Friday 8 February 2008

Musique Concrete and a Brief History of Sampling

In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer composed 'Etude aux chemans de fer', a piece that is widely credited as being the first 'Musique Concrete' composition. Schaeffer used tape manipulation as a method of creating sound collages. His technique involved recording individual sounds on to seperate pieces of tape , which he then cut into even smaller pieces, mixed up and spliced together, sometimes these were interspersed with pieces of blank tape to unusual create rhythmic patterns. He then would occasionally speed up, slow down and add reverb to the tape for added effect. Like the dance and Hip-Hop Dj's that came after him Pierre Schaeffer was interested in expanding the boundaries of music beyond instrumental playing and creating performances that were not dependent on human performers. Unsurprisingly Schaeffer was not himself a musician. Several prominent composers based a great amount of their early work around Schaeffer's ideas most famously Stockhousen and Reich (who became one of the first to merge tape loops and live performance in his early 'Phase compositions').

However it wasn't until the late 1960's and the introduction of avant-garde and experimental elements into popular music, that the concept of Concrete became popular. Most notibly Concrete was used frequently in later Beatles recordings such as Tomorrow Never Knows and Revolution 9.

Modern sampling uses much the same techniques as Musique Concrete, albeit with far more sophisticated digital techniques. The emphasis on modern sampling is no longer just non-musical sounds (although even Schaeffer and Stockhausen experimented with altering the sound of traditional instruments). Certainly modern sampling is used to far greater melodic effect than its avant-garde counter-part.

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