Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Family and Formation
- 2 Langlais, and a Beginning
- 3 Messaien, and Friendships
- 4 Sonata
- 5 A Nietzsche Sequence
- 6 Musique Concrète
- 7 Foucault
- 8 The Death of Virgil
- 9 You
- 10 Time Regiven
- 11 … Beyond Chance
- 12 Since Debussy
- 13 Silence
- 14 Debussy
- 14a Citation: Hommage à Claude Debussy
- 15 Song After Song
- 16 Concerto
- 17 The Man Lying Down
- Notes
- Chronology
- Catalogue
- Writings
- Bibliography
- Index
- The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué
6 - Musique Concrète
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Family and Formation
- 2 Langlais, and a Beginning
- 3 Messaien, and Friendships
- 4 Sonata
- 5 A Nietzsche Sequence
- 6 Musique Concrète
- 7 Foucault
- 8 The Death of Virgil
- 9 You
- 10 Time Regiven
- 11 … Beyond Chance
- 12 Since Debussy
- 13 Silence
- 14 Debussy
- 14a Citation: Hommage à Claude Debussy
- 15 Song After Song
- 16 Concerto
- 17 The Man Lying Down
- Notes
- Chronology
- Catalogue
- Writings
- Bibliography
- Index
- The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué
Summary
There was another work of the early fifties, besides the Sonata and Séquence, and one at a tangent to the rest of your output, unusual in its brevity as in its medium: the Etude you produced at the Club d'Essai, the experimental department of Radio Diffusion Française, which was housed at 37 rue de l'Université in the seventh arrondissement, not far from the Gare d'Orsay. This Etude is a study in musique concrète, a term you explained in a brief introduction to the subject you wrote for Le guide du concert in 1952:
When a composer organizes elements on staff paper (notes, timbres, rhythms, etc), one can say that these elements have only a virtual existence in the composer's mind, and that they await something that will give them a graspable presence, a “concretization” represented in this case by the performance of the work in question. Musique concrète, on the other hand, works from materials whose sonorous existence is present immediately. These sound objects are the natural or artificial results of recordings—natural if the recorded sound is used in its raw state, artificial if it is subjected to some transforming operation: sounds lacking the attack, reversed, filtered (suppressing the lower or higher harmonics), reverberated, etc. Thus the sound objects become, in the manipulator's hand, like the different degrees of a scale, except that the concrete musician builds his score with the help of turntables and tape machines, so creating at once the work and its performance.
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- Information
- The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué , pp. 64 - 68Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003