Day 080: Musique concrète sounds good
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
80 — Musique concrète sounds good
21-October-1971
(Thur.)
TRANSCRIPT
Full day. Lesson. Practice. Classes. Concert.
Übung. Class for electronic musik. Very interesting.
Learned how to splice out unwanted sounds from tape.
(2) How to run 3 tapes at same time and tape them
each with separate adjusting levels. Filters also.
Right now, technology is difficult, but the idea
still comes through.
BBC concert again. Very enjoyable (more contemporary
orientation). Debussy very nice. Schoenberg. Bartok.
I would like to hear again.
REFLECTIONS
Übung—exercise.
The German
word ubüng
means
exercise,
and is often used in German instrumental
clavier-übung
method
books. (piano exercises) I had to look it up. Today,
the exercises refer to techniques that we are
learning in our first “lab” class on electronic music
class. As I will discover, the class is actually
based in the techniques of musique
concrète, a style of
contemporary music often associated with 20th-century
avant-garde music.
Musique concrète. This style
of music began in the 1940s and continued through the
1950s and 1960s. It is often credited to being
founded by French composer, Pierre Schaeffer. The
musical style of musique concrète is based on the
recording of natural sounds and their manipulation
with tape recorders and other electronic equipment.
It was in effect, composing with “sound.” Definitely
avant-garde, contemporary, and different. Many
musicians and people do not consider this music,
however, it influenced the field of “electronic
music” which followed it.
I was fascinated by this genre and other forms of
contemporary music. This class and its projects would
become an important part of this year and my first
experimentation with contemporary music.
Tape
techniques. Some of
the techniques we learned this first day were the
editing and splicing of tapes, playing multiple tapes
and recording the three layers on another recorder,
volume control, and filtering.
Electronic music and musique concrète have passed
their heyday. They have left their influence on
modern music composition, avant-garde and multimedia
performance pieces, music recording, sound design,
and the movie and music industries.
It will be a fun class.
Evening
concert. Another
concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, this one in a
contemporary vein with works by Debussy, Schoenberg,
and Bartok. This time, I don’t get backstage to meet
hornist Alan Civil or anyone else.
Till tomorrow.
John
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