Week of 09.20.10

After we took a quick assessment, we began the week with discussing recording mediums before tape. These included wire recordings, phonofilm recording, and disk recording. Phonofilm was developed by Lee De Forest, and is a film based medium that takes snapshots of the audio and reads them for play back with an optic sensor. At the time, disk recording offered higher quality and increased longevity compared to other mediums. This technology led to the development of turntablism, which was introduced into the classical music scene in the 1920s. Because the playback on a turntable is so manipulate able, composers like Hindemith, Varese, and Cage began to compose music for the purpose of recording which could then be manipulated alongside a live orchestra. This is an instance of exploiting the weakness in a technology; the turntable was not meant to be used to alter the pitch and speed of the playback, but this was often how it was used in those early experimentations.
Paul Hindemith would go on to develop and contribute to a new genre of music called Musique Concrete, which came to fruition around 1949. Musique Concrete is music that is based on the found sound concept, and is made up of manipulated recording of everyday sounds like that of a train. The concept behind this style of composition is to reveal the musicality in every day sounds, so that people may better appreciate the beauty of the world we live in. tow other brilliant conceptual minds behind Musique Concrete were Pierre Schaefer (1910 -1995) who was a broadcaster, and Pierre Henry (1927-) who was a percussionist and composer. They collaborated to develop this genre and form the philosophy behind it. Schaefer was a technological innovator who could apply the technology to Henry’s musical composition and sensibly. They would play real world sounds back at different speeds and tempos, reversed, and edited in all kinds of rhythmic ways without instruments or human interface. Schaefer described it as the use of any and all sounds except traditional instruments unless it’s the warped sounds of recorded instruments. The breakdown of harmony, melody, and traditional music theory served to re-conceptualize the abstraction of music notation. Since traditionally music exists abstractly as notes on paper that is then interpreted by musicians and performed, Musique Concrete conversely is purely recorded and manipulated should that inherently is the music, rather that realized music. This would be achieved through looping, sampling, and splicing audio. Musique Concrete is known as the second era of electronic music, and is composing through technological means, using organic, non traditional music sounds that can be replayed identically each time, and can be performed without human involvement.