VOTD 6/18/2023

 Various artists: Musique Concrète (Candide)

Purchased used, not certain where

I've written before that I'll pretty much collect any early electronic music LPs if the price is right. I left the $4 sticker on the cover of this one, making it a prize find. 

The pieces on this collection are all from the French RTF studio, the center of musique concrète production in the early post-war era. The composers included: Pierre Schaeffer, Françoise-Bernard Mache, Michel Philippot, François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Ivo Mallec, and Bernard Parmegiani. Schaeffer makes perfect sense, as he ran the studio. I know Bayle and Ferrari's names, the others not so much. 

The phenomenon of French musique concrète vs. German elektronische musik seems silly in retrospect. I have to check myself a little; the story of the French vs. German schools makes for an easy narrative, but the truth is more complicated. It ignores the studios and schools popping up in the US, Italy, Japan, and other places during the 1950s. If I'm teaching current (traditional) music composition students who have no sense of history at all, it does make for a convenient source of both a narrative and assignments. 

I had a thought while listening to this record. The early German WDR studio-generate works (entirely synthesized sound sources) are sometimes difficult to tell one from another, or at least whose hands are on each one. How do you tell one composer from another? There are ways in some cases, but the sound sources tend to neutralize the the differences. 

At times I could say the same of these works. When many of the materials consist of short edits of percussion sounds, frantically moving in and out of a sonic field, how does one composer distinguish himself from another? A reversed piano sound for Schaeffer sounds the same was one for Philippot. 

Or am I being far too critical? The same could be said of any genre. As I quoted Nizan Leibovich in a previous post, how can you tell one second movement from an 18th century symphony from another?

Listening to this, my mind seems to be leaning towards the questions more than the answers. 

What strange music this can be. That's something I find especially interesting about the post-war era, how far composers and other artists intended to take their work. It's so easy to say that this isn't casual listening, something you put on for "entertainment." These works aren't simple. Often the sources of sound are difficult or impossible to identify. It's an interesting collection though, and does demonstrate some of the variety of works coming from the RTF studio. Bayle's work "L'Oiseau-chanteur" adds some range to the works included. Its sound sources are largely traditional instruments, playing most likely composed passages, at times with quick editing of bird-like sounds and other things. (They happen very fast at times.) Several of the pieces have such fast editing, it all feels like the works have short attention spans. 

And yet, every one of those edits was work. It's SO easy to edit audio digitally now. I do quite a bit on Audacity and it couldn't be much simpler. And that brings me back to a point I've made before: one thing I like about this music is the sweat on it. It took a lot of work. 

The collection was compiled by Ilhan Mimoroglu, a significant electronic music composer and producer himself. He'd have an ear for collecting solid examples for an album like this.