American Song
American Song
Musique Concrete: A Radical Re-Thinking of Sound and Performance
If there’s an over-riding theme across the last several episodes, it is that music can be whatever we say it is. In this third and last episode on this theme, we’re talking about Musique Concrete. It’s the name applied to a one of the most radical descriptions of music ever imagined.
Think of this music like you do when you think of abstract, visual art. For instance, Picasso’s Guernica. There aren’t too many people that think of that painting as traditionally beautiful, but there is a shocking, provocative, stirring power to it. The same holds true with this challenging music.
With musique concrète, (French: “concrete music”), natural and mechanical sounds were captured or created using new inventions, the tape recorder, and later the computer and the synthesizer. Sounds can either be used in their natural forms, or they could be processed and changed and then combined with other sounds to create a montage. Other traits that define musique concrete include randomness, and the discard of the traditional composer-performer roles. Sounds can be looped, played backward, sped up, slowed down, cut short or extended. Their natural pitches could be varied, echoes could be added and so on.
As I did with episodes 14 and 15, I'm also going to show you how these really bizarre ideas eventually made their way into our current popular music scene. Musique Concrete has made an impact in jazz and rock, too. This is fun stuff!
In This Episode:
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henry
John Cage
Harry Partch
Karlheinz Stockhausen
The Beatles
Pink Floyd
Industrial bands
Plunderphonics
THREE: MUSIQUE CONCRETE
If there’s an over-riding theme across the last several episodes, it is that music can be whatever we say it is. In this third and last episode on this theme, we’re talking about Musique Concrete. It’s the name applied to a one of the most radical descriptions of music ever imagined.
Back in episode 14, I mentioned that the common goal all these experimental composers had was to completely up-end music. There was a pretty pervasive feeling that too much had happened in the world, during the 20th century, to simply move forward in music with a continuous line connecting back to Bach and the rest of Western music. Everything had been turned sour by Nazism and the barbarism of the 20th century, and really, who can blame either of them?
Since artists reflect and interpret the world for us, the desire was to more accurately portray the nature of the world in all its brokenness. Think of this music like you do when you think of abstract, visual art. For instance, Picasso’s Guernica. There aren’t too many people that think of that painting as traditionally beautiful, but there is a shocking, provocative, stirring power to it. The same holds true with this challenging music.
It takes a special kind of creativity to visit a train yard, or stand along a railroad track, and – where other people hear noise, think of it as music. In 1948, a Frenchman named Pierre Schaeffer composed the world’s first piece of musique concrete. You’re listening to that piece now, it’s called Étude aux chemins de fer, and it’s composed entirely of train sounds.
We’re listening to an early composition in the musique concrete style, written by Piere Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, called Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul.
With musique concrète, (French: “concrete music”), natural and mechanical sounds were captured or created using new inventions, the tape recorder, and later the computer and the synthesizer. These sounds were the raw material for a new form of composition. The French composer, Pierre Schaeffer, was the leading edge of this movement. Sounds could either be used in their natural forms, or they could be processed and changed and then combined with other sounds to create a montage. Other traits that define musique concrete include randomness, and the discard of the traditional composer-performer roles. Sounds can be looped, played backward, sped up, slowed down, cut short or extended. Their natural pitches could be varied, echoes could be added and so on.
Here at home, in the United States, several composers also worked in this same general field. One of them was John Cage. He drew heavily on the randomness aspect of Musique Concrete. One of his pieces is called Imaginary Landscape No. 4, written in 1951. It’s a piece for 12 radios and 24 performers. Picture 24 people, seated in a semi-circle around a conductor, manipulating 12 transistor radios. The performers slowly turn transistor dials across the band with sounds and static fading in and out. No two performances can ever be identical. It’s completely up to chance, and what happens to be broadcast in that place, at that time.
This is an actual recording of a performance of a piece called 4’33”, also by John Cage. The length of this composition totally random, even though it’s called 4’33”, a composition for any instrument or combination of instruments. Less the instruments. Also, there’s no need to look at your device, folks. The reason you don’t hear anything is because the music is actually whatever random, ambient sounds might happen to naturally occur in the orchestra hall. A cough, a purse snap, a cellophane wrapped taken off of a throat lozenge, a fart….
On the other extreme, Cage also invented the ‘prepared piano’ technique, and applied it across a whole series of compositions, including this one, Our Spring Will Come. A prepared piano is one in which screws, bolts, wood blocks, wool, and other materials are jammed between the piano strings to seriously mess with the sound of the piano. In Our Spring Will Come, the preparation includes bamboo strips, screws and nuts. Over the top of the musical performance, Cage intended for a Langston Hughes poem about the struggles of being a black person living in the United States, to be read aloud.
Harry Partch was another American composer working in the same field as Cage. His fifty-year career ran from the 1920’s until his death in 1974. His unique style involved writing in microtones – the way traditional Asian music is composed - and wholly unique to Western music. His music divides an octave into 43 unequal tones. Western music usually uses twelve, evenly spaced, tonal values. Besides writing his own, very individualistic, very eclectic music, he also created the instruments to play it with, and gave them names like the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Don’t get these confused with the names of Dr. Seuss characters!
This is his first major composition, from 1950, called Sonata Dementia. It’s a piece written in three movements, each just as bizarrely named as the overall title of the piece; "Abstraction & Delusion," "Scherzo Schizophrenia," "Allegro Paranoia." Once, in an introduction of the piece, just before directing its performance, he said, "I’m always a little hard-pressed to find words to give any validity to this piece of music." I can see why he felt that way. He also said about it that “Sonata Dementia is a satire on the world of singers and singing, music and dance; on concerts and concert audiences, where the occasional perception of an American word is an odd kind of shock. Also a satire on the world in general, on whimsy and caprice, on music in 43 tones to the octave, on people who conceive such things, on grand flourishes that lead to nothing, on satyrs, or on nothing.” By the way, this piece features a bass marimba and a hypobass. Not exactly the kind of music to get married by, is it?
Assuming anyone is still listening at this point, I hope you won’t mind if I also share another Harry Partch composition with you? This piece is called Delusion of the Fury. It’s the score to a full-on performance art piece that includes music, lighting, dancing, miming, and singing. It’s loosely patterned on a Japanese Noh, or form of a play.
Partch intended that the musicians would also serve as the dancers/ actors/ mimes in the play, and he gave loose descriptions for character wardrobe. He said, “the musician must be in costume; they should convey a sense of magic, of an olden time, but never of a precise olden time. The basic garment is a huge pair of pantaloons, wrapping around the waist in East Indian fashion. in Act I, they also wear a poncho-like garment -- a single, full piece of cloth with a neckhole. It is completely unadorned, without collages or beads or anything that twinkles in the light. The poncho is discarded at the end of the "Sanctus". To compensate for this very simple costume, each musician will wear a fantastic headpiece. Each will be different, or frequently different. In contrast, the three principals will wear more imaginative costumes, and imaginative make-up. Wigs, perhaps, but not headpieces."
He also described the first act like this:
“It’s a music-theater portrayal of release from the wheel of life and death. It opens with a pilgrim in search of a particular shrine, where he may do penance for murder. The murdered man appears as a ghost, sees first the assassin, then his young son looking for a vision of his father's face. Spurred to resentment by his son's presence, he lives again through the ordeal of death, but at the end – with a request - "Pray for me!" -- he finds reconciliation.
At the time of its release on CBS records, the liner notes said this, “The world has caught up with Harry Partch. For almost fifty years in the wilderness, Partch has been doing his own thing and suffering the slings and arrows of outraged musicians and musicologists. But the times they are a-changing, and critics who have called him "the Don Quixote of music" now see him as a "philosopher," a "prophet", a "visionary," an "inspired, stubborn radical."
Karlheinz Stockhausen is one more composer who wrote musique concrete. Like the other composers, he totally turned his back on the world of the concert hall, diving headlong into the recording studio and sound laboratory. Stockhausen is trying to move past the skin-crawling horror of the gas chamber and the atomic bomb. He’s saying that the innocence of the musical world we used to know has been completely corrupted, and he’s asking whether some new world might be discovered if we look in new, unexpected places instead.
This is the sort of question you might expect to be asked by a composer who claimed to have come, not from Earth, but from the star, Sirius – he really did that.
The (music?) we’re listening to now - one of his early masterpieces (I’ll let you decide if you want to continue to call it that) was completed in 1957, and was called Gruppen for three orchestras. In it, Stockhausen created his own form of "scales" – a mixture of speeds, and timbres and dynamics as well as more conventional collections of pitches. This music is at once thrilling and disturbing. At over 23 minutes, this is the experience of being pelted by waves of unintelligible sound.
Stockhausen wants people to experience and intuit his music, much more than to passively listen to it. His creative chaos creates sensations in your body and in your brain. For instance, immerse yourself in this piece, called Stimmung – a piece for six voices and six microphones, written in 1968 for the City of Cologne. It’s at once both tonal and serial in composition. Stimmung is also a word Stockhausen coined, himself. He meant it to describe psychological tuning, of people being well tuned together.
The harmonies of Stimmung are composed from 108 pitches: twelve different tones for each of the three women's voices, and twenty-four for each of the three men. Not only do the performers produce partials from the overtone series in each note they sing, but all of the fundamental tones are also related by whole-number overtone ratios. In this way, overtones are composed upon overtones, generating a range of degrees of harmonic fusion.[8]
Stockhausen’s music seems to reflect some elements of jazz, in that he gives so much freedom to the individual singers to ‘come into identity’ – his phrase. He’s got men and women in his choir who sing ‘lead’ sections, and the other singers have to somehow change what they’ve been given to sing until they’ve brought those parts into the same tempo, rhythm and dynamics as the lead vocals. Then, the lead singer signals another singer who picks up the lead vocal. Classical music doesn’t usually give the performers anywhere near that amount of freedom; you play what’s written.
As for me, and probably like you, I’m getting a headache. Let’s move on.
For all it’s weirdness, or maybe because of it, Musique Concrete did influence some of the more adventurous work in rock music, starting in the 1960’s.
We can see its influence in the Beatles, both John and Paul were fascinated by what was happening in avant garde music. John’s more psychadelic songs such as Tomorrow Never Knows, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, and Revolution No. 9 both show a very obvious debt. John actually had regular communication with Karlheinz Stockhausen.
On the other hand, what you might not have known is that From 1970 – 1974, Pink Floyd were working on an album idea they eventually dropped, where all the instruments were household objects. Just think Roger Waters and the boys playing songs on hand mixers, light bulbs, wood saws, hammers, brooms and other home appliances. They spent days and weeks making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspapers for rhythm, and letting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound. In that period, they had a song in their live sets called Work. It included sawing wood and boiling kettles on stage. Two tracks from the uncompleted household objects project still exist. One’s called The Hard Way. The bass track you’re about to hear is actually a rubber band.
This next track, “Wine Glasses”, ultimately found a new life as the homage to their one-time band leader, and victim of a drug-induced mental breakdown, Syd Barret. See if you can spot it.
The keyboard-like sounds you here are actually wine glasses, partially filled with water, to specific pitches.
Pink Floyd’s use of tape loops, sound effects, and natural ambient sounds is legendary. Their album, the Dark Side of the Moon was practically built around tape loops. The theatrics begin as soon as the needle hits the groove on side one, leading into the song, Speak to Me. The listener is presented with a musique concrete sound collage – an overture that begins with a faint heartbeat (actually a heavily-processed bass drum) and contains samples from every track on the album as well as a reversed piano chord by Wright that leads right into the next track, Breathe. Listeners who had not passed out in a smokey, lava-lamp bedroom by the time side two was over were brought full-circle with that heart beat again. The song, Money, opens with a tape loop of money-related sounds. To do it, bassist and vocalist, Roger Waters recorded various samples, including coins clinking, paper tearing and a ringing cash register, then cut up the tape into seven equal sections. By splicing these pieces together, Waters created the infamous metronomic sequence that introduces the track. Up until now, no one has ever achieved anything like it.
Industrial: Throbbing Gristle - Discipline
Combine punk rock with Musique Concrete, and the offspring is called Industrial.
A few of the leading bands in this genre are The Fall, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire,and Test Dept. In America, industrial bands include Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Marilyn Manson, Filter and Stabbing Westward. The aim was supposed to be a reflection of late industrial society and society’s increasing alienation from nature. Artists would utilize industrial noises as a rhythmic backbone made from tape loops and later on, samplers.
The band, Sonic Youth, also released an album of avant garde orchestra covers, called SYR4, that included two Cage compositions. Here’s Sonic Youth doing Cage’s “Six”.
The following is a sequence of splices from the top 10 best EDM/ Industrial songs of all time, as ranked by Discogs.com.
Front 242 – Headhunter
Nitzer Ebb – Join in the Chant
Skinny Puppy – Worlock
Skinny Puppy – Bites and Remission
Ministry – Stigmata
Front Line Assembly – Mindphaser
Nine Inch Nails – Head Like a Hole
KMFDM – Godlike
Bigod 20 – The Bog
ClockDVA – The Hacker
Collage/Plunderphonics: Born directly out of Musique Concrète, collage music is a highly controversial, black market genre of electronic music that involves flat-out sampling other people’s music or media to create completely new tracks. In this first example, a group called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM) created a mash-up called Whitney Joins the Jams in which it sounded like Whitney Houston was joining forces with the group.
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu – Whitney Joins the Jams
The term, Plunderphonics was coined by John Oswald, one of the artists in this genre; he created a totally unique track, composed only of elements from Michael Jackson’s Bad, which sounded nothing like the original. John Oswald/ Dab:
Negativland created a track called I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.
In the track, Negativland sampled and reworked U2’s track of the same name, and over it dubbed in a rant by the DJ Casey Kasem (American Top 40). Check it out:
The band, Evolution Control Committee, created a track called Rock By Rape. Who knew Dan Rather could rap?
Brain Damage
Over the last three episodes, we’ve definitely taken a walk on the wild side – to borrow from Lou Reed. Thanks for your being brave and following me into some terrain that you’ve probably not explored before. I kind of think of this music – atonal or serial music, minimalist music and musique concrete like a musical version of the basic research done by really smart folks in lab coats. They’re peering into new ways of looking at the world, even if the use for their specific inventions or discoveries is uncertain. But where would we be today, without these people? Practically everything in our modern tech world came out of those basic research labs! It took other people to bring some of those esoteric ideas into applications more of us could enjoy and relate to! The same goes with the ways that guys like Miles Davis, Pat Matheny, John Lennon, and Tom Yorke, to name a few, applied the really strange ideas that goes like Schoenberg, Stockhausen, John Adams, and John Cage and Steve Reich first developed?
As American music continued to develop in the 20th century, we began to pull new textures and colors from a broader palette and the results have been fascinating. In future episodes, we’ll continue to witness the unexpected twists and turns along the American Music River. I can’t wait to continue as your personal tour guide! If you’re new to this podcast, there are now fifteen prior episodes for you to explore PLUS you can dip deeply into the original sources I’ve used in researching and writing these episodes – just visit our Facebook page at American Song Podcast. I hope you’ll leave a comment on our page, too. I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for listening, I’ll talk with you soon!