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Chapter 2
The Pre-History Of Live-Looping and The Figures That Would Inspire Its
Creation.
Musique Concrete The Beginnings of Tape based music.
Live-looping was created from the birth of the tape recorder, however it
was
by no means the first tape music. The tape recorder was developed by 1935
and became readily available by 1950. The tape recorders potential to allow
new forms of musical composition was first recognised by the composers of
contemporary classical music. The first of these was Pierre Schaeffer whose
early studies written for manipulated gramophone records of sound effects
were the beginnings of what he called Musique Concrete. Musique Concrete
was
³a term Schaffer coined to denote the use of sound objects from nature,
³concrete² sounds of the real world. These were opposed to the musical
objectsı of tonal music, whose source was the abstract value system of the
mind.²
Schaeffer can be said to be the founder of the institution of the
electronic
music studio way back in 1948. Using the medium of vinyl he designed a
whole
series of techniques for musical composition. He would create endless loops
from specially cut records, reverse sounds, layer sounds, and process
sounds
with reverb and audio filters. It is amazing to think that so many of the
compositional techniques that we take for granted today were pioneered by
Schaffer back in 1948. The 1950s saw Schaeffer transfer his skills from
working with vinyl to the more flexible format of tape and alongside his
associate Pierre Henry he produced the first extended Musique Concrete
composition, Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul which was premiered in 1950.
Musique Concrete represented a new compositional language, where the
outcome was essentially fixed in concrete form that gave no scope for
interpretation by a performer. It is within Musique Concrete that we saw
the
beginnings of the fascination with recorded sound as a unit for musical
creation and manipulation that has continued right through to the present
day with digital sampling. Composers became fascinated in the variety of
sounds that could be produced by familiar objects and instruments when
warped by the studio environment. Composers could change the timbre of an
instrument via the variable playback speed of a tape recorder, recorded
sounds could be fragmented via razor blade editing, allowing small chunks
of
different material to be reassembled into collages of unplayable passages.
For example a clip of laughter could be reversed then spliced into the
decay
of a piano chord and blended with a re-pitched flute melody. These types of
manipulation would form the blueprint for functions implemented later on in
Live-Looping.
The Breaking of the European Model
Musique Concrete can be said to represent the beginnings of a break away
from the European Classical model that had dominated music throughout the
19th and early 20th century. Music in the early 20th century had been
characterised by the modernists Schoenberg and Stravinsky who represented
the cutting edge of the continual evolution of the system of musical
harmony. This in turn had been cemented in history by the creation of the
European schools of music such as the Academy of Music, and the Trinity
College of Music.
Music Concrete clearly differed from the music of the Serialistıs. The
music
was no longer about increasing the complexity of the harmonic and rhythmic
components. The focus had changed all together, where the quality of found
sounds and the newness of manipulated sound became the focal point for
music
composition. A new aesthetic had been found.
Music Concrete displayed a language of musical examination that would later
on be repeated in the early live-looping pieces. Compositions like Henryıs
Vocaliseı using only the sound Ahı demonstrate how entire pieces could be
made from very small musical fragments. Indeed Schaffer would often
classify
his pieces by the type of sounds used to make them. There are clear
parallels between these early tape pieces and the early tape pieces of the
Minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Pieces like Rileyıs She Moves
Me or Reichıs Its Gonna Rain both rely on this idea of the examination of a
single musical fragment.
Cage
Other composers also began to try to distance themselves from the European
classical tradition. The American composers Henry Cowell , Charles Ives,
and
John Cage tried to create a music that wasnıt based upon the European
tradition. Of these Cage was probably the most successful and would prove
to
be one of the great pioneers of American music, whose ideas would be of
huge
influence to the first Live-Looping composers.
Although Cage had grown up studying the European classical model of music
under teachers like Schoenberg his musical ideas began to display a
departure from European forms and traditions. Cageıs harmonic and rhythmic
language was still derived from the European tradition, yet his obsession
with experimentation redefined the boundaries of what music could be
perceived as and represented a significant departure. I believe Cage is
best
look upon as an inventor of musical ideas, who although failed to produce
many outstanding compositions, certainly produced an outstanding output of
ideas and methods for the creation of music. Cage in a sense represented an
extreme of modernism where he even managed to call silence music.
It was Cageıs philosophy on music, his incorporation of the influence of
eastern cultures, and what he represented that inspired the Minimalists
rather more than the actual music he made. Cage removed the need for music
to have a developmental structure, he replaced this with the idea that
music
can exist as a sensation that can be heard. Cageıs music presented the
listener with a surface to read into as opposed to directing the listener
through a piece of music through the use of harmony and structure which can
be heard even in the atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. This idea of
music as an open surface can be seen to have been taken up by the first
Live-Loopers, the Minimalists.