Music made by editing recorded sound; the upstream tradition of which everything in this archive is downstream.
Musique concrète is the form of music whose primary compositional act is the editing of recorded sound. The composer goes out into the world with a microphone, returns to the studio with a quantity of recordings, and then cuts, loops, layers, slows, reverses, repitches and reassembles the recordings until what comes out has the structure of a piece of music. The recording is the score and the splice is the note; this is the formal claim that Schaeffer made in 1948 and that the Bureau holds to be foundational to the genre this archive otherwise covers. Without musique concrète there is no Throbbing Gristle, no Cabaret Voltaire, no Coil, no plunderphonics, no sampling-based music as a category and no contemporary electronic music in the broad sense. Every record in this archive is downstream of what Pierre Schaeffer broadcast on the evening of 5 October 1948.
The founding event was a single radio broadcast on Radiodiffusion française, the French national broadcaster's Paris service, late on the evening of 5 October 1948. The programme was titled Concert de bruits, "concert of noises," and contained five short pieces collectively known as the Cinq études de bruits. The first piece, Étude aux chemins de fer, was made from six steam trains recorded by Schaeffer at Batignolles station in northern Paris a few weeks earlier; the recordings were assembled into a roughly three-minute composition by what Schaeffer himself referred to as "research into noise." The pieces were assembled not on magnetic tape but on turntables and a cutting lathe, the only method available to him in autumn 1948. Tape arrived at the studio over the next two years; the founding moment of the form predates the technology most popular accounts associate with it.
Schaeffer (1910 to 1995) was a radio engineer first, a composer second and a theorist throughout. He had been working at Radiodiffusion française since 1936; the Studio d'Essai he had founded in 1942 (renamed Club d'Essai in 1946) was the vehicle through which the founding broadcast happened. The conceptual framework he developed alongside the practice has had as much downstream influence as the recordings themselves. The most consequential single concept is the acousmatic: the listening situation in which sound reaches the ear without the listener being able to see its source. Schaeffer borrowed the term from Pythagoras, who is reported to have lectured to his students from behind a veil so they would attend to his arguments rather than to his face. The acousmatic listening situation is the natural condition of all recorded music, and Schaeffer's framework has been the most rigorous account of what that situation means for what music is.
I am seeking direct contact with sound material, without electrons getting in the way. Pierre Schaeffer, on the method, paraphrased from journals 1948
The form's continuity has been unbroken. From Schaeffer's Studio d'Essai (1942) the work passed to the GRMC (Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète, established 1951 with Schaeffer, the composer Pierre Henry and the engineer Jacques Poullin) and from there in 1958 to the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), which was Schaeffer's restructuring of the 1951 group after a series of internal disputes; Henry quit that year and never returned. The GRM became part of the French national broadcaster's research apparatus through the 1960s, moved into the Radio France building on quai Kennedy in 1975, and is part of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) today. Continuous Paris-based practice from 1942 to the present; the longest single thread in this archive's parent disciplines.
The methodological argument with the Cologne school is the second consequential conceptual framing. Elektronische Musik, the WDR Cologne studio's tradition under Stockhausen and Eimert from 1951 to 1953 onward, took the position that the proper material for electronic music was synthesised pure tones generated by oscillators and ring modulators; the method built music from the bottom up out of acoustically simple components. Musique concrète took the opposite position: that the proper material was recorded sound from the world, treated as already-musical raw material, and that the method was reduction and editing rather than synthesis and construction. The two traditions defined post-war electronic music as a methodological argument for two decades; the convergence happened through the 1960s as the GRM started using synthesised sources alongside concrète sources and as Cologne started incorporating recorded material. Both traditions are filed at Tier 1 in this department; neither file is fully comprehensible without the other.
Pierre Henry (1927 to 2017) was Schaeffer's long-term collaborator. He arrived at the Club d'Essai in 1949 as a percussion-trained composer, worked alongside Schaeffer on the joint Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950, the form's first major extended work, later staged as ballet music by Maurice Béjart in 1955) and through most of the GRMC period. He quit GRM in 1958 over Schaeffer's editorial control, set up an independent studio at his parents' house, and produced an enormous catalogue across the next 59 years culminating in Mass for the Present Time (1969) and the late-period continuations through to his death in 2017. Henry's catalogue is the form's largest single body of practitioner work; the Bureau notes that he was filed at the GRM only briefly and that the form's continuity rests on Schaeffer's infrastructure rather than on his exclusive working presence.
The form's mature work is Bernard Parmegiani's De Natura Sonorum, premiered at the Salle Wagram in Paris on 3 June 1975 and recorded as a twelve-movement suite in two series of six. Parmegiani (1927 to 2013) had joined GRM in 1960 and stayed for thirty-two years; De Natura Sonorum is the work the Bureau holds to be the form's mature reference statement, the equivalent within musique concrète of what Trout Mask Replica is to its parent traditions or what The Velvet Underground & Nico is to its. The piece exists; people who know the form know the piece; the method is at full strength; the production is impeccable. Parmegiani also made the concrète signature for the French TV channel Canal+ and the audio identity for Charles de Gaulle Airport, neither of which fact diminishes the seriousness of the catalogue's central work.
The form's downstream propagation runs in three directions. Forward into the European avant-garde, where every electroacoustic studio set up between 1958 and 1985 was structured against the example of the GRM and the Cologne studio. Forward into popular music's tape-based wing, where The Beatles' Revolution 9 (1968) is musique concrète assembled by people who had read Schaeffer carefully, and where the British industrial cassette tradition of the late 1970s (Throbbing Gristle's 24 Hours box, the early Cabaret Voltaire material) is concrète method applied to industrial source material. Forward into sample-based music, where Oswald's plunderphonics (1985 onward), the founding hip-hop sample-collage records and contemporary electronic music's method are all musique concrète techniques applied to copyrighted source material with worse legal hygiene than Schaeffer ever had to worry about. The Bureau holds the third propagation as the most consequential; it brought the form's method to a global audience the form's own catalogue has never reached.
What this file argues for, finally, is that the genre this archive otherwise covers is musique concrète continued by other means. Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report (1977) is a musique concrète record made by people who would have used the term if they had known it; Cabaret Voltaire's tape-collage method from 1973 onward is musique concrète method translated into a Sheffield post-punk mode; Coil's mature catalogue is musique concrète's editorial vein applied to ritual and esoteric source material. Filing this form at F·01 is filing the headwater. Every later form in this department, and every artist file in the catalogue, runs downstream from here.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Dark Ages · last revised c. the Edwardian era