Page "Musique concrète" Paragraph 7

By 1949 Schaeffer's compositional work was known publicly as musique concrète ( Palombini 1993, 14 ).

Schaeffer stated: " when I proposed the term ' musique concrète ,' I intended … to point out an opposition with the way musical work usually goes.

Instead of notating musical ideas on paper with the symbols of solfege and entrusting their realization to well-known instruments, the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing " ( Reydellet 1996, 10 ).

According to Pierre Henry, " musique concrète was not a study of timbre, it is focused on envelopes, forms.

It must be presented by means of non-traditional characteristics, you see … one might say that the origin of this music is also found in the interest in ‘ plastifying ’ music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture … musique concrète, in my opinion … led to a manner of composing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing " ( James 1981, 79 ).

Schaeffer had developed an aesthetic that was centred upon the use of sound as a primary compositional resource.

The aesthetic also emphasised the importance of play ( jeu ) in the practice of sound based composition.

Schaeffer's use of the word jeu, from the verb jouer, carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: ' to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings ', as well as ' to operate a musical instrument ' ( Dack 2002 ).