Talk:Musique concrète

message: I would be going to change various statements such as in the section:
:Recently, the growing popularity in all forms of electronica has led to a re-birth of Musique concrète. Artists such as Squarepusher, Christian Fennesz, Francisco Lopez, Ernesto Rodrigues and Scanner use many Concrète techniques in their music while often being classified under more common electronica genres such as IDM or downtempo. Music magazines such as The Wire regularly feature articles and reviews of musique concrète.
becouse this is very unbalanced, the author seems to simply ignore the fact that artists such as Brian Wilson-Beach Boys, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Cluster, Can and  Einstürzende Neubauten made an extensive and prominent use of musique concrete techniques both as additional effects added to more "usual" songs and as pure experimental or avant-garde artistic form in a number of works, with regard to Pink Floyd, for example, here only "Bike" is mentioned. Dealing with more recent artists is appropriate only after a huge description of the works of oldest musicians.--Doktor Who 02:41, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I regret I do not have time for now, I am very busy with other stuff, it would be nice if someone would consider my suggestion and try to fix the article. For any question, if I can, I will be happy to reply here or at my talk page.--Doktor Who 07:44, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Rick Wright was more of a genius than people give him credit for. Before it was guitar driven, Pink Floyd relied heavily on the keys he played and later on he was Instrumental in creating the sounds that you are most familiar with on Darkside of the Moon in 1972 using sequencing techniques and samples. The guy was good on piano, anything with keys and programming the earlier synths and embracing technological advances in that world and used them incredibly well!!! R.I.P 70.30.32.127 (talk) 18:34, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Subjective statements

message: Should Raymond Scott be included here? I'm not a music historian but I enjoy Raymond Scott's work and know he used to market his company, Manhattan Research Inc, as a facility for composing electronic music and musique concrète. Discordian 15:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Raymond Scott 

message: My writing skills are not up to par at the moment, but I feel that there is a lot more that can be said about this subject.  Personally, I feel that Musique Concrète is one of the most overlooked movements in the history of western music.  I agree with the article's assumption that many modern electronic artists have been influenced in one way or another by this movement, and also that other "classic rock" artists such as Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Can, and even more diverse artists such as Salvador Dali, John Cage, and even, dare I say it, the very concept of music video itself, owe their very existence to these pioneers.  In short, I'm happy this article exists, but it could be much more informative. 69.92.205.158 13:23, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Short article.

message: Mike Keneally (http://www.keneally.com/poodlebites.html#notes) says that '118---"Apostolic Vlorch Injector" should be "Blorch"'.
Zappa himself, in an interview in February 1987 for 'Music Technology' magazine, said, "Oh, 'The Chrome-plated Megaphone of Destiny'? The percussive-type noises, the thing that sounds like little squirts and explosions, was done by using a box that we built at a studio called the Apostolic Vlorch Injector." 
Mike seems to think he knows more about Zappa than Zappa himself did. Me, I go with 'the horse's mouth'. Dwoogie (talk) 16:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Zappa's 'instrument'

message: This section is written in such a way that it appears to be NPOV, though I don't know much about musique concrète.  If it's actually some sort of consensus opinion, it should have citations.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by JustinBlank (talk • contribs) 06:42, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Controvery

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thread_title: Image copyright problem with File:L430xH465 jpg Schaeffer big-2eb70.jpg

message: Should the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and/or the Mellotron be mentioned in the article? They seem relevant to me, but I'll cheerfully admit that I'm no expert on the subject. Quickos (talk) 23:30, 9 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Mellotron

message: Battier 1997 is cited 3 times in the article, but I could not find any books or articles written by Battier in 1997, could someone either add a reference to this or at least verify it.--Holyct (talk) 11:39, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: thanks, corrected, should have been 2007. --Semitransgenic (talk) 12:17, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Battier 1997

message: While it is undoubtedly true that old disc record players of the 1940s could (and did) play commercial 78rpm discs pressed in shellac, that doesn't mean that (a) only shellac discs were in use or (more importantly) that (b) it was possible to record onto shellac directly -- apart from anything else it is of course a very hard and brittle resin.  Radio station recording work of this early period would have included the use of disc-recording machines that cut a groove into some kind of lacquer-coated disc, very much as more modern LP mastering was performed, for subsequent playback with a lightweight pickup.  
I suggest that all mentions of shellac be removed (the material is anyway irrelevant in this article): it might be sufficient simply to substitute the word 'disc'.
Peteradamson (talk) 13:43, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent point. It may be that one or another of the sources mistakenly used the word "shellac", but since there are no direct quotations involved, I have made the appropriate changes.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:01, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I just spotted this change now and have reverted. The source used for this content states shellac. Other sources also refer to shellac. Recordings made "through a microphone were engraved on shellac records, covered in wax." The shellac disc also had a metal base beneath it. For the purposes of historical accuracy shellac is preferable here, it makes it clear that this was prior to the introduction of vinyl.  Semitransgenic talk. 23:48, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If that is what the sources say, then your reversion of my edit is perfectly correct. I am old enough to remember shellac (pressed) disks, but not old enough ever to have made disk recordings in the described medium.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 01:06, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I have just seen the above and find it rather bemusing.  The materials generally available for cutting disc-recordings have been: (1900-) solid wax (too soft to play back and suitable only for onward plating); (ca.1930) cellulose acetate on a suitable substrate -- hence the generic term 'acetate' -- (1934-) nitrocellulose lacquer on an aluminum (or sometimes glass) plate; these last two are strong enough to withstand lightweight pickups for instant playback, and were what was used for radio transcriptions etc before the use of magnetic tape.  The lacquer cuts also eventually replaced solid wax for mastering discs to be plated and manufactured as pressings.  Shellac was used for pressings, later replaced by vinyl (which incidentally was in occasional use for pressings years before the LP era).  Thus it appears that printed sources are no more reliable than online sources: for an instant playback disc, the very idea of engraving on wax (too soft) covering a shellac base (unnecessary, brittle and expensive) with a metal backing is simply a muddle of the various different methods.  I suppose we should be grateful that there's no mention of etching the metal (as used pre-1900 for instant playback discs).  I would repeat that there's no point in including the term 'shellac' as it is irrelevant to the materials or technique actually used for such instant playback recordings; if the material used is somehow important (which it is probably not in this article) then it should be referred to as lacquer.  I have heard back from an expert in the history of sound recording who comments that 'there is a current tendency to use "vinyl" when meaning a shellac record and "shellac" when meaning a direct cut.'  So, as with 'acetate' for 'lacquer' I suppose that we may yet have to just put up with the spread of such un-historical and inaccurate usages... For further information see the wikipedia entry for [Acetate disc]. Peteradamson (talk) 15:51, 14 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: 'shellac' players and recorders

message: (And in this case by "modern" I don't mean the nineteen fifties.)
This article seems to end where it begins, in France in the middle of the last century.  Surely there is some way to note the outgrowths of musique concrete that have come later, starting with the obvious Revolution 9, but on to many artists of the current era.  Outfits such as Negativland, and their ilk, perhaps.  Also it either isn't mentioned, or I missed it, but surely there should some note of the Theater of the Absurd? I currently hear two shows each week on WUNH FM which can only be described as musique concrete ("collage music"), so the genre is certainly still alive. Huw Powell (talk) 20:55, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps this issue stems from the fact that, after the mid-1950s, musique concrète became conceptually merged with the idea of "electronic music". For a few years at the beginning of the 1950s, these were sharply contrasted categories with competing centres in Paris and Cologne. This article's lede already softens this distinction by admitting electronically generated sounds to the definition if musique concrète, but time was when this was precisely the difference (not for Schaeffer and Henri, perhaps, but for the general public, exposed to the full blast of the polemics). The "obvious start" of the continuation (or, as I have characterized it, merger) is not Revolution 9 in 1968, but with one of the main influences on that Beatles track, Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge from twelve years earlier. It was at that point that Stockhausen, the leading light of pure "electronic music", threw in the towel and admitted that generating every sound electronically was not only very laborious, but wasn't producing results with sufficient internal animation, and so he returned to some of the concrète techniques he had learned in Paris from Schaeffer. Stockhausen's influence being what it was, there weren't many composers working in Europe who continued to hold to the idea of restricting themselves to what could be coaxed from a sine-wave generator and the like. Perhaps the situation was a little different in America, where the Columbia-Princeton Center and other institutions continued for a while to hold themselves aloof from the corruption of sounds recorded from the real world, and the invention of the analog synthesizer injected new life into the idea of sound-synthesis on a more affordable scale, but even there the mixture of techniques soon reached the point where there was no longer any meaningful difference. The only thing left to do was toss a coin and decide whether to call the combined result "musique concrète" or "electronic music", and the latter won the toss. (It isn't quite so simple as that, of course, but this is roughly what happened.)—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:20, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

text: This could get very messy. I presume the four-year difference to which you refer means 1944 vs 1948. The latter is generally cited as the year in which Schaeffer coined the term "musique concrète".As far as I am aware, El-Dabh never did use the expression to describe his own work—at least, not until long after 1948. If on the other hand you are demanding precedence for the manipulation of prerecorded sounds, then it can be established that Schaeffer began doing this around 1941, when he co-founded the Club d'Essai (according to the New Grove biographical article by Francis Dhomont). Once again there is a "however": experiments with manipulation of recorded sound do not necessarily result in "compositions", and Schaeffer's catalogue of works does not acknowledge any titles before 1948. Yet a further "however": there are examples from the 1930s of experimental sound films in which the audio materials were manipulated in a manner very similar to musique concrète. Some of these can even be plausibly regarded as musical compositions. The issues are complex, so it will not only be necessary to find reliable sources, but also to decide what actually distinguishes musique concrète from other types of sound-technology products.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:36, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

text: OK, messy it is. Assuming that the tape medium itself is not an issue, the experimental "acoustic film" (without pictures) Wochenende (1930) by Walter Ruttmann is often cited as an early example of sound composition. Some of the work from the 1930s by Oskar Fischinger (who for a time was an assistant to Ruttmann) may also qualify. Ruttmann used the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film technology, first patented in 1919 but not commercially available until the mid-1920s, so it is possible that there are still earlier examples. On the other hand, if we are to insist on tape recording as a necessary criterion, at the time Schaeffer coined the expression musique concrète, he was not yet himself working with tape technology, but rather with discs.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:56, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The modern era 

message: According to other articles Halim predated Schaeffer by 4 years. I have adjusted the article accordingly - it would be good to settle this matter properly with well researched references though.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.230.183 (talk) 10:02, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: This could get very messy. I presume the four-year difference to which you refer means 1944 vs 1948. The latter is generally cited as the year in which Schaeffer coined the term "musique concrète".As far as I am aware, El-Dabh never did use the expression to describe his own work—at least, not until long after 1948. If on the other hand you are demanding precedence for the manipulation of prerecorded sounds, then it can be established that Schaeffer began doing this around 1941, when he co-founded the Club d'Essai (according to the New Grove biographical article by Francis Dhomont). Once again there is a "however": experiments with manipulation of recorded sound do not necessarily result in "compositions", and Schaeffer's catalogue of works does not acknowledge any titles before 1948. Yet a further "however": there are examples from the 1930s of experimental sound films in which the audio materials were manipulated in a manner very similar to musique concrète. Some of these can even be plausibly regarded as musical compositions. The issues are complex, so it will not only be necessary to find reliable sources, but also to decide what actually distinguishes musique concrète from other types of sound-technology products.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:36, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

text: OK, messy it is. Assuming that the tape medium itself is not an issue, the experimental "acoustic film" (without pictures) Wochenende (1930) by Walter Ruttmann is often cited as an early example of sound composition. Some of the work from the 1930s by Oskar Fischinger (who for a time was an assistant to Ruttmann) may also qualify. Ruttmann used the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film technology, first patented in 1919 but not commercially available until the mid-1920s, so it is possible that there are still earlier examples. On the other hand, if we are to insist on tape recording as a necessary criterion, at the time Schaeffer coined the expression musique concrète, he was not yet himself working with tape technology, but rather with discs.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 16:56, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Halim El-Dabh's tape music

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thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: It is probably me misreading (or maybe my lack of knowledge regarding a possible collaboration on the above piece), but am I wrong in understanding that the comment in the main article seems to suggest La rivière endormie (1954) was composed by Honnegar, when it was of course Darius Milhaud:
"In 1954 Varèse and Honegger visited [Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète] to work on the tape parts of Déserts and La rivière endormie (Palombini 1999).
Arthur Honneger died in 55 so I suppose he may have been involved somehow but I can find nothing to support this. 
It could be my misunderstanding the grammar of the above sentence as well. Sorry to waste your time if I have!
--Invulgo (talk) 15:37, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks like you are correct, but the passage in question is actually a quotation from Palombini. I have placed quotation marks around the directly quoted material. Something needs to be done about the misattribution, which should be to Milhaud's Etude poétique, Op. 333, which uses that text by Claude Roy. It would be a fantastic coincidence, indeed, if Honegger had set the same text in the same year, and used the facilities of the GRM to produce it, not to mention the fact of his poor health at the time.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 17:04, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  La rivière endormie 

message: Please explain (whoever it was) why my section of a fictional "psyops" use of CM was deleted? I was not insulting CM as "torture", merely stating factually its use in a fictional context (which presumably was based on good evidence, judging from the general historicity of the TV show in question). I imagine an afficionado of CM was insulted somehow, like perhaps a Metallica fan would be when told that their music has been used in such circumstances.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 143.159.200.25 (talk) 15:03, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: thanks for your interest in editing Wikipedia, please read WP:RS before adding content, we need citations for such additions, probably best also to discuss why you think this mention is notable on the talk page. Acousmana (talk) 16:25, 16 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  My new section deleted 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: Consensus dictates that the proposal is not COMMONNAME. Not Moved (non-admin closure) >>> Extorc.talk 20:12, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Musique concrète →  – Move from non-English name to English name; see also WP:COMMONNAME. Mast303 (talk) 20:06, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 7 January 2023