Empreintes DIGITALes & modern electroacoustics

[Dan Warburton]

Was is Schaeffer who coined the term "acousmatic"? I thought it was François Bayle (so did Michel Chion http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magaz ... chion.html ) - could you point me to a reference otherwise, Joe? Many thanks

[mudd]

going from wikipedia, the reference would be Schaeffer, P. (1966) "Traité des objets musicaux", Le Seuil, Paris.

m

[Dan Warburton]

Right, with you there, but did he start using it himself to describe the music he and his colleagues were making, or did he stick with "musique concrète"? It's like "minimalism" - the word was around a long time before Michael Nyman started using it in his early 70s articles. (Gah, I suppose someone's going to tell me now that someone coined that term before he did!)

[mudd]

can't help you there.

didn't the term 'minimalism' show up in visual art before it was applied to music?

eh, enough sidetrack.

m

[Dan Warburton]

can't help you there.

didn't the term 'minimalism' show up in visual art before it was applied to music?

Yes.

eh, enough sidetrack.

OK chief. In any case, I'm with Chion on "acousmatic" - sounds awful. Much prefer "musique concrète".
Did anyone in this thread mention Ned Bouhalassa? Very fond of his stuff.

[fearandpanic]

Funny, I've always found John Young to be slightly dry. Like he has a very clear point he wants to make and makes it carefully, but never really moves beyond that to thrill or excite. Considerate is a good word for his music but IMO also slightly negatively.

I was curious about John Young after the references to him here, and having heard his ED disc La limite du bruit (which covers pieces from about 1995-2002) I have to say it's one of the best things I've heard on the label. I can understand you calling it dry, I suppose, it is fairly severe and rigorous. But its partly recognisable sounds (like breath and hands rubbing) being analytically dissected into rhythmic fabrics does sound thrilling and exciting to me. At points what it reminded me of most was Xenakis's early electronic pieces with minimal filtering to emphasise the rhythmical world of natural phenomena. Xenakis used some burning charcoal; Young uses wind and rain. Haven't really spent enough time with other pieces yet, but I'm very impressed by "Pythagoras’s Curtain" (2001) and "Inner" (1995) so far. In both cases he manages to drag music out of some very restrictive material, almost through sheer insistence.

[visa tapani]

Right, with you there, but did he start using it himself to describe the music he and his colleagues were making, or did he stick with "musique concrète"?

Okay, a long quote from Chion's Guide des Objets Sonores maybe clarifies the issue:

1. ACOUSMATIC
1) Acousmatic: a rare word, derived from the Greek, and defined in the dictionary as:
adjective, indicating a noise which is heard without the causes from which it originates being
seen.
The word was taken up again by Pierre Schaeffer and Jérôme Peignot to describe an
experience which is very common today but whose consequences are more or less
unrecognised, consisting of hearing sounds with no visible cause on the radio, records,
telephone, tape recorder etc..
Acousmatic listening is the opposite of direct listening, which is the “natural”
situation where sound sources are present and visible.
The acousmatic situation changes the way we hear. By isolating the sound from the
“audiovisual complex” to which it initially belonged, it creates favourable conditions for
reduced listening which concentrates on the sound for its own sake, as sound object,
independently of its causes or its meaning (although reduced listening can also take place, but
with greater difficulty, in a direct listening situation).
2) Effects of the acousmatic situation: the acousmatic situation alters the conditions of
listening, with certain characteristic effects. Some of these are:
a) The help provided by sight to identify the sound sources is absent. “We discover
much of what we thought we were hearing was in reality only seen and explained by the
context”(93)
[19] b) Sight and hearing are dissociated, encouraging listening to sound forms for
themselves (and hence, to the sound object).
Indeed, if curiosity about causes remains in acousmatic listening (and it can even be
aroused by the situation), the repetition of the recorded signal can perhaps “exhaust” this
curiosity and little by little impose “the sound object as a perception worthy of being listened
to for itself” (94), revealing all its richness to us.
c) By repeated listening to the same recorded sound fragment, the emphasis is placed
on variations of listening. These variations do not arise from a “blurring” of perception, but
from “specific moments of illumination, directions which are always precise and always
reveal a new aspect of the object, towards which our attention is deliberately or
unconsciously drawn” (94)
3) The acousmatic experience: the rare word “acousmatic” also described in Greek a
sect of the disciples of Pythagoras who were said to follow a form of teaching where the
Master spoke to them hidden behind a screen. This was done in order to distract their visual
attention from his physical appearance.
P.S. emphasises the initiatory significance of the acousmatic experience which
enables the listener to become aware of his perceptual activity as well as of the sound object.
It was the acousmatic nature of sound on the radio which, in 1948, led him to develop
a self-contained “noise music” which he was to call musique concrète. This is why he came to
extend the meaning of the term “acousmatic” and speak of the “acousmatic experience” to
describe a new way of hearing: “giving oneself over entirely and exclusively to listening” in
order to discover the path from the “sonorous” to the “musical”. The tape recorder in this
research plays the initiatory role of “the screen of Pythagoras”, by creating not only new
phenomena to be studied (by manipulations in the studio), but also and above all “new
conditions for observation” (98).

So Schaeffer coined the term but he used it as 1.) acousmatic listening and 2.) acousmatic listening situation, not as "acousmatic music". Bayle coined this use as pointed out by Chion in that interview. Interestingly (or not), Schaeffer later stopped using the term musique concrète himself:

If some of the first concrete works (amongst them the Symphonie pour un homme seul,
1949-50, composed with Pierre Henry) played a great deal on the “double meaning” of
concrete sounds and the “reference to the exterior world”, P.S. quickly distanced himself from
this youthful expressionism, and his resumption of the Groupe de Musique concrète in 1957
after an absence of 4 years coincided with a rejection of the expression “Musique concrète” as
too ambiguous, and his preference for the term “experimental music”.

The problem I have with the term musique conréte is that it recalls in my mind the old dichotomy between elektronische musik and musique conréte. Perhaps simply electroacoustic music is the least loaded term.

[fearandpanic]

The academic terminological disputes are not that appropriate here, really. Some of it is fine, but it shouldn't take over the topic as it already threatened to do on the previous page. I suppose it's indicative of the theoretical and academic circles a lot of this music moves in and that puts a lot of people off, and that's all the more reason not to engage in it here. Discussion of the terms should only be in connection with specific music, which is what I intended the thread for. I know Jez is the one who opened the can of worms here, not you, Dan or Joe Grimm.

[visa tapani]

Yeah I agree, enough said about that issue.

Anyway, speaking of Schaeffer, there's a new book out on him. It's part of the Portraits polychromes series, which is a compilation of books focusing on analysis of electroacoustic music. However, this is the first installment that's available in English - maybe now there's hope that the other parts will be translated as well. The series incudes books on Bayle, Parmegiani, Chion, Ferrari and Dhomont for instance, so I'm sure there's interesting stuff in there for those that read French.

There's also a Portraits Ploychromes web site which I can recommend to those that don't read French as well. Among other content, it has listening transcriptions of varying quality from lots of different pieces. For example, here's one on Schaeffer's Etude aux objets by Denis Dufour.

Did anyone in this thread mention Ned Bouhalassa? Very fond of his stuff.

Any recommendations for some good starting points?

[Dan Warburton]

Aerosol, if it's still available.

http://www.electrocd.com/fr/cat/imed_9840/

review here (scroll down)

http://www.vitalweekly.net/160.html

[Joda]

I enjoy what I've heard from Ned Bouhalassa, but since he's mentioned in the same review I'll add that Darren Copeland is the artist who I've enjoyed the most on the Empreintes DIGITALes label.

[Bill Barton]

Thanks for this thread...

Although this music is outside my usual listening areas I do have Natasha Barrett's Isostasie and enjoy it very much. The often delicate, impressionistic soundscapes are quite evocative (at least for me) of what I imagine living in the Scandinavian countries must be like.

At some point I might very well explore more of the catalog.

[fearandpanic]

Also, let us not forget that Dufour's label MOTUS is also a leading publisher of new acousmatic work

In looking for some more things as good as Dufour's disc, I heard something else on Motus, Alexandre Yterce's Guerres (2006). He is quite obscure already and the CDs aren't easy to find, so maybe this isn't of much consequence. But it sucks. Manages to be completely uninteresting for nearly 70 minutes, which is some achievement.

[jcg]

Now listening to Mathew Adkins' [60]Project (ED, 2009). Some sort of tribute to Schaeffer/celebration of musique concrète's 60th anniversary and a long dense piece that is maybe more interesting conceptually than the result itself. Hard to really tell at this point as there are so many things to pay attention to in this work. Will try to give my impressions after a few listens...

Meanwhile, the realization behind this disc is quite stunning with a colossal mix of sound materials contributed by no less than 66 artists including some living musique concrète godfathers (Francis Dhomont, François Bayle), electronica superstars (Fennesz, Scanner), ambient soundscapers (Steve Roden, Lawrence English), Improvisers (Rhodri Davies) different kinds of turntablists (eRikm, Janek Schaeffer), circuit benders (Gert-Jan Prins), noise makers (Dror Feiler), guys who manage to be everywhere (David Toop), some of the Empreintes Digitales regulars (Gilles Gobeil, Jonty Harrison, John Young...) and a bunch of people unknown to me.

If you're curious, here's what Mathew Adkins has to say about this project:

From the outset, the involvement and the contribution of sound materials by over 60 of the world’s leading electronic composers and sound artists were essential. During the early months of 2008 a steady stream of emails went back and forth across the globe as more and more sound artists, composers, laptop improvisors, and experimental turntablists accepted my invitation to take part and contribute. The response was overwhelming.

The project had two distinct pre-compositional stages. Each of the participants was initially asked to contribute one sound object or a short improvisation with a sound object. Nothing was prescribed as I wanted everyone to respond to the concept of the project in their own way. Each of these sounds was uploaded to an ftp site which acted as a repository for all of the material.

For the second stage, I asked all the participants to create a variety of sound treatments based on any of the initial material. This second stage produced some wonderful and unexpected sound fragments. Some decided to focus on a small number of sounds and develop short or in some cases extended phrases, whilst others set out to utilize all of the material in a variety of imaginative means. These second stage processed sounds were again uploaded to the ftp site.

In July of 2008, I took all the sound material from both stage one and two to the Ina-GRM studio in Paris where the final work, [60]Project, was assembled. I set myself similar limits that Francis Dhomont had established with his Frankenstein Symphony (1997) — a work made up of layering and mixing fragments of works by multiple composers.

[maRi]

Léone by Philippe Mion is the only acousmatic opera I'm aware of, and it's spectacular. Bursts, bubbles, thuds, slams, shrieks and scraping punctuate the vocal rise and fall, and in turn the spinning and creeping vocals cut through the electronic haze. The main themes of the libretto by Philippe Minyana are madness, shame and murder, and they're manifested in the fragile detail, sharp transitions, dizzying pace and heavy atmosphere of the music.