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Musique Concrete (Schaeffer)


Pierre Schaeffer - Etude aux chemins de fer (1948)
Click here to listen!

Etude aux chemins de fer

What am I listening to?
Trains! Lots of recordings of trains. "Étude aux chemins de fer" translated to English means "Study at the railways"
Nerd Stuff
Musique Concrete is music created by formulating recorded and synthesized sounds into some reproducible structure. Pierre Schaeffer was one of the first composers to experiment with this form of music in 1942 in France. Over the following years Schaeffer formulated methods for recording and modifying tape created by the relatively new portable tape recorder. After recording, Schaeffer would physically cut up and rearrange the tape. To loop sounds he would make a copy of the tape and attach them end to beginning. To this day, we visualize video and sound editing in much the same way. Take Garage Band for instance. Those boxes are very similar to how tape was laid out and layered. However, in Garage Band it takes two key presses to copy and paste a sound. Schaeffer spent hours and hours painstakingly agonizing over incredibly precise physical cuts and pastes. View this piece as a work that took months of dedicated work to compose, even if anyone with a laptop could do the same thing in a hour today. 
What makes this music
Every time I have taken a composition class, the first lecture/lesson begins with the question "What is composing." From all the given answers, I have formulated some Frankenstein of my own. I define a composed music as sound organized in a reproducible manner. The reproducible part of that definition is the most revealing in my eyes. Going to a train station and listening to the trains going by is certainly something that you could call music, but you have to have some way to reproduce it. This could be as simple as finding the train schedule. Knowing when the trains are coming allows you to compose a reproducible piece with the trains as the performers. Schaeffer is far ahead of this on-the-edge example of music. He recorded sounds, took them, and created something even more complex from them.
Rhythm
Schaeffer uses a theme in his piece. This theme is ever-present in what most people think of when they hear the word music. The trains, because of how they run on the tracks, create a distinct rhythm. Lets say we want to describe how a train sounds to someone. You might say something like CHUGGA chugga CHUGGA chugga CHOO CHOOOOOOO. I am willing to bet that what you just thought in your mind or read out loud while looking at the CHUGGA chugga had a distinct rhythm. It is a powerful tool that is fully ingrained in our human nature. To me, the rhythm is what makes this piece effective and engaging.

Extra
Gotta be completely honest... this isn't my favorite piece by Schaeffer. I thought, however, that it is the best example for explaining the style of Music Concrete. If you want more, and more in depth, listen to Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry: Orphée 53 (1953). Enjoy!

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