Panorama De Musique Concrete/ Various - Panorama de Musique Concrete / Various

Musique Concrète is often confused with electronic music, which originated in Germany and which is concerned with the electronic manufacture of sounds built up from basic tones. Musique Concrète makes use of real everyday sounds which are modified by tape manipulation and electronic treatment. From the late forties, the genres two leading exponents have been the French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. If their compositions seem quaint to today's ears, in 1948, their bizarre, brittle, often beautiful, soundscapes were revolutionary. Schaeffer and Henry began their revolt by recording sounds from the natural world onto phonograph discs, altering them through the primitive means available, and creating an alarming music that they dubbed musique concrète Schaeffer and Henry created audio portraits for the end of the machine age and the beginning of the electronic age that burst with mechanical noises, orchestral hits, trains, and text-sound babble. Doors open and close on indecipherable conversations; engines start, stop and transform into screams and moans; disembodied pianists jam with mouth noise rhythm sections. Now, almost 60 years later, the scratches on the records they used give this vanguard work a charming, antique quality. Their methods may seem archaic by contemporary standards, but the resulting music is powerfully evocative by any standards. Apostles include Bill Nelson ('enviromental guitar'), Brian Eno and Holger Czukay. Out-of-print for decades, a PANORAMA OF MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE is the movement's essential historic document. It comprises all of the classics of the genre, including the Veil of Orpheus, a cantata from Henry's 1953 'opera' Orpheus, Schaeffer's first musique concrete work 'Etude aux Chemins de Fer' (Railroad Study), an assemblage of sounds of train wheels, engines, and whistles, recorded at Batignolle Station and his Study for Whirlygigs, assembled with the aid of a child's whirlygig or spinning top. The original fifty minute edition of the Panorama is augmented by the first masterpiece of musique concrète, Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony for a Man Alone)