Mayhem Concrete, Pt. 2

Monday Mayhem 26 6AM-10AM
Hosted by Roland Blunt

In the late 1940's, French composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer coined the term "musique concrete" to describe sound manipulation experiments that were designed "to point out an opposition with the way musical work usually goes. Instead of notating musical ideas on paper?and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing". In this two part special, I will present some of the earliest works by composers (Pierre Henry, Edgard Verese, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, Luc Ferrari, Michel Chion, Hugh Le Caine, Francis Dhomont, Todd Dockstader, Robert Normandau, Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Alvin Lucier, Milton Babbit, Francois Bayle, and many others) that were inspired by Scheffer's electroacoustic techniques, and achieved through the development of such concepts and devices as shellac record players/recorders?microphone arrays?magnetic tape recorders?mechanical reverb?high/low pass filters?the "phonogene"?the "morphophone"?the mixing desk?.and the "Acousmonium".