Friday, July 15, 2005
Run that by me again
I read a great series of articles on Last Days -- the new Gus Van Sant film inspired by Kurt Cobain -- in The Village Voice yesterday.
Insightful. But three of the six "Kurtain Call" articles threw out the term musique concrète like we should all know what it meant. So I looked it up. Invented by Pierre Shaeffer in the '40s, this type of music is composed out of recordings of natural sounds -- as in those naturally occuring in the environement including man made industrial noises, etc. His first such work, Etude aux chemans de fer or Concert for Locomotives layered various sounds generated by steam locomotives. One later work was titled Étude aux casseroles or Study with Baking Pans.
Per Wikipedia:
"Musique concrète is the name given to a class of electronic music produced from editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds. It is the opposite of traditional composing (known to some as Musique Abstraite, literally, Abstract Music) as the sounds are recorded first then built into a tune as opposed to a tune being written then given to players to turn into sound. "
Oh. OK.
