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In the 1950s, electronic music was divided into two main camps, and as we’ve seen earlier in the century those camps tended to divide along French/German lines. French composers began creating works using tape recordings that included acoustically produced tones and sounds (called musique concrete), while German composers created works using tape recordings of electronically produced tones and sounds (called elektronische musik).

Musique Concrete.   It wasn’t long before composers in Paris also began using the tape recorder to develop musique concrète a new technique invoilving editing  recorded fragments of natural and industrial sounds together. The first pieces of musique concrète in Paris were assembled by Pierre Schaeffer.

The selection below – an example  of Musique  – Concrete by Pierre Schaeffer  comprises of sounds of trains.

Musique concrète (meaning “concrete music”) is a genre of electroacoustic music that is made in part from acousmatic sound. It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using synthesizers and computer-based digital signal processing. Also, compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, metre, and so on. Originally contrasted with “pure” elektronische Musik (based solely on the production and manipulation of electronically produced sounds rather than recorded sounds), the theoretical basis of musique concrète as a compositional practice was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the early 1940s.

By 1949 Schaeffer’s compositional work was known publicly as musique concrète. Schaeffer stated: “when I proposed the term ‘musique concrète,’ I intended … to point out an opposition with the way musical work usually goes. Instead of notating musical ideas on paper with the symbols of solfege and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing.” According to Pierre Henry, “musique concrète was not a study of timbre, it is focused on envelopes, forms. It must be presented by means of non-traditional characteristics.  . . . One might say that the origin of this music is also found in the interest in “plastifying” music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture…musique concrète, in my opinion . . . led to a manner of composing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing.” Schaeffer had developed an aesthetic that was centered upon the use of sound as a primary compositional resource. The aesthetic also emphasized the importance of play (jeu) in the practice of sound based composition. Schaeffer’s use of the word jeu, from the verb jouer, carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: “to enjoy oneself by interacting with one’s surroundings,” as well as “to operate a musical instrument.”

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Electronic music  employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production –  an electronic musician  composes and/or performs such music. Electronics were pioneered In America and Europe in the early 1960s. ,  The  monophonic Mini-Moog became the most widely used synthesizer in both popular and electronic art music.during the 1970s to early 1980s,

Electronic music began having a significant influence on popular music In the 1970s, , with the adoption of polyphonic synthesizers such as the Yamaha GX-1 and Prophet-5, electronic drums, and drum machines such as the Roland CR-78, through the emergence of genres such as krautrock, disco, new wave and synthpop. In the 1980s, electronic music became more dominant in popular music, with a greater reliance on synthesizers, and the adoption of programmable drum machines.

Electronically produced music became prevalent in the popular domain by the 1990s, because of the advent of affordable music technology. Contemporary electronic music includes many varieties and ranges from experimental art music to popular forms such as electronic dance music.

Elektronische Musik

Figure 1. Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Electronic Music Studio of WDR, Cologne, in 1991

Karlheinz Stockhausen worked briefly in Schaeffer’s studio in 1952, and afterward for many years at the WDR Cologne’s Studio for Electronic Music.

“With Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in residence, the Cologne became a year-round hive of charismatic avante-gardism combining electronically generated sounds with relatively conventional orchestras—in   Stockhausen’s  Mixtur (1964) and Hymnen, dritte Region mit Orchester(1967). Stockhausen stated that his listeners had told him his electronic music gave them an experience of “outer space,” sensations of flying, or being in a “fantastic dream world.” More recently, Stockhausen turned to producing electronic music in his own studio in Kürten, his last work in the medium being Cosmic Pulses (2007).  (Listen to parts of this selection. Scan about every 4 minutes throughout the work to get a perspective)

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Varese produced a relatively small amount of music but he was influential as an early innovator in electronic music.

Figure 1. Edgard Varèse

Edgard  Varèse (1883-1965) was a French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States.

Varèse’s music emphasizes timbre and rhythm and he coined the term “organized sound” in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse’s conception of music reflected his vision of “sound as living matter” and of “musical space as open rather than bounded.” He conceived the elements of his music in terms of “sound-masses”, likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that “to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise,” and he posed the question, “what is music but organized noises?”

Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognized as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electronic mediums for sound production, and hich composer is descreibed as his use of new instruments and electronic resources led to his being known as the “Father of Electronic Music” while Henry Miller described him as “The stratospheric Colossus of Sound.”

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Here is a brief article on our playlist example of electronic music.

Poème électronique (English Translation: “Electronic Poem”) is an 8-minute piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse, written for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The Philips corporation commissioned Le Corbusier to design the pavilion, which was intended as a showcase of their engineering progress. Le Corbusier came up with the title Poème électronique, saying he wanted to create a “poem in a bottle.” Varèse composed the piece with the intention of creating a liberation between sounds and as a result uses noises not usually considered “musical” throughout the piece.

Note:   this work does not begin  until 27 seconds into the work.

Sequence of Events

The images in Le Corbusier’s film are all black and white still photographs and willfully abstract. The first image is a bull’s head in a spotlight. The final image is a woman holding an infant. Le Corbusier assigned thematic sections to the film:

The sequence of sounds in Varèse’s composition: