A Revolution in Music: The History of the Groupe de Recherches MusicalesEstablished in the 1950s by musician and engineer Pierre Schaeffer, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales would become the nerve center for avant-garde artists experimenting with sound and acoustics, as well as the birthplace of a genre of music-making enabled by new recording technologies and sound pioneers: musique concrète. Évelyne Gayou—herself a researcher, composer, and producer at the GRM—tells the history of the storied institution through the people, works, technologies, and research developed there. Placing musique concrète within a broad historical context extending from the early twentieth-century avant-garde's experiments with noise to the development of techniques in sound recording (at the Studio d'Essai in the 1940s) and later in sound synthesis, Gayou shows how recording technology made it possible for composers to not only create music from sounds in the world around them but also create acousmatic music—novel sounds without a visible connection to their source. Available in English translation for the first time, this updated edition will be an important resource for readers interested in the pioneering works and techniques of Schaeffer and his contemporaries, as well as their influence on the makers of new music and the contemporary avant-garde. |
Contents
Prehistory | 9 |
A Namea Schoola Style of Music | 46 |
ConceptsPedagogyTools | 55 |
SpaceConcertAudience | 103 |
In Search of Music Writing | 129 |
Postscript | 347 |
| 379 | |
| 393 | |
Other editions - View all
A Revolution in Music: The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales Évelyne Gayou Limited preview - 2025 |
A Revolution in Music: The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales Évelyne Gayou No preview available - 2025 |
Common terms and phrases
acousmatic Acousmographe Acousmonium acoustic aesthetic analog archives artistic audience Bénédict Mailliard Bernard Parmegiani broadcast Christian Zanési cinema Club d'Essai collaboration Cologne composers composition concert conservatory created creation Daniel Teruggi Denis Dufour developed direction director electroacoustic music electronic music engineer Étude Évelyne Gayou experimental film François Bayle François Delalande French genre Grand Auditorium graphic transcription GRM Tools GRM’s GRMC Guy Reibel Iannis Xenakis INA-GRM instruments iRCAM Ivo Malec Jacques Jean Jean-Claude Risset Jean-François Allouis listening loudspeakers Luc Ferrari Mâche Maison de Radio Michel Chion minutes movement musicale musicians musique concrète numerous objets musicaux organized Paris performance Philippe phonogène piece Pierre Boulez Pierre Henry Pierre Schaeffer Portraits polychromes premiered production Radio France radiophoniques sonore sound material sound object sound processing space spatial Stockhausen synthesizer Syter tape recorder techniques techno timbre tion Traité des objets transformation Varèse visual voice workshop Yann Geslin