Concrete Sound to French Touch

In 1948 a radio engineer in Paris recorded the sound of trains and cut the tape into pieces. Fifty years later, two young Parisians in robot helmets sold millions of records made with synthesisers and samplers. The two events look unrelated, but they sit on one line: a French habit of treating the studio and the machine as musical instruments, supported by state institutions that paid for the experiments. This chapter follows that line from the first experiments in recorded sound through the research institute of Pierre Boulez to the French Touch of the 1990s. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Musique Concrète

Pierre Schaeffer (1910 to 1995) was an engineer at French national radio who, in the late 1940s, began to compose with recorded sounds rather than written notes (check the dates). He recorded everyday noises, such as trains, and changed them by cutting, looping, slowing and reversing the tape. He called the result musique concrète, "concrete music", because the composer works directly with sound as material and not with abstract notation. His early studies were first broadcast in 1948 (check). With the composer Pierre Henry he made the Symphonie pour un homme seul in about 1950 (check). Schaeffer's studio grew into the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, an institution still active today (check the dates).

Boulez and IRCAM

Pierre Boulez (1925 to 2016) was a composer and conductor and one of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde (check the dates). In the 1970s he led the creation of IRCAM, the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music, in Paris, attached to the Centre Pompidou and opened in the late 1970s (check). IRCAM brought composers together with scientists and engineers to study sound and develop computer tools for music. Its work has been admired and criticised in roughly equal measure: admired for its technical advances, criticised by some for producing music that audiences found difficult. Many of the software tools developed there have since been widely used.

Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre studied with Schaeffer's group early in his career (check) and became one of the first musicians to take electronic music to a very large public. His album Oxygène (1976, check) sold in great numbers around the world, and he later staged enormous open-air concerts with lights and projections, starting with a free concert in Paris in 1979 (check the date and the numbers). His music is sometimes dismissed by critics and loved by audiences, which is a recurring pattern in this chapter.

The French Touch

In the 1990s a number of French dance and pop acts reached international audiences, and critics began to call the trend the "French Touch" (check the origin of the term). It was not one sound. It combined the filtered, disco-influenced style often called French house, dreamy electronic pop and a taste for humour and style. The best-known names are listed here.

Exercises

Next chapter: Hip-Hop, Raï & the Francophone World, which covers rap, North African music and African influences on French popular music.