A Revolution in Music

The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-520-40977-4
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 424 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

Established 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gayou, Evelyne

Gayou, Évelyne

Weitere Mitwirkende

Vaughn, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Geschichte der Musik
• Technische Wissenschaften Sonstige Technologien | Angewandte Technik Akustik, Tontechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Elektronische Musik
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikinstrumente Elektronische Musikinstrumente

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Preface to the English Edition 

Introduction 

PART ONE. ORGANIZING FORGETTING: A THEMATIC APPROACH 
1. Before 1948: Prehistory
2. A Name—a School—a Style of Music 
3. Concepts—Pedagogy—Tools 
4. Space—Concert—Audience 
5. In Search of Music Writing 

PART TWO. MEMORIALIZING THE FACTS: A CHRONOLOGICAL APPROACH
6. 1948–1958: The Avant-Garde of Musique Concrète 
7. 1958–1968: Birth of the GRM 
8. 1968–1978: End of the Schaeffer Era 
9. 1978–1988: Real and Nonreal Time 
10: 1988–1998: Innovation 
11. 1998 and Beyond 

Postscript 

Notes 
Bibliography—Discography 
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Évelyne Gayou is a French musicologist and composer, and a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales since 1975.
  David Vaughn is an interdisciplinary artist and arts translator, whose extensive translation experience includes an enduring collaboration with the GRM and its associates.