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Hugh Le Caine: Dripsody - An Etude for Variable Speed Recorder (stereo version, 1957)
From the album Compositions Demonstrations 1946-1974
The early composers of musique concrète often sought to focus the development their techniques of manipulation and montage by limiting the sound material with which they worked to a single sound or a set of related sounds from a common source. This model is apparent in Pierre Schaeffer’s very first efforts in this new form of music, such as his Etude aux chemins de fer (“Railroad Etude”) and Etude aux casseroles or “Study on Pots and Pans” (also known as Etude pathétique) of 1948. The new recording medium of magnetic tape offered composers the ability to capture and explore sounds from an unlimited number of auditory “angles,” opening new perceptual territory for the ear just as the movie camera had for the eye.
The Canadian inventor and composer Hugh Le Caine was experimenting with electronic music in Ottawa even before Schaeffer’s first radio broadcasts of musique concrète in Paris. His piece Dripsody is a miniature masterpiece of its genre: the entire composition is based on a single recording of a drip of water, which is manipulated on tape to create shimmering cascades of liqueous sound. The original monophonic version was made in 1955; I have posted the slightly longer stereo version, which Le Caine created in 1957.
Played 150 time(s).
November 10, 2009, 10:01am
