Sound Collage History
Pierre Schaeffer
(born Aug. 14, 1910, Nancy, France—died Aug. 19, 1995, Aix-en-Provence), French composer, acoustician, and electronics engineer who in 1948, with his staff at Radio-diffusion et Télévision Française, introduced musique concrète in which sounds of natural origin, animate and inanimate, are recorded and manipulated so that the original sounds are distorted and combined in a musical fashion. The means of manipulation include changing the speed of the playback to alter pitch, playing the tape backward, cutting the tape so as to exercise precise control over duration, filtering out or reinforcing certain sound-wave frequencies, and other more complex manipulation. Schaeffer’s 10-movement Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; “Symphony for One Man Only”), produced in collaboration with Pierre Henry, was the first major concrete piece. This and other works of musique concrète reflect an approach to sound that had an important influence on composers of aleatory, or chance, music. His other works include the experimental opera Orpheé 53 (1953).
Source Encyclopedia Britanica
Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry was born in Paris, France, and began experimenting at the age of 15 with sounds produced by various objects. He became fascinated with the integration of noise into music. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, and Félix Passerone at the Paris Conservatoire from 1938 to 1948 (Dhomont 2001).Between 1949 and 1958, Henry workedatthd'Essai studio at RTF, which had been founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1943 (Dhomont 2001). During this period, he wrote the 1950 piece Symphonie pour un homme seul, in cooperation with Schaeffer; he also composed the first musique concrète to appear in a commercial film, the 1952 short film Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Henry has scored numerous additional films and ballets.Two years after leaving the RTF, he founded with Jean Baronnet the first private electronic studio in France, the Apsone-Cabasse Studio (Dhomont 2001).Among Henry's works is the 1967 ballet Messe pour le temps présent (Dhomont 2001), a collaboration with choreographer Maurice Béjart that debuted in Avignon (Rubin 2001,[page needed]). In 1970 Henry collaborated with British rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony (Rubin 2001, 308).
Source Wikipedia
Daphne Oram
In 1942 she was offered a place at the Royal College of Music but instead took up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and "music balancer" at theBBC.[2] During this period she became aware of developments in "synthetic" sound and began experimenting with tape recorders. She also spent some time in the 1940s composing music, which remained unperformed, including an orchestal work entitled Still Point.[1] In the 1950s she was promoted to become a music studio manager and, following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities for composing sounds and music, using electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming.[2] In 1957 she was commissioned to compose music for the play Amphitryon 38. Using a sine wave oscillator, an early tape recorder and some self-designed filters, she produced the score from only electronic sources; the first of its kind at the BBC.[2] Along with fellow electronic musician and BBC colleague Desmond Briscoe, she began to receive commissions for many other works - including a significant production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall. As demand grew for these electronic sounds, the BBC gave Oram and Briscoe a budget to establish the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in early 1958, where she was the first Studio Manager.[2] In October of that year, she was sent by the BBC to the "Journées Internationales de Musique Expérimentale" at the Brussels World’s Fair(where Edgard Varèse demonstrated his Poème électronique). After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries and being unhappy at the BBC's music department's lack of interest, she decided to resign from the BBC less than one year after the workshop was opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own.[1][3]
Source Wikipedia
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development ofmodern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.[5][6]
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[7][8] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).[9]
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, in which he scattered televisions everywhere and used magnets to alter or distort their images. In a 1960 piano performance in Cologne, he played Chopin, threw himself on the piano and rushed into the audience, attacking Cage and pianist David Tudor by cutting their clothes with scissors and dumping shampoo on their heads.[6]
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, and began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance. In the workTV Cello, the pair stacked televisions on top of one another, so that they formed the shape of an actual cello. When Moorman drew her bow across the "cello," images of her and other cellists playing appeared on the screens.
Source Wikipedia
John Oswald
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition. Plunderphonics can be considered a form of sound collage.
Although the concept of plunderphonics is seemingly broad, in practice there are many common themes used in what is normally called plunderphonic music. This includes heavy sampling ofeducational films of the 1950s, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers. Oswald's contributions to this genre rarely used these materials, the exception being his rap-like 1975 track "Power."
Source Wikipedia
Luc Farari
Luc Ferrari was born in Paris, and was trained in music at a very young age, studying the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first works were freely atonal. A case of tuberculosis in his youth interrupted his career as a pianist. From then on he mostly concentrated on musical composition. During this illness he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the radio receiver, with pioneers such as Schönberg, Berg, and Webern.In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet Edgard Varèse, whose Déserts he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in Déserts serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use magnetic tape in his own music. In 1958 he co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio. By the early 1960, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds to suggest a dramatic narrative. The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language.Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beachand, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of John Cage's idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this. Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.Source Wikipedia
Hildegard Westerkamp (born April 8, 1946, in Osnabrück, Germany) is a German and Canadian composer of electroacoustic music.
Many of her compositions deal with the acoustic environment. Particular themes include soundscapes of urban or rural areas, including voices, noise, silence, music and media, and so on. In several of these compositions, she incorporates the poetry of her then-partner, Canadian writer Norbert Ruebsaat. She has composed for film soundtracks and her music has been featured in twoGus Van Sant movies Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). She is a founding member of the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and a co-founder of Vancouver Co-op radio.
Source Wikipedia
Raymond Murray Schafer
(born 18 July 1933) is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for hisWorld Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World (1977). He was notably the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.[1][2]
Source Wikipedia
Joe Banks
Joe Banks is a sound-installation and recording artist who works under the brand name Disinformation. Disinformation projects have involved radio noise from photographic flash guns and welding equipment, electrical and solar-magnetic storms, alternating current, electromagnets, domestic appliances, industrial and information technology hardware, visual documentation of obsolete British military “sound mirrors” and studies of various aspects of aesthetics, morphology and acoustic perception.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
(German pronunciation: [kaʁlˈhaɪnts ˈʃtɔkhaʊzn̩]; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important (Barrett 1988, 45; Harvey 1975b, 705; Hopkins 1972, 33; Klein 1968, 117) but also controversial (Power 1990, 30) composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music" (Hewett 2007). He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization.
Source Wikipedia
Raymond Scott
Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow, September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994)[1] was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor. Although Scott never scored cartoon soundtracks, his music is familiar to millions because of its adaptation by Carl Stalling in over 120 classic Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and other Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts. Scott's melodies have also been heard in twelve Ren & Stimpy episodes (that used the original Scott recordings), while making cameos in The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, and Batfink. (The only music Scott actually composed to accompany animation were three 20-second electronic commercial jingles for County Fair Bread in 1962.) Source Wikipedia
(born Aug. 14, 1910, Nancy, France—died Aug. 19, 1995, Aix-en-Provence), French composer, acoustician, and electronics engineer who in 1948, with his staff at Radio-diffusion et Télévision Française, introduced musique concrète in which sounds of natural origin, animate and inanimate, are recorded and manipulated so that the original sounds are distorted and combined in a musical fashion. The means of manipulation include changing the speed of the playback to alter pitch, playing the tape backward, cutting the tape so as to exercise precise control over duration, filtering out or reinforcing certain sound-wave frequencies, and other more complex manipulation. Schaeffer’s 10-movement Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; “Symphony for One Man Only”), produced in collaboration with Pierre Henry, was the first major concrete piece. This and other works of musique concrète reflect an approach to sound that had an important influence on composers of aleatory, or chance, music. His other works include the experimental opera Orpheé 53 (1953).
Source Encyclopedia Britanica
Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry was born in Paris, France, and began experimenting at the age of 15 with sounds produced by various objects. He became fascinated with the integration of noise into music. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, and Félix Passerone at the Paris Conservatoire from 1938 to 1948 (Dhomont 2001).Between 1949 and 1958, Henry worked
Source Wikipedia
Daphne Oram
In 1942 she was offered a place at the Royal College of Music but instead took up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and "music balancer" at theBBC.[2] During this period she became aware of developments in "synthetic" sound and began experimenting with tape recorders. She also spent some time in the 1940s composing music, which remained unperformed, including an orchestal work entitled Still Point.[1] In the 1950s she was promoted to become a music studio manager and, following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities for composing sounds and music, using electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming.[2] In 1957 she was commissioned to compose music for the play Amphitryon 38. Using a sine wave oscillator, an early tape recorder and some self-designed filters, she produced the score from only electronic sources; the first of its kind at the BBC.[2] Along with fellow electronic musician and BBC colleague Desmond Briscoe, she began to receive commissions for many other works - including a significant production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall. As demand grew for these electronic sounds, the BBC gave Oram and Briscoe a budget to establish the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in early 1958, where she was the first Studio Manager.[2] In October of that year, she was sent by the BBC to the "Journées Internationales de Musique Expérimentale" at the Brussels World’s Fair(where Edgard Varèse demonstrated his Poème électronique). After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries and being unhappy at the BBC's music department's lack of interest, she decided to resign from the BBC less than one year after the workshop was opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own.[1][3]
Source Wikipedia
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development ofmodern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.[5][6]
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[7][8] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).[9]
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik then began participating in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, in which he scattered televisions everywhere and used magnets to alter or distort their images. In a 1960 piano performance in Cologne, he played Chopin, threw himself on the piano and rushed into the audience, attacking Cage and pianist David Tudor by cutting their clothes with scissors and dumping shampoo on their heads.[6]
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, and began working with classical cellist Charlotte Moorman, to combine his video, music, and performance. In the workTV Cello, the pair stacked televisions on top of one another, so that they formed the shape of an actual cello. When Moorman drew her bow across the "cello," images of her and other cellists playing appeared on the screens.
Source Wikipedia
John Oswald
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition. Plunderphonics can be considered a form of sound collage.
Although the concept of plunderphonics is seemingly broad, in practice there are many common themes used in what is normally called plunderphonic music. This includes heavy sampling ofeducational films of the 1950s, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers. Oswald's contributions to this genre rarely used these materials, the exception being his rap-like 1975 track "Power."
Source Wikipedia
Luc Farari
Luc Ferrari was born in Paris, and was trained in music at a very young age, studying the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first works were freely atonal. A case of tuberculosis in his youth interrupted his career as a pianist. From then on he mostly concentrated on musical composition. During this illness he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the radio receiver, with pioneers such as Schönberg, Berg, and Webern.In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet Edgard Varèse, whose Déserts he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in Déserts serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use magnetic tape in his own music. In 1958 he co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio. By the early 1960, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds to suggest a dramatic narrative. The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language.Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beachand, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of John Cage's idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this. Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.Source Wikipedia
Hildegard Westerkamp (born April 8, 1946, in Osnabrück, Germany) is a German and Canadian composer of electroacoustic music.
Many of her compositions deal with the acoustic environment. Particular themes include soundscapes of urban or rural areas, including voices, noise, silence, music and media, and so on. In several of these compositions, she incorporates the poetry of her then-partner, Canadian writer Norbert Ruebsaat. She has composed for film soundtracks and her music has been featured in twoGus Van Sant movies Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). She is a founding member of the World Forum on Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and a co-founder of Vancouver Co-op radio.
Source Wikipedia
Raymond Murray Schafer
(born 18 July 1933) is a Canadian composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist perhaps best known for hisWorld Soundscape Project, concern for acoustic ecology, and his book The Tuning of the World (1977). He was notably the first recipient of the Jules Léger Prize in 1978.[1][2]
Source Wikipedia
Joe Banks
Joe Banks is a sound-installation and recording artist who works under the brand name Disinformation. Disinformation projects have involved radio noise from photographic flash guns and welding equipment, electrical and solar-magnetic storms, alternating current, electromagnets, domestic appliances, industrial and information technology hardware, visual documentation of obsolete British military “sound mirrors” and studies of various aspects of aesthetics, morphology and acoustic perception.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
(German pronunciation: [kaʁlˈhaɪnts ˈʃtɔkhaʊzn̩]; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important (Barrett 1988, 45; Harvey 1975b, 705; Hopkins 1972, 33; Klein 1968, 117) but also controversial (Power 1990, 30) composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music" (Hewett 2007). He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization.
Source Wikipedia
Raymond Scott
Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow, September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994)[1] was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor. Although Scott never scored cartoon soundtracks, his music is familiar to millions because of its adaptation by Carl Stalling in over 120 classic Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and other Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts. Scott's melodies have also been heard in twelve Ren & Stimpy episodes (that used the original Scott recordings), while making cameos in The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, and Batfink. (The only music Scott actually composed to accompany animation were three 20-second electronic commercial jingles for County Fair Bread in 1962.) Source Wikipedia