What the GRM brought to music: from musique concre`te to ...

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196 Marc Battierwas the idea of the ductile quality of sounds which ledSchaeffer to this rapprochement between his discoveryand the visual arts. Seeing that it was ‘comfortable toestablish links between musique concrète and abstractpainting, that these were tangible and real, for all thatdescriptive music is as illusory as musical painting’. 49 Itwould ever after be possible ‘to compose a concrètemusic that expresses the equivalents of matter and formfrom the standpoint of abstract painting’. 50 This is whyhe wondered whether he should not have chosen theexpressions ‘musique plastique’ or even ‘plastiquesonore’ (plastic sound). 51It was the poet Jérôme Peignot who suggested toPierre Schaeffer an alternative name: ‘acousmaticmusic’. This is what Peignot said:To try and finish in good time with the expression‘musique concrète’, why not use the word ‘acousmatic’,taken from the Greek word akousma, which means ‘theobject of hearing’. In French, the word ‘acousmatique’already describes those disciples of Pythagoras who,during five years, only heard his lessons hidden behind acurtain, without seeing him, and keeping a rigid silence.Pythagoras was of the view that a simple look at his facecould distract his pupils from the teachings that he wasgiving them. If one gives the word an adjectival form,acousmatic, it would indicate a sound that one hearswithout being able to identify its origin. 52This idea was relaunched by François Bayle fifteenyears later, when he applied it to the music of ParisSchool.This term, henceforth used in reference to the musicalwork of the GRM, has to be extended through thenotion of ‘acousmate’, which gave a mystical dimensionto the phenomenon of hidden sound. Sound technologieshave increasingly reinforced the idea of acousmateas a number of great mystics have given witness,supporting our listening to voices without bodies.Voices without bodies: this addresses itself to the ideathat with sound technology one can transport orreproduce sound without its being associated with thematerial that produced it. Historically, the idea of‘acousmate’ is linked to mysticism. Here is what theDictionary of the Académie française says in its fifthedition of 1798: ‘ACOUSMATE. Noun singular. Noiseof human voices or instruments that one imagines onehears in the air.’ 53 In his comments on the Académie’sDictionary, Antoine-Augustin Renouard wroteBiographers have written that St Cecilia, ready for hermartyrdom, heard within herself the songs of angels,49Ibid., p. 114.50Ibid., p. 115.51For a development of this question, see Jean-Yves Bosseur, 2001,‘Musique concrète/peinture abstraite’, in Sylvie Dallet et AnneVeitl (eds) Du sonore au musical, Paris: L’Harmattan, p. 261–77.52Jérôme Peignot. 1960. ‘Musique concrète’, Esprit, no. 280,January, p. 116.53Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, cinquième édition, Paris,1789.from which derives her title as the patron saint of music.If this historical point is correct, St Cecilia was in a stateof acousmate, or of enchantment, for these two words inthe language of learned metaphysicians, are essentiallysynonymous. Both designate a mental condition, whichfew physiologists know how to distinguish. The conditionis rarely morbid, sometimes endemic; but those whosuffer from it, when they are not saints, have oftenimputed it to witchcraft. 54This definition by the Académie can be found copiedexactly in the notebooks of the young Apollinaire. Thepoet gave this title of acousmate to two of his poems.The first is a poem included in the Stavelot anthology,and probably dates from 1899:I sometimes hear the quiet voice of the absent 55In the second poem, also titled ‘Acousmate’, anddating certainly to same period, Apollinaire wrote theselines:Shepherds used to listen to the speech of angels /Shepherds used to understand all they thought theyheard 56This is the role now played by phonography, to makevoices without bodies or sounds without their causalsource heard: writers, researchers and poets all makethis attribution. The gramophone holds onto thephysical inscription. In giving it back, it leaves to thelistener the care of reconstituting the sound image whichtraces the sound of origin. It is in these two tendencies,restitution and recreation, that one finds the sources ofthe creation of phonographic sound.The occasion of the great turning-point that was thecreation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958produced a change in the adjective of qualification:henceforward one would speak of experimental music.It was called musique concrète, electronic music, electroacousticmusic, music for tape, these synonyms whichinitially designated, in principle, the same thing, indicatedat the same time certain tendencies – not aesthetic, for Itake the word tendencies in the sense of the signifierswhich were consecrated to it. In taking as signifier ‘musicfor tape’, one takes on the medium, one emphasises theorigin, on the instrument: the generator, the synthesiser,and so on. In calling that music, musique concrète, Iwould emphasise, according to my way of thinking, onthe approach. In terming it electroacoustic music one mayfind a synthetic term where the concrete sources (that is,the microphones) and the synthetic sources are mingled,as manipulations so often mix them. 5754Antoine-Augustin Renouard. 1807. ‘Remarques morales, philosophiqueset grammaticales’, in Dictionnaire de l’Académiefrançaise, Paris.55Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Acousmate’ (j’entends parfois une voixquiète d’absente), Le guetteur mélancolique, ‘Stavelot’, ca. 1899.56Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Acousmate’ (Paix sur terre aux hommesde bonne volonté), Lacerba no. 9, 8 May 1915.57Pierre Schaeffer, interview with Michel Chion, reproduced inCahiers recherche/musique no. 4, 1977, p. 122.
What the GRM brought to music 1979. CABIN OR STUDIO? THE GESTURE OR THEMACHINE?In their development, the activities of the studio had theeffect of opening up new questions that the composerhad to confront. Schaeffer had well foreseen this whenin the first pages of his diary 58 he wondered whether itwas necessary to choose between the analogue soundwhere one could find the electroacoustic equipment, andthe recording studio, a temple where the microphonecaptured the resonances of the sound-producingobjects. Placing gesture as the primary considerationin compositional practice was the decisive factor for theParis School: in order for the music in process ofgestation to find its sound shape, the composer drawsfrom a repertory of actions, controls, manipulations,synchronisations and so on. He disentangles twodistinct routes: that of the recording studio, and thatof the analogue sound.And it was the latter that was Schaeffer’s choice.There he found himself ‘among the turntables, themixer, the potentiometers’ and he could work ‘throughinterposed items’. By contrast, it was the recordingstudio that above all tempted the young Pierre Henry,who thus created a new route for concrète practice. Forhim, electroacoustic music was an affair of gesture andinvention, and he would remain faithful to thesefeelings. In 1970 he wrote ‘Anyone who practicesElectroacoustic music invents his music, makes it,makes it real, with his fingers.’ 59Schaefer’s preference was hence for the analoguestudio. He imagined a control device made from abattery of turntables which he could steer at will. Theresult of this technique was that the method ofcomposition made itself apparent by a process ofcollage, where the items were superimposed upon eachother or followed one another without much effort ofarticulation or transition. With the maturation ofthought, the question of finding means to combineand articulate objects became a focus of the techniquesof montage. For that, it was possible to evokecomfortably a procedure of electroacoustic writing,where the musician proceeds without graphic inscriptionbut instead with a vocabulary of styles of gesturesand actions. It was thus that the idea was formed,advanced and developed by Guy Reibel, concentratingon sound producing objects and mechanisms. The routeexplored by Reibel consisted of making an inventory ofthe actions comprising the ways of playing, acting upona sound body, whether this was acoustic, according tothe concrète tradition, or electronic, ignoring, in thiscase, the means of recording or adapted interfaces. Thus58See Pierre Schaeffer, 1952, A la recherche d’une musique concrète,Paris: Seuil.59Pierre Henry, ‘Le voyage intérieur’, Les lettres françaises, 8May1970, reprinted in Martine Cadieu, 1992, A l’écoute descompositeurs, Paris: Minerve, p. 220.the idea of the instrument, not in a conventional sense,was apt for the purpose of playing and exploringgestures. Reibel asserted that the approach, undertakensoon after his arrival at the GRM, conformed withSchaefferian thought. 60 In fact, one can see a sort ofstruggle between the composer’s musical idea and thesound-producing object that puts flesh on it – even if thisis an electroacoustic device. An electronic machine, ineffect, is not a tool given to the musician withoutencumbrances. Beginning with its own particular waysof functioning, it has its range of possibilities as well asits limitations, and can easily be resistant to thecomposer’s wishes. The imprint of this compositionalstrategy can be found in the work in six movementsVariations en étoile (1966).The basic question posed to the concrète musician is:ought one to act and understand later-on? To state it inanother way, can the gesture – on the sound body, onthe potentiometer, on the machine – work by itself tomake a musical character appear? Or rather, must it incontrast apply a strategy aimed at unveiling the initialintention through the gesture?10. THE RELAYED GESTURE IIIn order to explore the transformations of recordedobjects more elaborately, Schaeffer thought aboutadapting the tape recorder, with which the studio hadonly just equipped itself. Several machines were thoughtof and produced by Jacques Poullin. There was thekeyboard phonogène, made by the Tolana company,which would allow a magnetic tape in the form of a loopto be played according to a selection from twelveplayback speeds. There was the sliding phonogène,whoseeffectonecanhearinOrphée ou toute la lyre bySchaeffer and Henry (1951). This was furnished with alever which assured a gradual change in the speed,resulting in a sort of spectral and temporal glissando.This was constructed by the Sareg company. Themorphophone would read a loop of magnetic tape withthe aid of ten heads which one could place along theloop and be regulated at will: one might thereby producerepetition according to a chosen rhythm. Finally, theuniversal phonogène, created in 1961, was an adaptationof the principle of the machine developed inGermany by Axel Springer, the Springer Tempophon. 61Its principle allowed one to work independently onspeed variation, resulting in an acceleration or a slowingdown, as well as the transposition of pitch. Itsmanipulation was, however, very delicate.Several works mark the phase that opened with thefounding of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Withthese works a new way of electroacoustic composition60See Guy Reibel, 2000, L’homme musicien. Musique fondamentaleet création musicale, La Calade: Édisud.61One can hear this in the work for tape by Herbert Eimert made inCologne, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1960–62).
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