Acousmatic Art

THE ACOUSMATIC GENRE
By Denis Dufour and Thomas Brando (1)
[2000]
What is ‘acousmatic music’?
The acousmatic is an art of sound (2). Acousmatic music (or musique acousmatique) is music which is fixed definitively on a medium and the resulting works can only be heard through that medium. In the late 1940s they were recorded on discs; then magnetic tapes and tape recorders were used; and nowadays the computer is the most common tool.
For the acousmatic musician this medium is like stone for the sculptor, canvas for the painter, prints for the photographer, film for the film-maker. As a sculptor chisels stone, the acousmatic musician fashions his sound material, shaping it and often completely changing its nature. Like a painter, he juxtaposes his colours, mixes them, modifies them, composes and blends them. Like a photographer, he captures a particular moment, centres his ‘picture’, chooses his lighting, makes use of double exposure. Like the film-maker, he chooses his timing, creates movement and contrast, edits, brings into play fluidity and clashes, repetition, delay, continuity, breaks. How does he do all that? His basic material is sound, in the broadest sense of the term –recorded sound. The latter may be taken from any source, natural, artificial or synthetic, and is by no means restricted to those previously associated with music. He may use musical instruments (traditional or ‘exotic’), any sounding bodies, speech, natural or artificial sounds, electronic sound (produced by a synthesiser), digital sound (using digital computer synthesis).
Once the composer has recorded those sounds, he modifies them electronically and arranges them in any combination or succession that suits his purpose. He may edit them, play them backwards (thus converting fading sounds into an abrupt crescendo, for example), change their speed, form them into a continuous loop (which can be used to create an ostinato), transpose them, compress them, freeze them, superpose them, cut them short or extend them, subject them to echo-chamber effects, vary their pitch and intensity, and so on. All those processes, which have been commonly used for more than 50 years, take place in a studio, where he has access to all the latest technological devices (including reverberators, modulators, filters, etc.).
A composer who has a clear idea of the world he wishes to create and present to the listener, is thus able to create the most improbable fantasies, express the most elaborate dreams. Obviously, he must have a keen awareness of all the rich possibilities of sound. His art calls not only for savoir-faire, but also for a good measure of sensitivity and intuition; and he must enjoy playing with sound. An acousmatic work is built up gradually, as he constantly moves to and fro between the act of composing and the act of listening (3). Little by little, he elaborates his work, making it conform to his original idea (choice of themes, the particular sound he wishes to create, form, division, and so on), using his sensitivity to invent a ‘system’ by the use of synchronisation, contrast, accidents, similarities, diffraction and convergence. Rigour and freedom, a sense of structure, determination and receptiveness are other qualities that are required if he is to create a work that is coherent, interesting and captivating to the ear.
Finally, as in the case of the film-maker, he presents the finished work to the public through a system of sound projection: an orchestra composed of loudspeakers of varying ‘colour’ and output, set at different points in the concert space (4) , the gallery, the museum, the public place, depending on whether he chose to compose for the concert, the sound installation or any other form of acousmatic expression. Through what might be called an ‘interpretation’ (arrangement of the speakers, use of space, use of intensities and colours, filtering, etc.), the acousmatic composer brings his work to concert audiences, who find themselves in a situation where their attention is concentrated entirely on the activity of listening (5).
Fifty years of adventure
The adventure began in 1948, when the French composer, acoustician and electronics engineer, Pierre Schaeffer, with his staff at Radiodiffusion Française, introduced a new form of artistic expression, to which he gave the name ‘musique concrète’ (6).
This creator and radio producer was fascinated by the possibilities of radio, a medium which meant concentrating on listening, without any visual support –this contributed to the mystery and success of this new means of communication (7). With a vast range of sound material at his disposal in the sound archives, he began to experiment with and observe recorded sound (‘sons fixés’). He carried out simple experimentations with disc recordings, using several turntables and, on 21 April 1948, he wrote (8): ‘By amputating the attack from sounds, I obtain different sounds; on the other hand, if I use the potentiometer to make up for the drop in intensity, I obtain a sound that is drawn out and I can shift the crescendo or decrescendo at will. So I record a series of notes which I have created in this fashion, each of them on a separate disc. When I place each of these discs on a pick-up, I can play with those notes as I like, using the on-off levers, and bringing them in successively or simultaneously. […] We are craftsmen. I find my violin, my voice in this clutter of wood and tin, and in my bycicle horns. What I want is direct contact with the sound material, without having to pass through the intermediary of electrons.’
His experimentations gave rise that same year to Etudes de bruits, which was first presented on the radio on 20 June as Concert de bruits (Radio Paris, Club d'Essai), before being given (privately) in concert on 3 October (Paris Studio Devèze). It was also the first concrete work to be issued on record. In 1949 Pierre Henry joined him at the Club d'Essai and together they composed Bidule en ut and Symphonie pour un homme seul in 1950. In 1955, Maurice Béjart choreographed the latter for his Ballets de l'Etoile and the work subsequently travelled all over the world (9).
In 1951, Pierre Schaeffer's group became the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC) and in 1958 it was reorganised as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) (10). Meanwhile, Pierre Henry went his own way and, in 1960, he founded the Apsome Studio, the first private electronic workshop in France. He went on to give concerts before ever-growing audiences: Messe pour le temps présent, Le Voyage, L'Apocalypse de Jean, Futuristie, Messe de Liverpool…
During the 1950s, many ‘traditional’ or avant-garde composers of the time, from Darius Milhaud to Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen to Edgard Varèse, Henri Sauguet to Pierre Boulez, came to Pierre Schaeffer to learn the art of musique concrète. At that same time, electronic music studios were also founded in other countries and other composers began to work in that field, the best-known of them being Karlheinz Stockhausen (Gesang der Jünglinge, 1956) at the Studio für Elektronische Musik, West German Radio, Cologne (founded in 1951), and Lucian Berio (Thema-Omaggio a Joyce, 1958) at the Studio di Fonologia, Italian Radio, Milan. In the United States experimentation with sound took a more technical turn with the research into sound synthesis by computer carried out by Max Matthews at the laboratory of the Bell Telephone Company, Murray Hill, and Otto Luening (Fantasy in Space, 1952) and Vladimir Ussachevsky (Incantation, 1953) carried out important work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, New York. France soon became a veritable breeding-ground for purely acousmatic composers: François Bayle (Espaces inhabitables, 1967), Pierre Boeswillwald (Sur les chemins de Venise, 1983), Michel Chion (Requiem, 1973), Christian Clozier (Quasars, 1980), Luc Ferrari (Hétérozygote, 1964), Jacques Lejeune (Parages, 1974), Bernard Parmegiani (De natura sonorum, 1975), Jean-Claude Risset (Mutations, 1969), Alain Savouret (L’Arbre et coetera, 1972)…
The acousmatic art today
Thousands of works and an international repertoire.
The acousmatic genre –a genre without any trace of academism– is very much alive and well: fifty years of research, experimentation and production; four generations of remarkable composers; a whole host of works, some of which have already become ‘classics’; an impressive collection of records…
Influenced and encouraged by the example set by Pierre Schaeffer and the other pioneers of electronic music, many countries have now created their own studios. In 1970, Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier founded the GMBE, groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges, which acted as a catalyst for the electroacoustic production world-wide and more particularly in the eastern countries, northern Europe, Cuba and South America. Thanks to the existence of composition classes for such music at conservatoires and universities, the practice of acousmatic music is developing strongly in the following countries: France (with Marcel Frémiot, Guy Reibel, Denis Dufour, Philippe Mion…), Canada (Francis Dhomont), Belgium (Annette Vande Gorne), United Kingdom (Denis Smalley), Austria (Dieter Kaufmann), Germany (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans Tutschku), Brasil (Jorge Antunes), Italy (Roberto Doati, Agostino di Scipio…), but also Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, South America, the United States, Japan, and so on. New generations of composers are being attracted to acousmatic music (Frédéric Acquaviva, Patrick Ascione, Paul Dolden, Marc Favre, Thomas Gerwin, Bernhard Günter, Jonty Harrison, Frédéric Kahn, Eric Mikael Karlsson, Patrick Kosk, Francisco López, Lionel Marchetti, Elio Martusciello, Robert Normandeau, Ake Parmerud, Dominique Petitgand, Agnès Poisson, Daniel Teruggi, Christian Zanési to mention but a few), and dozens of composers are at work in a whole host of styles, worlds and approaches –some of them very far removed from the original ideas of Pierre Schaeffer. Constantly changing technology means that creators in this field rally to various appellations (11). This may be rather confusing or disconcerting, but it indicates the dynamism of the genre and the fact that it is still (relatively) recent.
The many repercussions of the acousmatic experience.
The world of experimental instrumental composition was the first to be turned upside down by the experience of musique concrète. Composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Ivo Malec, François-Bernard Mache and Denis Dufour have been profoundly influenced in their musical ideas and style by concepts of form and composition resulting from their work in the studio. The ‘sillon fermé’ (lit. the ‘closed groove’, i.e. the principle of a scratched record, which causes the same section of music to be repeated over and over again) has gradually made its way into modern musical vocabulary and it cannot be denied that the American minimalists (prominent among whom are Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley and La Monte Young) have, in turn, been inspired by the idea of the ‘loop’, first of all in their works for magnetic tape, but also in their instrumental pieces; and their studio work has also obviously influenced them. The various means that are available in an electronic workshop make it possible to play with ‘psychological’ time (stretching it out, shortening it or ‘freezing’ it), and by ‘looping’ sound all sense of time can be virtually abolished. Such effects have been used to produce many very original works and this paradigm shift is still to be felt in the pieces that are being created today.
The composers of serial and post-serial music are taking much longer to react and to admit that a new form of music may be conceived and created, with a different approach, different material, a different response.
It may also be noted that, in the 1970s, a new aesthetic movement grew up in France, know as the Ecole Spectrale (12). It adhered to Pierre Schaeffer's research into sound (but not to acousmatic music) and it drew its inspiration from the acoustic structure of sound (harmonics, sound spectrum) to support the choice of pitch, the definition of form and the orchestration of the work.
Jean-Michel Jarre claims a filiation with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, after spending a few months in Pierre Schaeffer's class at the Paris Conservatoire (CNSM) in the late 1960s. Similar avatars are also to be found in Germany, with Klaus Schulze (inspired by Stockhausen), Tangerine Dream and the group Kraftwerk (in its early years). From the late 1960s onwards, the pop world was invaded by ‘mind-blowing’ sequences and studio sound effects: examples are to be found in the works of The Beatles (Revolution 9), Pink Floyd (The Dark Side of the Moon), Can, Faust (even more radical), and also Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, and so on, right up to the leading international variety performers of the present day (e.g. Michael Jackson).
Finally, the early ’90s saw the emergence of ‘techno’ (a style of popular music making extensive use of electronic instruments and synthesized sound), whose disc jockeys (they are not only presenters but also technicians and –more and more frequently– musicians) sometimes claim to have been inspired by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. (On a magazine cover in 1997, the latter was described, at the age of seventy, as ‘the oldest DJ in the world’!). Do those MCs and other ‘magicians of the night’ realise that, since 1948, hundreds of compositions have come into being that would have the adepts of their so-called ‘rave-ups’ in raptures?
Finally, what we shall call ‘application music’ (i.e. music for promotion and advertising, sound illustration for television, radio, theatre and ballet, soundtracks for short and full-length films, jingles and other sound gimmicks) is not the last to have adopted the expressive possibilities of sound resulting from the explorations and experimentations of the alchemists of acousmatic music.
A new type of music lover.
Over the years there have been various types of concert experiences in the world of acousmatic music, from the very first concert of musique concrète, held in the auditorium of the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris on 18 March 1950 to the grand, full-scale events organised by Pierre Henry or Karlheinz Stockhausen, the marathon concerts of Jean-Claude Eloy, the underwater concerts of Michel Redolfi, and experiences such as the ‘sleepless nights’ and the ‘acousma-raves’ at the Futura Festival… During that time, audiences, too, have changed.
In the 1960s, attracted by the experimentations of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Henry and titillated by the intrusion into their musical world of new colours and spectacular studio effects, the adepts of pop music joined (sometimes in large numbers) those of acousmatic music.
Partly as a result of late recognition by the media and by the cultured public of the 20th-century repertoire, ‘tape music’ also attracts those who are eager for new musical experiences. Finally, the work that has been carried out in French schools and conservatoires to create an awareness of this type of music is now bearing fruit. For more and more people, the discovery of new works is not necessarily a result of the stereotypes of mass consumption, nor of some cultural obligation: it is quite simply a pleasure (the pleasure of exploration) and a primitive (almost instinctive), sensorial enjoyment of sound. Acousmatic works may be elaborate, refined, rich and subtle, but they do not require any particular knowledge, culture or background, nor does one need to have studied musicology in order to be able to understand them. Acousmatic works are accessible and are simply meant to be enjoyed. We must remember that when the work finally reaches the listener, the latter does not have access to the ‘realist’ (causal, anecdotal) sources of the sounds that go to make it up. The work appeals directly to the dimension of pure listening, without any intrusive visual stimulation or distraction. Only the sound is perceived and the imagination can therefore come quite freely into play. The important thing is to enter into the spirit of this ‘immersion’ in sound, setting aside all the musical reference points we may have accumulated over the years. In his Traité des objets musicaux (13), Pierre Schaeffer wrote: ‘The suggestive power of acousmatic music is such that we are led to set aside the instrument, forget our cultural conditioning; we find ourselves face to face with sound and its musical possibilities.’
1. Denis Dufour is an instrumental and acousmatic composer, an educator (CNR in Lyon from 1980 to 1995, CNR in Perpignan since then), a concert promoter (Acore, Motus concerts, Futura festival, Syntax festival) and a discographic collection director (Motus-Acousma and Motus-Aujourd’hui). Thomas Brando is a writer and a librettist.
2. As we nowadays refer to ‘plastic arts’, why not use the term ‘arts of sound’ which would include everything that sounds or makes a noise: instrumental music, popular music, electroacoustic music, traditional music…?
Electroacoustics includes all the musical genres using electricity in their conception and realization. That is to say works fixed on a medium (identified with acousmatic art), works for instruments or amplified sounding bodies (this amplification must intervene in a decisive way on the aesthetics and the choices of composition), mixed works (combining instruments and sound tracks fixed on a medium), live electronic works (live synthesizers, acoustic instruments with a real-time electronic or digital transformation device), interactive sound installations, and so on…
Acousmatic art includes acousmatic or concrete musics, radio creations and Horspiele, electroacoustic application works (for theatre, danse, cinema, video…), sound installations on an audio medium played back through loudspeakers (their visual conception mustn’t have any direct cause and effect relationship on the sound result), some so-called ‘electronic music’ (techno) conceived in studio, fixed on a medium and meant for the sole listening. Finally, some sound poetry close to radio creation.
3. It was the experimental aspect of this approach (the famous ‘démarche concrète’, in which the composition is based on direct listening to the result, with a constant to-and-fro movement between the act of creating or capturing and transforming sound and the act of listening to what has been created or captured and transformed), combined with the manipulation of ‘raw’, ‘ready-made’ sounds, that led Pierre Schaeffer to coin the very evocative term ‘musique concrète’ in 1949. It refers quite obviously to musique ‘abstraite’ instrumentale, which is composed by the ‘classic method’ but in a ‘theoretical’ way (without any direct contact with the material, and the conception of which goes through the abstraction of any codification or language: musical notation).
4. System of ‘sound projection’, of transmission (otherwise known as a ‘loudspeaker orchestra’ or Acousmonium): it consists of a set of speakers, placed in different parts of the concert hall; the intensity and colour of the sound output are varied with the aid of a projection table (via filters, cables and amplifiers), thus projecting the works interpreted into the space of the concert hall. Motus has been, since 1995, the only organization with an appointed professional performer, Jonathan Prager, in charge of its acousmonium.
acousmatic music is music fixed on a medium. It is played back through a system of ‘sound projection’. ‘It is thus necessary to fit in with the characteristics of the auditorium, while the psychological space has to be arranged to match the features of the work. As he organises tutti and soli, nuance and contrasts, relief and movement, the musician at the console becomes the creator of an orchestration, of a live performance’ (François Bayle).
5. This corresponds to the situation described, in the literal sense, by the term ‘acousmatics’ (which comes from the Greek akousmata, meaning ‘something heard’). Here are some definitions and commentaries on the subject by various authors. a. Pythagoras (6th century B.C) invented an original means of encouraging attentive listening: he would teach from behind a curtain, in complete darkness and in utter silence. ‘Acousmatic’ was the word he used to describe this situation and also to refer to his disciples, who thus developed their concentration. Pythagoras left no written works.
b. Jérôme Peignot. In the 1950s when musique concrète was in its early years and Pierre Schaeffer was busy providing the first elements of a methodology, the writer and poet Jérôme Peignot declared: ‘Which words could be used to refer to the distance that exists between sounds and their origin? ‘Bruit acousmatique’ is used (in the dictionary) to describe a sound that is heard without the causes being identified. And there we have the very definition of the sound object, which is the basic element in musique concrète, the most general type of music that exists, with its head close to heaven and its feet touching the world of the dead.’ (From a radio programme entitled Musique animée, presented by the Groupe de Musique Concrète, 1955).
c. Pierre Schaeffer, in his Traité des objets musicaux (1966), used the term ‘acousmatic’ to refer to concentrated listening (‘écoute réduite’): ‘The tape recorder has the same virtue as Pythagoras's curtain: it creates new phenomena for observation, but, above all, it creates new conditions of observation.’ (Quoted by F. Bayle in Vocabulaire de la musique contemporaine, ‘Musique ouverte’ series, J.Y. Bosseur, published by Minerve).
d. Denis Dufour and Jean-François Minjard. The acousmatic art is an art of sound, producing a work that is set and definitive, recorded, presented through a medium which is purely auditory: without any visual support and using all the electroacoustical means composers have at their disposal through the studio, whatever the technology employed. The acousmatic composition is based on listening. In a constant to-and-fro movement between the act of creating or capturing and transforming sound and the act of listening to what has been created or captured and transformed, the composer makes and arranges the different elements of his work in an incredible inventiveness of detail and a linking-up of sound images. As the sounds are worked on for their own sakes and are therefore detached from their mode of production, they lose their true causality, taking on instead a virtual causality, which itself generates spaces –internal, external, induced, imaginary, metaphorical, and so on– the juxtaposition of which produces meaning.’ (in Vocabulaire de la musique contemporaine, ‘Musique ouverte’ series, J.Y. Bosseur, published by Minerve).
e. Michel Chion. Acousmatic: a term used to describe a listening situation in which we hear a sound without actually seeing the cause of that sound. This Greek word ‘acousmatic’ was originally used to refer to the disciples of Pythagoras, who would listen to their master teaching from behind a curtain. Pierre Schaeffer, who invented musique concrete, had the idea of reviving this word to describe the situation in which we find ourselves when listening to the radio, a record or a loudspeaker. In his Traité des objets musicaux (1966) he analysed the consequences of this situation on the psychology of listening. After Pierre Schaeffer, the composer François Bayle then had the idea of adopting the word for what is more commonly known as ‘musique électroacoustique’. He considers that the terms ‘musique acousmatique’ and ‘concert acousmatique’ are better suited to the aesthetics and to the conditions of listening to and creating of such ‘invisible’ music, resulting from the loudspeaker and in which the recorded sound is released from its original cause (Michel Chion in Dictionnaire de la Musique, Larousse).
6. It is interesting to remind ourselves that, even before Schaeffer, there were various other exponents of the use of sounds and noises as materials for composition. At the beginning of this century, for example, the Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo built a number of mechanically activated intonarumori (‘noise intoners’ or noise instruments). Some years later, the German experimental film-maker Walter Ruttmann used the soundtrack of a cinefilm to produce a ‘film without pictures’ (Week-end, 1930). And we must not forget the French-born American composer Edgard Varèse, with his famous Utopia of ‘organised sound’. We must note, however, that none of these pioneers had the idea of using the recording (which had been available and perfectible from 1910 onwards) to create a veritable ‘art des sons fixés’, to borrow Michel Chion's ..‘sons fixés’ being sounds recorded, for example, on magnetic tape).
7. See Orson Welles and his famous programmes for American radio: Dracula (1938) and, especially, War of the Worlds (1939). In 1943-44 Pierre Schaeffer also created a fictional work for radio entitled La Coquille à planètes.
8. In the ‘Premier journal (1948-49)’ of his work entitled A la recherche d'une musique concrete (published by Seuil, 1952).
9. Musique concrète is becoming quite popular and even figures in François Truffaut's L'amour à vingt ans (1961), in which the protagonists attend a lecture on the subject.
10. Actually directed by Daniel Teruggi, the GRM became part of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) in 1974.
11. Musique Acousmatique: according to the different periods, places and schools, this music has also been known as musique concrète, musique experimentale, electronic music, electroacoustic music, Tonbandmusik, Elektronische Musik (Germany), Tape music (USA).
12. With Itinéraire ensemble and Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail…
13. Le Traité des Objets musicaux is a very important work, presenting the theory underlying Schaeffer's research with his team. It is published by Seuil (1966, Paris).
Translation Mary Pardoe
Art Acousmatique - Texte français
Arte Acusmatica - Testo italiano
Acousmatic Art - Japanese text