MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE – week three
Musique concrète is defined to be ‘a recorded montage of natural sounds often electronically modified and presented as a musical composition’. It is often described through how it was created by Pierre Schaeffer in 1948, being “a musician experimenting with recorded sounds in a radio studio, with a radiophonic background, and at some point he considers this music”. The expression of ‘musique concrète’ was regularly used until the end of the 1950s. As stated in Daniel Teruggi’s ”Musique Concrète Today: Its reach, evolution of concepts and role in musical thought” article, “the term ‘musique concrète’ applied to a musical styles is almost obsolete in modern day, even if some composers may still continue composing music with this name, however, the concept is very strong and describes an attitude towards sound and musical composition with important implications for musical thought.” Musique concrete brought a huge shift in western culture with its diverse number of sounds that can be used to compose new music. This is because since the end of the Middle Ages, music has been mainly concerned with writing with the small variety of set sounds that were known to musicians, which were instruments and vocals.
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer who was widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He composed an electronic/musique concrete piece called ‘Gesang der Jüngling’, which was said to be “the first masterpiece of electronic music” according to a number of scholars. Stockhausen’s work typically develops from a single idea, which in this case, with Gesang der Jüngling, “the idea was to seamlessly fuse the sound of the human voice with electronically generated sounds”. At West German Radio’s Studio for Electronic Music, Stockhausen analysed sung verses into their elementary phonetic components, then grouped these sounds into a timbre continuum that ranged from pure tones to white noise. From this, he concluded that sung vowels, in their overtone structures, most resemble pure tones, whereas “plosive” consonants (b,p,t,d,k, and g) resemble noises. He then used contemporary studio resources to generate sine wave complexes to imitate vowel-like sounds and filtered electronically generated noise to arrive at consonant-like sounds. Stockhausen used only one voice for this composition, being a twelve-year-old boy, which helped him maintain maximum control over vocal timbres. Multiple recordings made of the boy’s singing were then transposed, combined, and altered in accordance with Gesang’s compositional plan.