Get the latest tech news
Pierre Schaeffer looking back on his career in musique concrète (1987)
[ Pierre Schaeffer interview ] This interview originally appeared in Recommended Records Quarterly magazine, volume 2, number 1, in 1987. The author is Tim Hodgkinson.
When you build a farcical machine for rumori with things rubbing against each other -- like the Italians -- lead shot in a d rum, etc, you don't hurt a fly, it lasts 10, 20 years -- it's circus, quite harmless little sound effects. But when you stick generations of young musicians, as is happening today, in front of synthesisers -- I don't mean the ones for commercial music, but the really precise ones, where you have one control for the frequency, another for the decibels, another for the harmonic spectrum -- then you're really in the shit... [Laughter] If I compare that to jazz for example in its historically fecund period, the extraordinary fruition of American music at the point where the European DoReMi was suddenly seized upon by the blacks for the production of expressive forms... this was sublime.
Or read this on Hacker News