VA - (2004) Archives GRM 5xCD

 INA-GRM ‎– ina c 1030 

 

This fabulous collection contains some of the foremost heroes of electroacoustics from my artistic maturation process through the decades, as well as some names I didn’t know before – and some I didn’t expect to see in these circumstances!

GRM's first CD, 1984
I recall my amazement and pure listening joy when I received GRM’s first CD – Concert Imaginaire – in 1984. That was also a collection of the crème de la crème of electroacousticians, albeit on a smaller scale. Here we have five CDs of material; some of it historical issues, some a mere account of what’s been going on at the Paris studio since its beginning until today; a magnificent release, with a submitted photo booklet of highly interesting pictures from the decades of Groupe de Recherches Musicales. 

The official introductory text by INA Chairman Emmanuel Hoog explains this endeavor thus:
To mark and celebrate the thirty years of the INA, the GRM has chosen to bring together an exceptional set of five compact discs, illustrating some of its most remarkable musical archives.
These original works, which are often previously unpublished or have been dispersed throughout a host of other publications, are important because of the originality and audacity they testify to in the second half of the 20th century.
Some listeners will be pleased to see that there are a number of illustrious composers here who, in the 1950s, frequented the studio of Pierre Schaeffer, and others will discover numerous musicians whose enthusiasm enabled this innovative musical genre to last throughout the following decades.
Each of the five CDs has information that makes it easy to study each piece. On the back of each CD you find the contents neatly listed, and inside the booklets you can read more details about the works.
Jean-Christophe Thomas has written a preface for this edition, which is distinguished in its five parts: The Visitors of the Concrete Adventure; The Art of Study; Sound in Numbers; The Time of Real Time and The GRM Without Knowing It. Thomas opposes the desire of classification, which, anyhow, would be tough in an area of sound art so wide and disparate as the one we’re traveling through these CDs.
After the initial introduction, printed in all five booklets, Jean-Christophe Thomas goes into each CD individually, giving an overview of the category specified in the different issues, despite his warnings about classification.
In addition to Thomas’ texts, each issue is equipped with further texts on the material, by, for instance François Bayle (CD 1), Régis Renouard Larivière (CD 2), Yann Geslin (CD 3), Daniel Teruggi (CD 4) and Christian Zanési (CD 5).
All the CDs have their own colors, and the release is a feast for the eye as well as for the ear – but perhaps, to the highest degree, for our imagination.
The photo booklet contains 80 pages with 101 black and white photos of the utmost interest to the connoisseur of sound art.
All in all, this is a much needed and perfectly executed issue, necessary for anyone interested in contemporary art.
CD 1 is called Les visiteurs de la’aventure concrète; The Visitors of the Concrete Adventure.
Naturally, this means that the first CD harbors the truly historical pieces, the etudes! Here are the artists that spent some time with Pierre Schaffer in his studio in the 1950s; those truly experimental times of fundamental research into sound, when Stockhausen and Eimert cut and spliced tapes of machine generated audio in Cologne; a Stockhausen that indeed himself had met with Schaeffer!
Pierre Boulez participates with Étude 1 and 2, from as early as 1951! This was even before Rune Lindblad had his revelation of a new sound, waking up, hung-over, in the park of Slottsskogen in Gothenburg, Sweden, and, amazingly, one year before Stockhausen’s first concrete Etude, which was executed in 1952.
Pierre Boulez’s Étude 1 bears all the features typical of its time, with fragments of brute sounds cutting like shrapnel through the sound space, though, of course, monaural. Your ear seems to equip the material with spatial properties, however; perhaps from the impression of motion that the frantic fluttering about of flaky sound objects with metallic surfaces and sharp corners present, or perhaps just because of our later stereophonic listening, which we have become so accustomed to.
Boulez’s First Étude stands up good to any comparisons to other works of those days, and to what was to come in the years immediately ahead, until Stockhausen swept the arena clean of competitors with Gesang der Jünglinge and… Kontakte!
I have never heard these Boulez works before, and it is, for sure, an adventure to hear the 28-year old Boulez in this electronic outpour!
 

Boulez’s very first Étude didn’t sound as much concrete as it sounded electronic, in fact, though you might have been able to detect some source sounds, like creaking doors and so forth – but Étude 2 bears witness to a more obvious concretism. The sounds are clearer, more rounded off, with distinct contours, and also a bit softer, arranged like fruits in a bowl in a still life. I hear percussive sounds in sequence with dripping and ticking sounds, followed by glissandi and glassy intrusions, as well as speedily rotating objects. Étude 2 seems to explore a more complicated and diverse sound world than did Étude 1 – and development of the art of electronic and concrete music was rapid; each step a step forward into new, pristine sonic worlds. It must have been amazing for these sound artists during those first years!
To hear Darius Milhaud in this context is fantastic! I would never have expected! His piece is La rivière endormie from 1954. He uses various recordings of an instrumental ensemble, which he mixes, varying speed etcetera, layer after layer, achieving a dreamy atmosphere of reverberant beauty, in a electroacoustic Hörspiel manner that came into fashion much later, even though it was practiced quite a bit in Germany too, at the same time.
The duration also speaks of tape; a hefty eight-minute take!

Later in the piece voices speak in French, a chanson begins, probably picked-up from a 78 rpm, and mixed in by Darius Milhaud. In a way you could view Milhaud’s work here as development into the age of sound manipulations of the old radio play.
Edgar Varèse participates on this CD 1 of the collection with an astounding work called Déserts; interpolation 1, realized in 1954. It is a work of immense and almost hilarious complexity, mixing the full and partial orchestral sound with recorded sounds on tape; sounds of diving planes, machine guns, unidentified brute and tingling sounds, sudden spurs of rhythmic percussion in the orchestra drifting over into the tapes and back; smoky sounds and railroad audio… with a distorted and dispersed symphonic orchestra: a masterwork of three and a half minutes!

André Boucourechliev’s Texte 2 from 1959 introduces a wildly stereophonic catharsis, with mimicry of falling rocks at right and the rattling of steel rods at left, yourself lost in a bewildering middle, especially if you’re in earphones!
The sound world is incredibly rich, with wheezing and dripping sounds thrown into the falling of pebbles and rocks in dark atmospheres of venomous gases of prehistory… Brilliant!
This was achieved solely from utilizing two tape recorders running simultaneously, with separate, set starting points, which could be changed to make instant, new works!
Boucourechliev’s Texte 2 is sheer joy and pleasure for the sound connoisseur; an intellectual game of sounds that will drive you nuts, and beyond!
Claude Ballif’s Points-Mouvements from 1962 introduces a music that became viable much later, in the 1980s, with an interplay of startling bands of overtones from tiny, high-pitch percussive instruments, whose drifting afterglow lingers in the atmosphere like gold dust. The tinkling attacks shine like reflections on Impressionist water surfaces, while the timbres stretch and linger like drifting dust in a quarry.
Half way through the piece the purity of overtone timbres transforms into gray and black sounds from hoarse and brute layers of consciousness, from lower chakras of clay and soil and rock-bottom, from the classrooms of Bleistift and caoutchouc elementary schools of the 1950s.
To hear Olivier Messiaen on a CD dedicated to musique concrète is nothing short of a wonder. It’s not just any short etude, either, but a fifteen minutes long piece, called Timbres Durées, recorded in 1952! This is incredible, and alone justifies the purchase of the whole box!
Admittedly, Messiaen composed for the Ondes Martenot – but this early concretism is something that cannot even be compared to that. It’s sheer, downright acousmatic music, wild and raw and rough as anything anybody else did later, like Gottfried Michael Koenig or Henri Pousseur, for example. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Messiaen had stayed with this new means of composition as devotedly as Stockhausen did; what a thought!
Olivier Messiaen had been invited to Pierre Schaeffer’s studio, and without that invitation this magic work probably would never have reached us. It took 53 years for it to reach my ears!
Messiaen had a strange request when he agreed to do something in the studio. He wanted sound samples that contained as little sound as possible! Yet the finished piece is a kind of frantic rock n’ roll electronic music! Messiaen chose Pierre Henry for his assistant, and picked out a dozen or so sounds to work with for his composition. Messiaen was just 44 years old at this time, in the prime of his professional deed. To the chosen sounds (water drop, spray, mist, tom-tom etcetera) he applied simple transformations (inversion, reverberation and so forth), constructing his one concrète composition.
The booklet text says it well:
Listening to this maze of turns, twists and returns, a quite unbelievable anamorphosis effect arises, durations are transformed by tone, strange duration colors shimmer as if refracted through matter, a veritable stained glass window and meditative mantra effect […]
Pierre Schaeffer talked about Messiaen and the other main figures to work in the studio:
I have always admired when composers arriving from afar feel comfortable in our studio and immediately leave such a definite personal mark on it. So, with Timbres-Durées, Messiaen developed his ideology, Stockhausen quibbled over remakes, Varèse hitched up the Far-West tractor to the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, Xenakis gleaned the sound of sparks from fire; each with his sign of water or fire, his space, desert or garden, his heaven or hell, for Orpheus himself passed through both.
The piece by Messiaen is a boiling stew of sonic ingredients; crescendi suddenly cut right off, rippling, watery formations, rumbling, tumbling occurrences, sweeping, soaring extensions, recognizable percussive sounds, resounding underworlds of sewage and dark, rat-ridden tunnels – as well as flocks of meteorites rushing past alien planets; there’s no end to the fantasies that may arise out of Messiaen’s concrete music! 1952!
Pierre Schaeffer said, in 1968, twenty years after he broke the news of musique concrète to the world through the French radio’s Concert de Bruits in June 1948:
We learned to associate the lute with the Middle Ages, plain-song with the monastery, the tom-tom with wild and primitive man, the viola da gamba with courtly dress. How can we really not expect to also find that music in the 20th century relates to machines and the masses, the electron and calculators […]. The unbridled release of noises, the surge of sounds, all utterly opposed to terms customarily used to describe music – harmony and counterpoint, mellowness and subtlety, expression and feeling -, was actually the music of the period, brutal and disturbed in nature, born in the period of the atom and missiles, power and speed, all unleashed elements.
CD 2 is entitled L’art de l’étude. Of course the étude was a preferred form for the new experimentalists of electronic/concrete music from the very beginning – and from that very very beginning this CD starts, with Pierre Schaeffer’s famous Étude pathétique from… 1948! Schaeffer pried into new worlds with his five études of concrete music in 1948, changing our world of sounds forever, as it were. It must have been incredibly impressive and unfathomable in those days; something outrageous – and yet Schaeffer could play the stuff on radio. Here’s to the French! They’re poets and romantics, and then this can happen!

Let’s hear how Schaeffer describes in his Journal how he got Étude pathétique down in 1948:
I was sent on an assignment to Washington […]. The day before departure I simply had to have a final studio session […]. There are always old abandoned records lying about in the studio. The one I happened to find was a recording of the wonderfully enticing voice of Sacha Guitry […]. I took hold of it, and using another turntable, played over a very peaceful rhythm evoking the surging movement of an impressive barge, and then, on two turntables, put on anything I chanced upon; an American accordion or harmonica recording and some Balinese music. Then came the exercise in virtuosity using four potentiometers and ignition keys […]. Étude No 5, known as the composition “aux casseroles”, arose in just a few minutes; in the time needed to record it. The barge from the canals of France, the American harmonica, the Balinese priests all miraculously began to respond and heed the gods of the turntable; a remarkable ensemble.
Thus, this remarkable piece emerged from Schaeffer’s delicate handling of the sounding moment, as it arose – and not from a conscious and premeditated constructive planning. Rather he let intuition and sensitive ears/fingers steer the process.
There is a sense of wonder and magic in hearing this inauguration work over the earphones I use when writing this, at the Macintosh. A gap in time is bridged, but I see/hear this Etude also as a well from which the fluid has not ceased to gush, coloring the whole globe with a film of audio that had its real beginning in that moment, in that new way of thinking that made Schaeffer achieve the works that altered our hearing.
A number of early electronic/concrete etudes are displayed on disc 2 in this brilliant series of five CDs, but time and work load allows me to just touch lightly upon the content, dipping into a choice few of the many works.

After the initial Schaeffer work I go to track 6, Luc Ferrari’s Étude aux sons tendus from 1958. Liner notes from the time of release describe “rhythmic structures sometimes curling up into sorts of sound knots, sometimes opening up”. As the booklet text says, this description does not give justice to the fluidity of the sound, as woven by Ferrari.
What you hear, initially, are beads of gray pebbles, coming across like colorless, curved pieces of matter, microscope pictures of bacteria – and sounding somewhat like a thumb playing a plastic comb… Other sounds are inserted, at times rudely and provocative, in characteristically cut-up proportions – but you also hear crescendi and loud whistles, and the apparent whining of circular saws. This piece seems to apply the methods of the early 1950s in the late 1950s without much development of sound material, but with a higher degree of artistry. Luc Ferrari was to emerge as one of the most exciting sound artists of the 1960s and 1970s, so this short piece may perhaps serve as a foretaste of what was still to come, like the Presque rien pieces, for example.

Ivo Malec’s Reflets from 1961 was issued on INA GRM’s first CD Concert Imaginaire in 1984, and it deserves its inclusion here too, as it presents a spatial and spacey sound that wouldn’t become very common until the 1980s, really, to any higher degree. Malec’s piece has an inherent poetic beauty and an inward, Southern France garden mysticism, later amplified by composers like Jean-Claude Risset and François Bayle.
The fluidity of sound is outstanding, especially when you consider the early time in which it was achieved. I recall my initial amazement at hearing this for the first time from that CD in 1984, and I can still feel the thrill of discovery when I re-listen today.
Philippe Carson’s Phonologie from 1962 at first make me think of Stockhausen’s Stimmung, which, however, was composed in 1968… It was performed at Stockholm New Music in February 2005, and will be performed twice at the Stockhausen Courses in the summer of 2005.
Anyone who has heard Stimmung will understand what I’m getting at. Carson uses an array of voices, all in a spiraling, khoomei kind of way, sounding like, or almost like, Tuvinian or Mongolian throat singing, without, however, most of the overtone spectra.
What we hear are solely extended and modulated vocals, at higher or lower pitches, achieving… yes, that particular Stimmung feeling, or that bardo state sensation of Tibetan monks humming!
All the voices here are in fact one voice; that of Xavier Depraz, diffused in a layering that also, in a shadowy way, resembles some kind of chamber ensemble; an ensemble of vocal cords in some ritual, para-religious or magic ceremony…