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Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987)

paul.mycpanel.princeton.edu

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987)

#11
I don't care one iota for trying to demarcate what is and what isn't music - IMHO just a really stupid thing to get hung up about. But the point about abstraction ("The whole problem of the sound-work [...]") in both visual and aural terms I found really interesting.

Regarding the conclusion, some of the best works have been disowned by their creators at some point, so not to worry there.

PS a nice sort of anthropological/sociological inside view of the IRCAM at some specific time can be read in "Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde" by Georgina Born.

By the way, isn't it quite silly to say that electronic music " emerged in Cologne in 1950 at the NWDR"? As if we wouldn't have electronic music from 1000 different places if it weren't for them...

Re: Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987)

#12
post #6

In which Pierre Schaeffer admits that Musique Concrete is not music, and that he has never been a real musician. Ouch… I wonder if he knows there are internet music genres that have not only kept the ideas of Musique Concrete alive, but made them culturally relevant and musically valuable in a way that he and other 20th century “serious” musical thinkers never managed to. Some of the more obscure vaporwave subgenres…

it was absolutely music, it just wasn't very good.
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