Acousmatic music
The acousmatic music is a specific sub-genus of the Musique electroacoustic " savante".
Electroacoustic recovers the whole of the musical genres making use of electricity in the design and the realization of works. Thus are electroacoustics works of support (art acousmatic), works for instruments or amplified sound bodies (provided that this amplification intervenes in a decisive way in esthetics and the choices of composition), works mixed (mixing instruments and sound track on support), works live electronic (for synthetizers on line, acoustic instruments with device of electronic or numerical transformation into real-time), the sound installations interactive, etc
A sound is known as acousmatic which one hears without seeing the cause which produces it. For example, one can say radio that it is media acousmatic.
The expression of acousmatic music is thus used to mean the dematerialization of the sound source, the abolition of the dependence to the sound event, the sound abstraction and, inter alia, its surrealist possibilities.
The acousmatique one gathers the concrete musics or acousmatic, radiophonic creations and Hörspiele, the acousmatic musics of application (musics for the theater, the dance, the video cinema, it…), sound installations worked on audio support diffused on loudspeaker (whose visual design does not install direct report/ratio of cause for purpose with the heard sound result), a certain fringe of the musics popular known as electronic resulting from a realization in studio fixed on support and delivered to listening alone. Lastly, certain achievements of sound poetry for those which approach radiophonic creation.
What a acousmatic work?
The acousmatique one is a sound art. Works which of it result are works of support: they appear only by the reading of the support on which they are recorded, fixed in a final form. At the end of the Forties on floppy discs, then on the magnetic band of the tape recorders and today on the memory of the computers.
This support is to the musician acousmatic what the stone is to the sculptor, the fabric with the painter, the test with the photographer, the film with the scenario writer. Like the sculptor his material, it cuts in the matter of the sounds, it builds, it diverts, often. Like the painter his colors, it juxtaposes, it mixes, it transforms, it composes. Like the photographer, it seizes, it tallies, it lights, it superimposed. Like the scenario writer finally, it governs time, it creates the movement, it goes up, it opposes, playing of the repetition and waiting, continuity and the rupture, fluidity and the clash. How? Starting from an initial material: the sound, in the broadest sense of the term. Starting from sound recordings. Acoustics, they can be made starting from plays on various instruments chosen for their aptitude “to sound” (sound bodies), inhabited universes of characteristic events, course, gestures or sequences played intentionally, even of “figurative” sounds or plays on traditional or “exotic” instruments. Synthetic, they can be made up of sounds or electronic sequences played synthetizer, or numerical, resulting from software programming or immediate transformations of sound events.
And what makes the type-setter of these accumulated sound recordings? It classifies them, and performs on them choices, a distribution, cuts, then multiple transformations in a studio equipped with many apparatuses resulting from the technological change from these last decades. Assembly, inversion, put in loop, transposition, sampling, compression, freezing, reverberation, echo, time, filtering, mixing, accumulation, are as many fundamental operations whose principle has been essential for more than fifty years, through an already long practice and a history. Those allow from now on the most sophisticated dreams, with the most improbable dreams to take form, provided that the type-setter has a preliminary idea of the universe which it wishes to create and make hear. For little thus, that it carries in him a sufficiently rich sound world, its knowledge to make, its sensitivity, its intuition, its taste of the play dictate the details of its work to him as it hears it: in a constant outward journey return of making hear it, it works out its work thus gradually, in a step which holds as much the will, of a preliminary project of composition (the choice of a set of themes, of a sound universe, a “great form”, a cutting) that sensitivity, making possible the invention of a “writing” by the exploitation of synchronisms, the accidents, contrasts, the similarities, diffractions, convergences. Rigor and freedom, directions of construction and taste of the gesture, will and availability are qualities also necessary to arrive to a coherent work, which, beyond the surprise, captivates and hangs listening. Lastly, like the scenario writer, it projects then his work in front of the public through a device of projection of the sound: an orchestra made up of loudspeakers of various “colors” and various powers, disseminated in the space in the concert, the gallery, the museum, the public place according to whether it chose to compose for the concert, the sound installation or any other form of acousmatic expression. Through what one can call an interpretation (choices of establishment, a spatialization, a play on the intensities and colors, of filterings) it makes its work accessible to the public, from now on delivered to the only empire of listening…
Already fifty years of sound adventures
In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer, organizer of a small research team within French Broadcasting, invents a new form of artistic expression which it will call concrete music itself.
Creator and producer of radio, where “to listen to it without seeing” made at the same time the mystery and the success of these new means of communication, it launches out by chance and taste of the play in an entirely new adventure musical, after months of experiments and observations on the “fixed” sounds, which the processes of recording allow him of réécouter with leisure: the most various sound materials available within the record library, given up by the technicians or recorded by him. Playing with several platinums of record players, he writes: " April 21st, 1948: if I cut down the sounds by their attack, I obtain a different sound; in addition, if I compensate for the fall of intensity, thanks to the potentiometer, I obtain a his thread of which I move the bellows at will. I thus record a series of notes manufactured in this way, each one on a disc. By laying out these discs on record players, I then, thanks to the play of the ignition keys, to play of these notes as I wish it, successively or simultaneously. We are craftsmen. My violin, my voice, I find them in all this bazaar out of wooden and tin, and in my horns with bicycles. I seek the direct contact with the sound matter, without electrons interposés."
From its enthusiasm and its scientific spirit are born the Études from noises (the first work of concrete music engraved on disc) initially broadcast before being given in concert. Pierre Henry joined it with the Club of test of the Radio in 1949. Together they compose Bidule in C and Symphonie for a man alone , work which will make then the round the world tour with the ballets of Maurice Béjart.
In 1951 the group of Pierre Schaeffer becomes the Group of searchs for concrete music of the rtf. It is reorganized in 1958 under the name of Groupe of music research (GRM).
On its side Pierre Henry continues a solitary way and founds the first private studio of concrete music, Apsome, in 1960. Consequently its course is sown concerts joining together an increasingly vast public: Mass for time present , the Voyage , Apocalypse of Jean , Futuristie , Mass of Liverpool …
During the Fifties, many traditional type-setters or of avant-garde of the time, from Darius Milhaud with Iannis Xenakis, from Olivier Messiaen with Edgard Varèse, from Henri Sauguet with Pierre Boulez come to be initiated with the practice of the concrete music at Pierre Schaeffer. At the same time, type-setters invest the studios of electronic composition abroad: Karlheinz Stockhausen with the WDR of Cologne ( Gesang der Jünglinge , 1956), Luciano Berio with the SPOKE of Milan ( Thema-Omaggio has Joyce , 1958). In the United States, the experiment of the fixed sounds takes a more technical turning, with the searchs for max Matthews on the sound synthesis by computer in the laboratory of the company Bell Telephone in Murray Hill, but also the attempts at Otto Luening ( Fantasy in space , 1952) and Wladimir Ussachevsky ( Incantation , 1953) in Columbia-Princeton Music Center of New York…
In France, creates for itself soon a true fish pond of type-setters purely acousmatic: François Bayle ( uninhabitable Spaces , 1967), Pierre Boeswillwald ( On the ways of Venice , 1983), Michel Chion ( Requiem , 1973), Christian Clozier ( Quasars , 1980), Luc Ferrari ( Hétérozygote , 1964), Jacques Lejeune ( Trimmings , 1974), Bernard Parmegiani ( Of will natura sonorum , 1975), Jean-Claude Risset ( Mutations , 1969), Alain Savouret ( the tree and will coetera , 1972)…
Art acousmatic today
- a world repertory several thousands of works
Fifty years of research, of reflections and production, four generations outstanding type-setters, works of which some are already the “traditional ones”, an eloquent discographic production sign the vitality of a kind despite everything virgin of any academism. Influenced and stimulated by the example of Pierre Schaeffer and by that of the pioneers of the electronic music, of many other countries created their studios. In 1970 Francoise Barrier and Christian Clozier found the GMEB, group of experimental music of Bourges, catalyst of world the electroacoustic production and more particularly in the Eastern European countries, Northern Europe, Cuba and South America. Thanks to the existence of classes of composition within the academies and the universities, the acousmatic practice of art experiences a strong development in the following countries: France (with Marcel Frémiot, Guy Reibel, Denis Dufour, Philippe Mion…), Canada (with Francis Dhomont), Belgium (with Annette Vande Gorne), the United Kingdom (with Denis Smalley), Austria (with Dieter Kaufmann), Germany (with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Tutschku), Brazil (with Jorge Antunes), Italy (Roberto Doati, Agostino di Scipio…), but also Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, South America, the United States, Japan… The acousmatique one counts a new generation of type-setters today (quote Frederic Acquaviva, Patrick Ascione, Paul Dolden, Ingrid Drese, Jean-Marc Duchenne, Marc Favre, Thomas Gerwin, Bernhard Günter, Jonty Harrison, Tomonari Higaki, Frederic Kahn, Erik Mikael Karlsson, Patrick Kosk, Francisco López, Lionel Marchetti, Elio Martusciello, Robert Normandeau, Ake Parmerud, Dominique Petitgand, Agnès Poisson, Daniel Teruggi, Christian Zanési…) and of tens of type-setters working in a swarming of styles, universe, and steps sometimes extremely far away from the ideas first from Pierre Schaeffer… (see low list of type-setters). Playing of a technology in perpetual evolution, these creators recognize themselves under various names, of which multiplicity a little diverting translated at the same time the dynamism and it (relative) innovation of the kind.
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an experiment with the multiple prolongations
The world of the contemporary instrumental composition is the first upset by the experiment of the concrete music. Type-setters such as Iannis Xenakis, Ivo Malec, François-Bernard Mâche and Denis Dufour was strongly influenced in their style and their musical ideas by ideas of morphologies and writing coming from their practice of the studio. The “closed furrow” forms part little by little of the contemporary musical vocabulary and one can deny only the American type-setters minimalists of the school of New York (Steve Reich, Phil Glass, Terry Riley, Assembles It Young…) in their turn inspired initially in their works for band then in their instrumental works by the idea of “loop”, but were also nourished of a whole know-how of studio. The multiplied by ten possibilities of intervention and distance compared to musical time that the studio offers produced of singularly new works, and this change of paradigm is still felt in the current production.
Serial and post-serial ones are longest to react and admit that a new music can be thought and be created with a behavior, a material, a different step.
Still let us note that it is in the Seventies that a new esthetic school is born in France, asserting research of Pierre Schaeffer on the sound (but not of the acousmatic music), the spectral school, which takes as a starting point the acoustic structure of the sound (its harmonics, its spectrum) to support the choice heights, the definition of the form and the orchestration of work.
Jean Michel Jarre asserts as for him its filiation with the GRM, after having followed a few months the class of Pierre Schaeffer to the higher national Academy of music of Paris at the end of the years 1960. One finds similar musical misadventures beyond the rhine with Klaus Schulze (inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen), Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk groups it beginnings. As of the end of the year 1960, the “planing” sequences and the sound effects of studio invade the pop production: the Beatles ( Revolution 9 ), the Pink Floyd ( The Dark Side off the Moon ), Edge and more radical still Faust, but also the Velvet Underground and Software Machine… until the current international variety most hegemonic (Michael Jackson).
Finally with the beginning of the year 1990 appears the Techno (Electronic music), of which the DJ' S, at the same time organizers, technicians and now musicians assert today for some the heritage of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (qualified at 70 years on the cover of a magazine of “older DJ of the world”!) The MC and do other magicians of the night know that since 1948, of the hundreds of type-setters have work before them in directions and styles whose invention and power could make to pâmer the most demanding public of the evenings “turnip”?
As for the musics of application (commercial and/or advertizing, of sound illustration for television, the radio, the theater or the ballet, bands of courts or feature-length films, “sonals”, jingles and others “gimmicks” sound), they are not the last to be itself seized the expressive possibilities of its discoveries by the work of exploration and grubbing of the alchemists acousmatic…
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a new kind of music lover
Profiting to some extent of the late recognition granted by the media and the public cultivated to the repertory of this century, the “music for band” drains also a public curious about new musical experiments. Finally the education job undertaken in the schools and the academies in France bears its fruits, and one meets more and more people for whom the discovery of new works necessarily does not result from the stereotypes of the consumption of mass, nor of any cultural yoke, but quite simply of the pleasure of exploration, the sensory pleasure rough - and almost instinctive - sound. Through works which do not do of anything call with a culture or an obliged background, nor with references requiring of long musicologic studies, this in spite of an elaborate invoice whose refinement and richness do not have anything to envy works of the most subtle polyphonists…
Let us recall that more than in the innovation of the sounds and the stamps, the radical innovation of art acousmatic to lie in the possibility of fixing these sounds and of the réécouter as much as necessary during work, in order to act on their own characters (attacks, harmonic stamp, grain, pace, dynamics, etc), and finally of delivering work to the listeners, without those having access to the “realistic” sources (causal, anecdotic) of the sounds. Pure auditive dimension is directly requested. In the absence of stimulation or of visual distraction parasitizes, only the sound arrives at perception and the imaginary one between concerned then freely. One can consequently give up any former musical reference, for little that one plays the game of this kind of “immersion”. Pierre Schaeffer thus writes in the Traité musical objects : “Such is the suggestion of acousmatic, to deny the instrument and cultural conditioning, to put vis-a-vis us the sound one and its possible musical”.
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