReplyDeleteHALIM el-DABH
created four years before
Schaeffer firsr concrete pieces...
Re: Ruttman, I think the distinction would be between "musical" content and "narrative" content. Schaeffer was interested in "sonorous objects," sounds in themselves. Ruttman, a film-maker, was more interested in sounds as narrative elements. So, the train in "Weekend" is primarily a train, while the train in the Schaeffer etude is primarily a sound.
ReplyDeletePeople often try to make the early Schaeffer work seem like the earliest examples in the "tape idiom". Most importantly I wanted to convey that:
ReplyDelete1) musique concrete is not simply synonymous with tape music
2) there are earlier historical examples of "sound collage"-type works
As for Ruttmann being a film-maker interested in narrative, certainly true. But also remember that the film he made preceding "Weekend" was called "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" (translated from German title).
Joe
http://electronicmusicteacher.com