What the GRM brought to music: from musique concrète to acousmatic music

Abstract

Sixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.

Acousmate: History and de-visualised sound in the Schaefferian tradition

“…Bayle – along with Michel Chion (1999: 15 note 5), Francis Dhomont (1996a and 2001: 261) and Marc Battier (2007: 196) – tacitly accepts Larousse's identification of ‘acousmate’ and ‘acousmatique’. In his ‘histoire du mot’, Bayle introduces snippets from Apollinaire's ‘Acousmate’ poems with this clause – ‘Note in the Poèmes retrouvés of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913, this ‘rediscovery’ [ re-trouvaille ]’ (Bayle 1993: 180) – the implication being that the real find in Apollinaire's collection is simply the discovery of the word ‘acousmate’, and thus the rediscovery of the ancient acousmatic tradition.…”

“…Marc Battier (2007) makes a case for keeping Apollinaire in the story. He argues that the central experience of phonography has less to do with the reproduction of sounds than the separation of sonic sources from their audible effects, which occurs at two levels: first, the source is separated from its effect and the latter is captured as a ‘physical inscription’; then separation of source and effect is evident at playback, where the listener is given the responsibility for ‘reconstituting the sound image which traces the sound of [the] origin’ (Battier 2007: 196). It is in these two tendencies, inscription and reconstitution, that ‘one finds the sources of the creation of phonographic sound’.…”

“…For Battier, the history of this kind of sonic experience is associated with the word ‘acousmate’. This is why Apollinaire is significant; the self-named ‘poète phonographiste’ of the 1910s gives voice, in his ‘Acousmate’ poems, to pre-phonographic experiences of ‘voices without bodies’ and ‘sounds without their causal source’ (Battier 2007: 196).…”

“… In Le Roi-Lune , Apollinaire imagines the Moon-King sitting at a keyboard where, through the use of microphones, he transports the sounds of the world into his chamber. Running his hands over the keyboard, the king plays a ‘symphony, made by the world’ (quoted by Battier 2007: 190). The phrase evokes Schaeffer's desideratum to make a ‘symphony of noises’ (Schaeffer 1952: 12). In December of 1913, Apollinaire made a trip to the Archives of the Voice, where he recorded himself reciting three poems.…”

Rhythmic Concatenative Synthesis for Electronic Music: Techniques, Implementation, and Evaluation

“…In music and the sonic arts, the natural corollary of collage came in the form of musique concrète (Holmes 2008), a movement of composition stemming from the experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and, later, Pierre Henry at the studios of Radiodiffusion-Télévision Franç aise in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s (Battier 2007). In contrast to the artificially and electronically generated elektronische Musik spearheaded by Karlheinz Stockhausen at the West German Radio studios in Cologne, the French composers sought to conceive their works from existing recorded sound, including environmental sources like trains and speech.…”