Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987) | Hacker News Reader

Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987)

paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu

83 pointsivjw11 comments

In which Pierre Schaeffer admits that Musique Concrete is not music, and that he has never been a real musician. Ouch… I wonder if he knows there are internet music genres that have not only kept the ideas of Musique Concrete alive, but made them culturally relevant and musically valuable in a way that he and other 20th century “serious” musical thinkers never managed to. Some of the more obscure vaporwave subgenres are basically turntable pieces.

You don't have to look as far as obscure internet music genres, though. Musique Concrete set the very basis for sound design and the art of sampling! Today, artists manipulate recorded sounds in software, instead of splicing magnetic tapes, but the fundamental principles are still the same. Most people are not aware to which extend modern music has been (indirectly) shaped by experimental electronic music composers of the 1950s. Its influence can not be overstated.

BTW, there are quite a few composers that have continued the French tradition of Musique Concrete will into the 21st century, most notably Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle.

it was absolutely music, it just wasn't very good.

I don't care one iota for trying to demarcate what is and what isn't music - IMHO just a really stupid thing to get hung up about. But the point about abstraction ("The whole problem of the sound-work [...]") in both visual and aural terms I found really interesting.

Regarding the conclusion, some of the best works have been disowned by their creators at some point, so not to worry there.

PS a nice sort of anthropological/sociological inside view of the IRCAM at some specific time can be read in "Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde" by Georgina Born.

By the way, isn't it quite silly to say that electronic music " emerged in Cologne in 1950 at the NWDR"? As if we wouldn't have electronic music from 1000 different places if it weren't for them...

This is the first time I’ve heard of him, so I looked him up on YouTube. For anyone else who may be interested, here is an example:

https://youtu.be/CTf0yE15zzI

Another one of his notable—and slightly more accessible for the uninitiated—pieces is the composition Symphonie pour un homme seul (with Pierre Henry): https://youtube.com/watch?v=MOYNFu45khQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphonie_pour_un_homme_seul

This reminded me of Herbert's manifesto on how he makes music.

https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?t=3890

Many years ago I was in my apartment and could hear chanting and the like in the distance from an antiwar protest.

Suddenly I heard sirens, yells, and gunshots and thought something horrible had happened.

Turns out I left Scaeffer playing in another room.

Upvote pattern on this is odd. Is someone botting the votes on selected submissions?

Submitter has a karma score of 1 but there are, as of writing this, 37 points on this post and it's only 45 minutes old.

A similar pattern to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348956 which has 39 points after 15 minutes, and karma score of 1 for the submitting user.

Is someone trying to manipulate the rankings? Either upwards by points, or downwards by penalty.

I wondered this too. I think twelve minutes after submission it went from 1 point to 37 points.

Yes, I believe so. It doesn't seem to have been the OP, though. The submission was a fine one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com