Seven records to understand musique concrète

Musique concrète was born on the radio, not in a record shop.

Pierre Schaeffer made his first five études across May and June 1948. On 20 June that year they went out over Radio-Paris, inside a programme of his own called Concerts de Bruits.

That broadcast is where anybody listening in France first heard the thing exist.

Buying them on a numbered record meant waiting until 1971. Twenty-three years.

That record came out inside a series, and the series is still the best door into this music. Philips published it. François Bayle and Pierre Henry started it in 1967 and called it Prospective 21e Siècle.

Seven of its records follow, in catalogue number order rather than by year. Here the catalogue and the calendar do not agree, and the disagreement is the whole point.

Listen while you read

836.885

Luc Ferrari, Hétérozygote / J’ai été coupé (1969). The lowest number on the page.

836.889

Bernard Parmegiani, Violostries / Bidule en Ré / Capture Éphémère (1969). Three pieces.

836 893

Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, Les Jerks Électroniques de la Messe pour le temps présent (1967). Four sides of concrete music written for Maurice Béjart.

Two of those sides point straight at other records in the same series. The second is an extract from Le Voyage, six numbers further on. The fourth comes from Variations pour une porte et un soupir, which has a record of its own too.

836 897

Xenakis, Berio, Maderna, Kagel, Orient-Occident and other pieces (1970). Five works. Four composers. One LP, with two by Berio, one Maderna, one Xenakis and one Kagel.

836 899

Pierre Henry, Le Voyage (1967). Seven pieces after the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with the tracks made on 25 June 1963 inside the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris, which puts four years between the recording and the sleeve it eventually came in.

We can’t find it on Spotify.

6521 016

François Bayle, Jeîta ou murmure des eaux (1971). The numbering has moved on by now, from the 836s to the 6521s. Bayle was one of the two who set the series going in the first place.

6521 021

Pierre Schaeffer, Étude aux objets - Étude aux allures - Étude aux sons animés - Étude de bruits - L’oiseau RAI - Suite Quatorze (1971). Six pieces, and the title is simply the list of them.

Twelve minutes and twenty-five seconds of side B carry the name Étude de bruits. Everything starts there. On the record it arrives last.

Why the catalogue doesn’t follow the years

Run down the list again and watch the two columns disagree. The numbers climb steadily while the dates jump about, so that 836.885 and 836.889 are 1969 and yet 836 893 and 836 899 are 1967.

No archivist slipped up here. A series hands out its numbers when it decides to issue a title, not when the music was made, and this one was issuing work that in several cases had been sitting around for years.

The extreme case is at the bottom of the page. Études made in 1948 took the number 6521 021 in 1971, by which point nearly everything else here was already in the shops.

What’s missing from this page

Two of the seven aren’t on Spotify as far as we can see: the Ferrari and Le Voyage.

That’s our search, and nobody has ever declared the absence. It does say something true about the music, though. Reading a catalogue number for it remains easier than hearing the record that carries it.