Musique Concrète and Other Experimental And Electronic Music

In the subject Creative Music Technology at university last semester, I was asked to listen to a collection of experimental and electronic music to stimulate my creative imagination, and to write what I liked and didn’t like about it. Here’s my rather cynical take on the genre.

Musique Concrète

Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry – Symphonie pour un Homme Seul

This piece reminded me of Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica; only less musical. I’m a Homme Seul (single man) and my life doesn’t sound anything like this. In his book La musique concrète, Schaeffer described the work as “an opera for blind people…”. Haven’t they suffered enough?

Edgard Varèse – Poème Électronique

The audio equivalent of Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.

Does to my ears what the asbestos coating on the walls of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair for which it was commissioned, would do to my lungs.

György Ligeti – Artikulation

George Lucas must owe Ligeti millions in royalties for R2D2’s sound effects. Initially I thought I was joking when I first wrote that, but I’ve since discovered that he was actually trying to create a sort of phonetic speech in electronic music, which pretty much fits R2D2’s dialogue. Plus, the title is German for “articulation”. That should have been a giveaway.

I thought this piece might make more sense to me if I played it backwards, so I dropped it into Logic Pro X and reversed it. I couldn’t tell the difference. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I listened to it in the original quadraphonic. I’ll just end noting that Ligeti abandoned electronic music after composing this piece.

Iannis Xenakis – Concret PH

2 minutes and 44 seconds of breaking glass to my ears. I think I’d rather listen to Kraftwerk.

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontakte

It’s long. It’s too long. I think this is how Jacob Collier learned to play piano in his mother’s womb; but look at him now. The title is German for “Contacts”, which I think Stockhausen interpreted as “Just hit the things.” Maybe it sounds better in the original quadraphonic.

Stockhausen was evidently a pioneer of the extended dance remix, as the work exists in several versions: “Nr. 12”, “Nr. 12½” and “Nr. 12⅔”

Bernard Parmegiani – Accidents / harmoniques

Parmegiani had studied mime before turning his hand to electro-acoustic composition, and in this piece it really shows. From the album De Natura Sonorum (the nature of sound). I felt like there were Martians in my head listening to this. Surely he’s just playing a joke on us.

Pauline Oliveiros – Bye Bye Butterfly

Bids farewell to the institutionalized oppression of the female sex while also providing inspiration for the sound of the Theramin. Gave my new monitor speakers a good workout; I hope the neighbours enjoyed it too.

Tape Loops

Steve Reich – It’s Gonna Rain

I’ve got this pervasive feeling that it’s going to rain. I’m not sure why. I liked the way the meteorological message panned left and right. More like It’s Gonna Have An Acid Trip.

Halleluiah Part II is over. I’m not sure how I lasted the full 18 minutes.

Terry Riley – Mescalin Mix

Parts of this sounded to me like an industrial version of native Australian bush sounds. I felt like I was on a camping trip in the 23^rd century.

Brian Eno – 1/1

From his album Music For Airports/Ambient 1, which apparently coined the term Ambient Music. Brian Eno has a lot to answer for. However, this track put me in a relaxing state, ready to fall asleep on the plane; so I liked it.

Sampling

Luc Ferrari – Ronda, Spain, June 2001

After being jolted awake by the sound of a loud sliding door opening to greet the day, I was drawn into this by the sweet sound of a French woman’s voice. I imagined she was Ferrari’s lover, speaking to him in bed after awakening on a warm Spanish summer Sunday morning. I wanted to know what she was saying, but my French isn’t good enough. In my mind’s eye, they head to a busy market together to buy some croissants for breakfast, where we hear a man’s voice repeating “numero quatro”, which I assumed is Spanish for “number 4”. As the voices fade, the sound becomes more musical and we return to the soft sound of Ronda speaking to her beloved back in their villa together. I quite liked it.

My interpretation, however, is not what the composer had in mind. According to him, the point of Les Anecdotiques (The Anecdotals) is to dispense with the story altogether. My busy market was, in fact, the sound of Spanish tourists in a museum. While he describes the woman’s words as “Spontaneous and intimate”, in this context they are simply words in a foreign language with no narrative purpose. Just another one of Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion’s sound objects, if you will. My narrative interpretation of what was intended as an explicitly anecdotal work is testament to the human brain’s tendency to make meaning out of nothing. It turns out Rhonda is a village in Spain, not a woman.

Still, I enjoyed my little fantasy, thank you Luc.

John Oswald – Manifold

Wow, this was short. I didn’t even have time to eat breakfast while listening to it. It was only about as long as the Spotify ads, but certainly more fun. I recognised a couple of songs, like U2’s With or Without You and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To You. Artists who use samples liberally often sample obscure works, sometimes affording them attention they would otherwise have missed; but in this work Oswald went mainstream. It sounded to me like the soundtrack to a sample-abusing hip-hop artist from the 1990’s being beaten up in a boxing ring by all the artists who reckoned he’d ripped off their work.

Tod Dockstader – Water Music: Part III

I quite liked this piece. The cuteness of the sounds and the stereo effects bouncing between the left and right channels really drew me in. I’ve recently got myself some decent monitor speakers for my home studio and this piece really worked on them. Pretty amazing for something released in 1963.

Dockstader started out in the 1940’s, prior to the invention of magnetic tape, editing his steel wire recordings with a lit cigarette. That makes me realise how much I take the piece-of-crap Logic Pro X File Editor for granted. Listening to this, I found myself wanting to know what was going to happen next, like I was watching a soap opera on TV; only with no actual story.

Synthesis

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Studie I

I found this quite disorienting to listen to. I guess it was revolutionary in 1953 but I reckon now you could whip it up in Ableton in about 5 minutes using the Random MIDI Effect and some automation.

Eliane Radigue – Jetsun Mila (Pt.1) / Birth and Youth (Excerpt)

I liked how the pulsing ambient drone sound in this grew over time; it drew me in and had me wondering what was going to happen next. Unfortunately the answer was: not much. Gradually a rhythmic element with some high pulsing tones which grew over time came in. It was a bit like listening to a very slow EDM dance track from underwater in a diesel-powered submarine going at full throttle for 12 minutes.

Laurie Spiegel – Appalachian Grove: I

I liked the pulsing stereo effects in this piece and the way the tonal characteristics of the sound varied while the pitch changed. It’s much more melodic than the other tracks we’ve listened to and that made it more enjoyable to my ears. It got a bit harsh in the middle though. This piece puts the musique in musique concrète.

Morton Subotnick – Silver Apples of the Moon – Part A

Perhaps the sound designer for Star Wars had this in mind when creating the sound effects for R2D2. I kind of lost the flow of the conversation without the witty English-accented retorts from C3PO though. Morton Sobotnick is described as The Mad Scientist in one interview, and I think if I listen to this too often I’ll end up fitting one of the DSM-5 diagnostic categories I’m learning about over in PSYC1002.

Suzanne Ciani – Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft

This piece had some funky sounds that I liked. The start reminded me a bit of Kraftwerk but without the rhythm and melody; although it did get more melodic later. I’d probably give it a Distinction for its use of technology given it was made in 1975, but only a Credit for musicality.

Barry Schraeder – Lost Atlantis: Introduction

At first, I thought this sounded a lot like a modern ad for KFC; then I realised I was hearing a Spotify ad.

I liked the ambient sounds in this piece and the way it surged in and out with its “mysterious tone colors”. It slowly builds to a crescendo until we get the drop that EDM lovers crave, and then built more quickly to the ultimate drop at the end. I kept wondering what was going to happen next; I’d still rather listen to Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp or Queen though.

Contemporary Examples

Amon Tobin – Foley Room

DJ & producer. Retain percussive quality through sounds. Horsefish & Esther’s. Create beauty and delicate textures from sounds. Pitched percussive material. Fast loops. New textures. Funky beats. Check out the Foley Room Documentary.

Aphex Twin – 1ST 44

Acid house DJ in rave scene. Intelligent Dance Music. More complex sampling, polyrhythms, rhythmic patterns. From Collapsed album. Polyrhythms sounded funky. Lots of variation.

Holly Herndon – Chorus

Intersection of humanity and technology. Recorded web browsing. Stereo ping-pong effects. Here’s a talk she gave about her creative process.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Riparian

This was my favourite out of these three, largely because it sounds the most musical to my ears. I liked the pulsing beat in this track. I can hear a bass line for instance, melodies played on the synth and lyrics, although I can’t tell what they are saying. I also like the way the soundscape swirls around when listened to with headphones. It feels ambient, immersive and musical all at the same time. I get the sense that she’s using the electronics at her disposal in service of the music rather than the other way around. There’s even a great video about how she uses modular synthesis.

Graham Stoney – Foster le Concrète

“How hard can it be?”, I asked myself. And since I had an assignment to do, I wrote my own musique concrète track based on the drum rhythm from one of my favourite songs, Coming of Age by Foster The People. I even made a breakdown video showing how I did it; because that’s what the assignment required.

Conclusion

I didn’t take too easily to some of the more experimental musique concrète pieces we studied at the beginning of this semester. The weekly listening tasks felt harsh to my untrained ears and I would think mean things like:

“Didn’t the Geneva Convention ban cruel and unusual punishment?”

Perhaps these tracks will never be my preferred go-to pieces for chilling out on a Friday night, but when I look back at some of my cynicism-laced early comments in these discussion threads, I cringe. I just didn’t appreciate the historical significance of these pieces and how they might have influenced later electronic music that I do enjoy, like Kraftwerk say.

Then in Angharad Davis’s Music Colloquium Series talk on George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, when she played a snippet of the work I heard sounds reminiscent of musique concrète. Sure enough, they were roughly contemporaneous, and Antheil had been living in Paris at the time musique concrète was just getting started. You never know when something you study in one arena will pop up elsewhere.

Another thing I’ve learned in this subject is about taking creative risks and learning to follow my gut instincts without worrying whether a concept will work, or other people will like it. This has been an opportunity for me to explore that. My Formative Skills Assignment piece Foster le Concrète was in part a reaction to my frustration at the lack of discernible rhythm in some of the early pieces we studied. However, I really didn’t know whether the concept was going to work, and that was a little anxiety-inducing; especially given that I was doing it for an assignment which would be graded. I was quite touched to hear other students say they liked the end result, and I feel more confident about following my gut instincts in future and seeing what I end up.

Finally, I’ve been really inspired by the creativity of the other students in this subject. It’s been a weird experience studying online this year without ever meeting them in person, but I’ve really enjoyed hearing the creative works everyone came up with. They’re all so distinctive and amazingly different, it’s incredible; yet they were all products of the same brief. I can’t wait to hear everyone’s works on the radio, TV, movies, video games, Spotify, or whatever audio technology is around when we all graduate: live streaming direct to our neurons perhaps?