Pierre Schaeffer

L'Œuvre Musicale

Genre: ELECTRONIC

Deluxe 3CD Set

Boomkat Product Review:

The historic overview of concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer is an eerie, innovative masterclass in groundbreaking techniques that would herald the artform of sampling, editing, and foreshadow the creation of whole new worlds of sound-within-sound that came to define experimental music in the 2nd half of the C.20th and beyond.

Sounding as otherworldly now as it surely did then, back in the post WWII days of the late 1940s and thru the ‘70s, the work collected on ‘L’Œuvre Musicale’ is a nonpareil touchstone for modern experimental music. Utilising the new technology of tape recording, Schaeffer, along with close spar Pierre Henry, would draw on technical background as part of the French resistance during WWII, and subsequently as engineer for French television and radio, to set about dissecting and re-organising pre-recorded sounds at their co-founded institute, Groupe de Recherché de Musique Concrète (GRMC) by the end of the 1940s. This studio formed the basis for what is now known as INA GRM, who first issued this milestone set in 1990, and have kept it in print since, acting as a go-to handbook (along with his text ‘A la recherché d’une musique concrète’) for any musician seeking to go beyond musical composition’s putative boundaries.

The 48 pieces are all brief in length due to the laborious method of making musique concrète prior the advent of real-time computer editing processes - which arguably lasted until the late ‘80s, when hip hop and electro producers were still using basically the same methods of razor blade spliced tape edits as developed by Schaeffer, albeit much funkier. In chronologic order they range from one of his earliest in 1948’s ‘Étude Aux Chemin De Fer’, which reorganised the sounds of train terminal to revel in its cacophonous, dynamic play of attack and atonalities, thru a longform pinnacle of his creativity in the 41’ concrète opera ‘Orphée 53, Suite De Concert’ (1953-2010), made in collaboration with Pierre Henry and technician Bernadette Mangin, to the brilliant schisms of rapid piano arpeggios and clattering foley on ‘Bilude’ (1979), which again bridges the whistles and dynamic of his early train study with radical elements of classical music.

Worlds within worlds of sound live on in between those timestamps, encompassing prototypes for styles that have delineated into what are now regarded as noise music to techno, horror film soundtracks and sampledelia, and so many subsets between. They exist on their own terms as deeply unusual projections of the an imagination and art informed by the horrors of war and the way it spurred the march of technology during a pivotal period of humanity, altering perceptions of the matter of music and its meaning for ever.

Deluxe 3CD Set (9)

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2024 edition. Box set with 3 x CD housed in individual cardsleeves. Includes a 116 page booklet in French and English with biographical notes, essays and program notes for each work, and a 52 page booklet with photographs.

Play All Deluxe 3CD Set (9)