French polish MUSIC
MICHAEL NYMAN
Thirty-five years after the Italian Futurists pro- posed the art of bruitistno, Pierre Schaeffer in 1948 began his experiments with montages of recorded sounds which he called musique con- crete. Last week, his Groupe de Recherches Musicales appeared for the first time in public in England. The first of the Groupe's two pre- sentations took place at the ICA and tried to create, in a systematic, semi-educational for- mat, a variable sound environment—different
types of music were to be experienced in dif- ferent types of space (tiny gallery `theatre,' ex- hibitiun hall and cinema). But the show was a failure since the initial freedom, of impression rather than expression, became pretty rigid when you were (albeit willingly) shunted from one activity to another.
What was valuable was to see the way in which the planned balance and focus of the separate activities were completely altered by real ex- perience: the electronic 'classics' lost their im- pact in too close and confined an area, whereas the short programmes of extracts (Webern, tabla music, the Beatles etc), intended to be heard as `wrap round' sounds while wandering round the exhibition hall, had to be listened to, simply because they made a very definite point in a very short space of time. From there to the cinema, where 'enforced' doses of prolix French- brand electronic music were amply compen- sated for by two brilliant films, made by a painter, Peter Foldes (the Groupe works closely with film-makers), which combined wit, intel- lect, the representational and the abstract, in visual images of superb imaginative and tech- nical quality.
The composers did, however, partially redress the balance in their Queen Elizabeth Hall con- cert two days later. Technically this too was very polished; the immediacy of sound gained by usitg highly professional equipment (as dis- tinct from the amateur toys used in English electronic music) was immeasurable. And since there were no self-conscious attempts to treat the audience like winter pipes and lag them with sound, this was, ironically, precisely the effect achieved. Exciting and poetic sound waves vibrated through and around the hall out of the
four-channel stereo. Certainly these composers seem to be entirely committed to, immersed in, the sound potential of the electronic medium. . And one's own visual imagination worked overtime, too, inventing pleasurable fantasies suggested by the music. That the same images seemed to recur rather often was, I think, a de- ficiency in the music, and showed the Groupe limited, in their characteristically French way, to the picturesque, the descriptive, the illustra- tive, as superior 'programme music.' The asso- ciations of the sounds, whether machine-made or from real life, seemed to have been empha- sised rather than diminished; electronically pro- duced `white noise' sounded like surf, or aero- planes, or wind. Bird song noises proliferated like electrified Messiaen. Bernard Parmegiani's Capture ephemere became an exciting aural transcript of one of those world-taken-over-by- giant-ant films, Francis Bayle added to the re- pertory of good music for the heath scene in King Lear.
Mann Marais wrote'in the eighteenth century a sonata purporting to describe a gallstone oper- ation. On the evidence of the Groupe's two con- certs, they are writing equivalents for moon- flight operations, or for pictorial-mystical journeys to the centre of the mind. The com- posers are trapped by the beatings of their own ephemeral wings. For to the claim that the 'unlimited possibilities' of electronic music `generate problems of expression of a com- pletely new nature, for which we must look for new solutions,' we must reply yes, but look harder, and perhaps in a different direction. At te moment the aesthetic problem is still light years away from a satisfactory solution, at least by the composers of the Groupe.
Previous page
