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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.

November 10, 2009, 10:01am

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Michel Chion: “Requiem Aeternam”

From the album Requiem (1973)

Though he is probably better known as an influential theorist of film music, Michel Chion is also a prolific composer of electronic music in the primarily Francophone tradition of musique concrete inaugurated around 1950 by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.

Chion’s music of the 1970s, along with that of other composers working within the Parisian orbit of the Groupe de recherches musicales such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, represents the blossoming of an as-yet undiscovered golden age of electroacoustic art, in which the sonic experiments of the 50s and 60s gave way to a coherent, almost “classical” compositional style, with all the positive and negative connotations of that term.

This is music of a rare and disturbing programmatic intensity.  The sound of the speaking voice, so often an annoying gesture of pseudo-philosophical depth in electronic music, is here enfolded into the sonic texture in a virtually seamless manner.

June 29, 2009, 1:48pm