Electronic music in France: musique concrète

The idea that music could be created from sound sources outside traditional musical instruments, and could in fact be constructed from various classes of noises, dates from at least the Italian Futurist movement of the early part of the last century, the history of which has been often recounted.Footnote ³ For the purposes of this article, however, discussion of the application of non-traditional sound sources will begin with the innovations of Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95), who pioneered musique concrète. After his initial attempts to manipulate sounds recorded from his environment, by re-recording them in a controlled way onto shellac discs, he realized the potential of a music composed by the alteration of previously existing sound materials. With the development and availability of magnetic tape – which was much easier to cut, edit, and manipulate – after the Second World War, Schaeffer created a body of work posited on this notion. An entire generation of French composers was influenced by these experiments and the philosophical approach behind them, including his greatest ally and collaborator, Pierre Henry (b. 1927).Footnote ⁴

Schaeffer's career began as an electronic engineer at the Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (RTF) in the 1930s after training at the Paris Polytechnic.Footnote ⁵ In 1942, he persuaded the corporation to establish a centre for research into the science of musical acoustics, initially called the Studio d'Essai (after 1946, the Club d'Essai), with himself as director. He was engaged primarily in studying how recording technology can isolate individual sound events. In 1948 Schaeffer recorded the first Études de bruit (Studies on noise) based on this research. These initial recordings explored the inherent components of sounds, including such elements as attack and decay, and what happens to such sonorities when various aspects are modified.

His first piece using the newfound techniques, Étude aux chemins de fer, manipulated the various sounds of six steam trains in a way that left the core of their sounds intact, adjusting the recording's speed and looping (repeating) to emphasize the repetitive percussiveness of the train's operating mechanics. This process left the origin of the sound intelligible, and the novelty of the work lies in the listener's recognition of how the familiar yet altered sound of a train has been made to submit to larger issues of classical form, such as thematic development, dynamics, and pitch relationships. His next several Études attempted to disguise the origin of the sound sources more thoroughly, mostly by slowing and speeding up playback, to eliminate the associative quality of the music. The Études were unveiled in the first broadcast of musique concrète on the RTF, in a programme entitled Concert à bruits, on 5 October 1948. In the spring of 1949, he convinced the RTF to fund the hiring of Pierre Henry as co-researcher and Jacques Poullin as studio technician.

The habit of creating new uses for sounds marked Schaeffer and Henry's new compositions as separate from the works of similar radio sound artists working contemporaneously in London. Ludwig Koch's BBC radio broadcasts, Music of the Sea and Paris, from 1951 and 1952 respectively, were billed as ‘sound pictures without words’ in the Radio Times (the BBC's weekly broadcasting guide). These were carefully, logically, and artistically modelled sound sculptures. They used the latest in outside broadcast technology and recording equipment, including high-tech microphones and newly available tape recorders, but were in fact the opposite of new uses of old sounds; rather, they attempted to capture as realistically, evocatively, and authentically as possible the theme of the broadcast. Koch's sound pictures were an intermittent but regular feature of the BBC's radio broadcasts of the late 1940s and 1950s, and epitomize one of radio's great strengths: the ability to play live sounds from often exotic locations. Koch's programmes take this idea to a new level of sonic ‘impressionism’ and, with few words of explanation and no hint of plot, present a collection of representative sounds which together illustrate his theme. The musicality of such a technique did not go unnoticed in the press, and a 1951 article from the Radio Times bears quoting at length:

However effective and new Koch's sound portraits were as radio, they still were intended to be realistic representations of their subject, so that if their subject was obscured in the final broadcast, then the work would have been deemed a failure. This fundamental difference marks out the sound works of Schaeffer and his co-workers as profoundly new.

In order to create these new sounds, Schaeffer was constantly running up against the inadequacies of his equipment. It is vital (and shocking) to remember that until 1951 at the earliest, all musique concrète in Paris was being assembled and performed on turntables alone – that is, without tape recording. This limited the effects that could be performed to the playing of sounds at different speeds, in reverse, and simultaneously (a frustration Schaeffer conceded in 1949).Footnote ⁷ In spite of these misgivings, he collaborated with Henry on their most influential work, the Symphonie pour un homme seul, premiering it at the first public concert of musique concrète in the hall of the École Normale de Musique, Paris on 18 March 1950 (again, realized live on turntables). In 1951, the RTF provided Schaeffer and his co-workers with the world's first custom-built musique concrète studio, and they adopted the name ‘Groupe de Musique Concrète, Club d'Essai’. It was this studio's equipment that led to the shift from shellac discs to tape-based composition, allowing for much more flexibility.

A broadcast in 1951 of Schaeffer and Henry's Symphonie on radio stations throughout Germany and Austria and at the Darmstadt Summer Institute was, according to Schaeffer, ‘welcomed enthusiastically there’.Footnote ⁸ But by 1953, the mood had shifted at the Institute, and a performance of Schaeffer and Henry's opera concrète, Orphée 53, was received with hostility and derision, a ‘battle’ Schaeffer acknowledged losing: ‘It is thus that we lost the battle of Donaueschingen and that we were plunged for years into international reprobation, while there rose in the sky of Cologne, a dawn favorable to the hereditary and electronic enemy!’Footnote ⁹ A sea-change by some proponents of elektronische Musik had led to a hardening of their attitudes towards the French concrète-ists.

Electronic music in Germany: elektronische Musik

Since hearing a demonstration of Bell Lab's Vocoder in 1948, Dr Werner Meyer-Eppler, a professor of phonetics at Bonn University, had become increasingly interested in electronic sound production. A year later he teamed up with Robert Beyer of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and in 1950 they presented their findings at the Darmstadt Summer Institute in a paper titled ‘The Sound World of Electronic Music’. At this presentation they met the composer Herbert Eimert. An electronic music studio was established at the WDR in Cologne a year later under the direction of Eimert. Here the emphasis was on synthesizing sounds electronically and manipulating them with tape, rather than using pre-existing or acoustic sounds. Composers in this studio rejected traditional instruments and pre-recorded sounds as viable musical elements. The first demonstrations of ‘elektronische’ techniques took place here in 1953, followed by a 19 October 1954 radio broadcast on Cologne radio of a ‘live’ concert of what was billed as ‘the first truly electronic compositions anywhere’ (in spite of earlier demonstrations), with pieces by Eimert, Henri Pousseur, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Paul Gredinger.

Like Schaeffer, the first composers of elektronische Musik were anxious to explain themselves and their music, and in 1955 published the first issue of the contemporary music journal Die Reihe, edited by Stockhausen and Eimert (translated in 1957 to English). They devoted their inaugural issue to the composition of and philosophy behind their new electronic art form. Introducing readers to his subject matter, Eimert, in the opening essay ‘What is Electronic Music?’, highlighted the main thrust of his philosophy, that electronic music was merely a means to shake up stagnant and worn-out approaches to composition. He believed that ‘new ways of generating sound stipulate new compositional ideas’.Footnote ¹⁰ It was not important that the sound was electronic, rather that the nature of the sonic production was more flexibly manipulated by the composer.

Eimert felt that ‘This electronic music is not “another” music, but is serial music.’Footnote ¹¹ In saying this, he reaffirmed his faith in a new totalized kind of serialism; one that for the first time would include aspects of sound production never before considered in the serial paradigm. Eimert saw in electronic composition a completely new way of composing sound and was joined in this belief by Stockhausen. Stockhausen's disenchantment with traditional instruments was articulated in his statement that ‘any attempt to subordinate the different structures of the different instrumental tones to a general rational principle of proportions is bound to fail’.Footnote ¹² Inherent in such comments is the root of the feud between the two studios. The Germans believed that pre-existing, or ‘found sounds’, always retain some hint of associative baggage, making it impossible to create something totally new. In the essay ‘The Third Stage: Some Observations on the Aesthetics of Electronic Music’, a manifesto of purpose of the principles behind elektronische Musik, H. H. Stuckenschmidt noted that Eimert ‘disassociated himself from the “fashionable and surrealistic” Musique Concrète produced at the Club d'Essai in Paris . . . He is opposed to the idea of composition and interpretation by association and reference.’Footnote ¹³ For his part, Schaeffer believed that ‘If I extract any sound element and repeat it without bothering about its form but varying its matter, I practically cancel out the form, it loses its meaning; only the variation of matter emerges, and with it the phenomenon of music.’Footnote ¹⁴ He insisted that intuition and careful listening should guide a composer's work, not, in the words of historian Daniel Teruggi, ‘as an intellectual construction independent of the sound material’.Footnote ¹⁵

In such a brief summary of the two opposing camps of electronic music, it is difficult not to give the simplistic and oft-repeated sense, as Palombini noted, of, ‘a dichotomy of equipment (synthesizers and tape recorders), material (electronic and recorded sounds), method (total serialism and collage) or temperament (rationality and intuitiveness)’.Footnote ¹⁶ This notion ignores the reality that composers in both studios, by 1956, were producing work that, despite philosophical differences, combined elements of each approach, such as Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge and Henry's Haut voltage.

Most of the nuanced distinctions between the two camps could be ignored by those more interested in this kind of use for electronic sound. Eimert's high-minded attitude towards ‘serious’ music and Schaeffer's rigorous attempts to systematize concrète sounds made for much critical British head-scratching as the United Kingdom started receiving its first reports of these new experiments in the early 1950s. The internal organization of the BBC throughout its many structural changes served to polarize public thinking about contemporary music, and given the power of the BBC to shape musical taste through its broadcasting monopoly, understanding its built-in biases is critical to an interpretation of musique concrète reception. Specifically, the tendency within the BBC to label and isolate various kinds of music into categories of ‘difficulty’ would also affect how experimental techniques were received and developed.

Background and history of the BBC and the Third Programme

After four years as the ‘British Broadcasting Company’, the BBC incorporated in 1927 as a government-sponsored monopoly with exclusive broadcasting rights. The BBC immediately became Britain's largest employer of professional musicians and retained this status throughout the twentieth century. From the beginning, the BBC advocated for a policy of music education, led by the BBC's first director general, John Reith.Footnote ¹⁷ This initially led to a distinction between the interests of the BBC at large, who, by investing in a programme of ‘great works’, attempted to educate the general public, and many within the BBC's Music Department, who were more dedicated to programming challenging contemporary works by European modernist composers.Footnote ¹⁸ Ultimately the two sets of beliefs came to a head in the Five Year Plan of 1934, which determined that the Music Department should more enthusiastically fulfil its obligation to provide performances of ‘the classics’, while at the same time establishing a chamber music ensemble for the performance of more modern and ‘difficult’ works (to vastly smaller audiences). This compromise provided only a temporary solution to the problem. It must be remembered that in the eyes of the administration it was important to programme edifying classical works, the ‘high culture’ standard pieces of the canon, against the more popular dance bands of the day. The battle was for the limited broadcasting time available to the two BBC radio stations: the nationwide Home and provincial Regional. The Music Department's urge to programme more difficult and less accessible music during limited broadcast time was outweighed by this practical ‘improving’ mandate.

Although there had been talk of developing a network dedicated to ‘better class material’ as early as 1924, the idea would have to wait until after the end of the Second World War, when the BBC again reconsidered its position regarding the programming of more difficult music.Footnote ¹⁹ Ultimately, the BBC was divided into three distinct networks with very different political, social, class, and regional agendas polarized around musical and cultural differences: the Home Service, the Light Programme, and the Third Programme.

The Third Programme was the station dedicated to the intellectual ‘elite’; an important distinction was placed between it and ‘educational’ programming. The ‘Third’ was intended not as programming for education, but rather as programming for the educated. As Humphrey Carpenter has shown, throughout the twentieth century Britain's musical inferiority complex led it to look to continental Europe for both inspiration and personnel. In the first few years of the Third Programme's musical broadcasts, the vast majority of programmes used visiting musicians from the Continent, as the BBC Music Department felt that domestic musicians and composers simply did not have the skill to match their European counterparts.

Things began well for contemporary music on the Third Programme. On 14 December 1946, pianist Peter Stadlen led a lecture performance called Schoenberg and the Twelve-Note Scale. During its first few years, the Third broadcast concerts of music by Paul Hindemith, Luigi Dallapiccola, Egon Wellesz, Roberto Gerhard, Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, George Gershwin, and Alban Berg, in addition to a talks series called Contemporary Music and the Listener.Footnote ²⁰ This promotion of contemporary music did not last long, however. With its seeming advocacy for contemporary music, the Third was left open to the charge that, although its budget came from all taxpayers, its programming consisted of material that was of interest only to a tiny unrepresentative section of the public – and, most unforgivably, the portion that would have been most able to pay for that sort of entertainment themselves anyway. Contemporary music promotion, in the minds of critics, exemplified the worst example of this elitist thinking. In May 1948, Harman Grisewood, controller of the Third Programme, requested that what he perceived to be the ‘creeping in’ of contemporary music be curtailed in favour of more accessible modern works (such as Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 6, which received four broadcasts between May and December).Footnote ²¹ Matyas Seiber's Second String Quartet, intended for broadcast in March 1949, was rejected by the controller, noting, ‘Quite frankly, we are able to broadcast only a very little of music so radical as this. The audience to whom it would appeal is, as you know, extremely small.’Footnote ²² By the early 1950s, serial music and other more ‘challenging’ works, with few exceptions, vanished from the radio, replaced by contemporary music that was perceived to be more ‘listener friendly’. Alec Robertson expressed the official view of the BBC regarding their audience's attitude towards much new music, that: ‘they cannot wholly avoid hearing it, but they hear it reluctantly and they find most of it a lot of noise and fury signifying nothing but aural discomfort’.Footnote ²³ Relatively tonal composers such as William Walton, Edmund Rubbra, Arnold Bax, and Benjamin Britten were prominent, but works by other domestic composers, such as Humphrey Searle and Elisabeth Lutyens, both proponents of twelve-tone technique, experienced near total exclusion. Searle noted in a letter to the Composer's Guild of Great Britain that the amount of modern music programmed ‘in relation to music of other countries and older music remains very small’.Footnote ²⁴

The opinion that the Third played only unchallenging music calculated to satisfy in the most cynical terms an uncomplicated idea of what ‘culture’ ought to be emerged in articles written around its tenth anniversary. In particular, the perception that too much pre-classical music was being performed for an uninterested audience galvanized critics. One of the Third's most outspoken supporters at its inception, Edward Sackville-West, wrote of:

Listeners in the 1950s frequently commented on the preponderance of music on the Third by ‘unknown’ Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque composers. It appears that in order to satisfy those listeners who craved new music, the programmers were reaching back in time to find music that could, in one sense, be considered ‘new’, while at the same time not be too aesthetically challenging. The mainstream desire for novelty, for music not overly familiar, was combining with a middlebrow goal of edification, finding a solution in the emergence of the early music movement. As Lawrence Dreyfus has shown, in the 1950s, the listening public turned from the avant-garde's rejection of tonality, and all the soul-destroying pain of modernism, to a perceived early music that ‘redressed the imbalance by repressing the nightmarish present and mounting a grand restoration of the glorious past’.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, early music could work effectively as a substitute for modern music because, first, it promised a near-infinite number of ‘new’ and unknown works at the disposal of programmers, with unusual combinations of rare instruments performing in unfamiliar forms, and second, it contained none of the disturbing dissonance and perceived ‘unfriendliness’ of contemporary music. In their selection process, music planners do seem to be reacting to the very real perception that their programming contained too much contemporary music. But they were put in an impossible position, as some listeners and reviewers remained hostile to any attempt to broadcast the unfamiliar, as this critic exemplified:

In fact, the general audience received any contemporary music with a fair degree of ambivalence, as is apparent from the letters in the press. In a typical missive from 1953 to the BBC's weekly programme guide, the Radio Times, after a concert of modern music, one listener commented: ‘Under the mistaken idea that the art of music must progress or perish those bemused people who call themselves contemporary composers are surging with Schubertian industry minus the divine fire; bringing forth an amazing mass of cacophonous rubbish, with neither character, sensibility, nor form, and with all of which the average listener is heartily sick.’Footnote ²⁸

This letter might well have been referring to Olivier Messiaen, who received a fair amount of abuse from British critics and the public alike in the early 1950s, especially when he was perceived to be writing in a more ‘modern’ style. In the Radio Times’s preview for a 1953 performance of Messiaen's L'Ascension, a BBC representative attempted to mitigate any fears their Third audience might have towards the composer. First admitting that ‘This French Catholic mystic flabbergasted most of us with his Turangalila Symphony, broadcast last June in the Third: some thought it the work of a visionary, others that of a charlatan’, they then assured the listener that since in his new work, they would find ‘a more “normal” manifestation of Messiaen's art, it will perhaps allow us to form a more balanced opinion of his status as a composer’.Footnote ²⁹

A disastrous series of concerts and lectures after Schoenberg's death in 1951 were largely seen as undermined by the Music Department's dislike of the composer (and demonstrating the general perception throughout the musical world of the outré nature of Schoenberg's music at the time, following the rise of Webern). Malcolm Sargent, conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, cancelled his performance of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces and a substitute conductor had to be called in on short notice. Their timidity to programme Schoenberg's later works as well as Michael Tippett's talks that skirted the more difficult issues of his music led The Spectator to remark that:

The Music Department's unfamiliarity with contemporary music can be perhaps best exemplified by the dismissal of a 1954 proposed talk on the music of Dallapiccola, Elliott Carter, and Pierre Boulez by Roger Fiske, Producer of Music Talks, on the grounds that ‘We have no recordings at all of Elliott Carter. . . . We only have one work by Dallapiccola, and I don't think anything by Boulez.’Footnote ³¹ Listeners of the Third Programme throughout the 1950s and 1960s continued to express resentment that they were essentially paying for music they did not like, and one gets the feeling these letters were not from casual listeners, but rather from music lovers who felt that contemporary music was taking up valuable air time. Even as late as 1961, listeners were still complaining about the occasional broadcast of serial compositions, expressing bafflement as to who the audience could be: ‘Why should listeners be compelled to pay for unending doses of Schoenberg and his imitators, whose works cannot command a live audience anywhere in the world and to which not one person in ten thousand listens on the radio?’Footnote ³² Even non-serial pieces by contemporary British composers faced open hostility and incredulity, on those rare occasions they were broadcast: ‘I have just endured Gerhard's Symphony No. 1 played by the BBC Scottish Orchestra. A month ago the same orchestra played a piano concerto by Iain Hamilton which nearly drove me up the wall. Does anyone really enjoy this so-called modern music? I meet most of the members of Sheffield's musical societies, and so far I have not met one who does enjoy it.’Footnote ³³

There was an appetite among some, however, for more difficult music, and these listeners also let their opinions be known in the letters pages of the Radio Times. Perhaps, as Harold Rutland observed, listeners just were not sure how to approach contemporary music. Showing sympathy for the desire to revisit familiar works, he nevertheless admonished that ‘if we stick to the safe ones and never show any sense of adventure, we may well be denying ourselves a valuable enlargement of artistic experience’.Footnote ³⁴ One listener, with the clever pseudonym ‘D. Reihe’, wrote to the Radio Times that ‘I am heartily tired of seeing so many letters from people without the patience or intellectual capacity to appreciate modern music. I suggest we might have one week every year during which, in the Third Programme at least, all tonal music was completely banned.’Footnote ³⁵ Another listener bemoaned the resistance to more challenging music on the part of resistant audiences: ‘I had thought that we had now reached in our musically backward country a point where even those who do not regard atonality as inevitable and dodecaphony as logical are at least willing to admit that it is a legitimate genre.’Footnote ³⁶

This survey of critical and public opinion of contemporary music in the 1950s should go some way towards explaining the initially sceptical attitude in Britain towards developments in electronic music. British musical culture after the Second World War, while mostly endorsing the ideas of musical autonomy and musical progress – and certain of its own domestic musical inferiority – nevertheless was not nearly as invested in relegating the meaning and value of musical works solely to their internal structure as those at the centres of elektronische Musik production on the Continent and elsewhere.Footnote ³⁷ The British attitude towards contemporary music had been traditionally suspicious during most of the twentieth century, and the cultural and musical environment into which electronic music entered Britain was hostile at best. Soon this same audience would be faced with the realization that not only were traditional systems of organizing pitches being challenged, but also the very notion of what constituted ‘music’ was under attack, and by the same Europeans that they perceived as initiating the flood of ‘cacophonous rubbish’ in the first place.

British Reaction to musique concrète

The experiments of composers of musique concrète and elektronische Musik and the battles among them did not go completely unnoticed in Britain, although the audience was small, and hesitant to provide sympathy to either side at first. The first mention of musique concrète in the British press was by the critic John Amis in 1951 after he had attended a contemporary arts festival on the Continent. In his review for the journal Tempo, Amis remarked on the novelties heard there, beginning with Messiaen (who as we have seen, was a common sacrificial lamb in the British press), and whose perceived charlatanism demonstrated the excesses of the avant-garde and musique concrète:

Note that the only group to appreciate the significance of the new music were visual artists, the implication being that they were ‘in on the joke’ along with the concrète-ists, a frequent trope in the mainstream British press. Note also that Amis makes no mention of an inherent ‘Frenchness’ in musique concrète, and that it was Austrian visual artists who rose to defend the new music. For many British critics and musicians in the 1950s, in both the press and the BBC, there was no distinction to be made between the French and the German camps of electronic music. It was all an exemplar of a European music scene out of touch with the traditional British conception of contemporary music and at odds with the BBC Third Programme's promotion of early music and more accessible classical works. In fact, the technique mentioned in the review, of a piano being recorded after the note is struck, had been something of a profound discovery for Schaeffer in his quest for a ‘concrète instrument’ and had been one of his earliest experiments in deconstructing the nature of a sound object: “If I cut off the sounds from their attacks, I get a different sound . . . So I record a series of notes made in this way, each one on a disc. By arranging the discs on record players, I can, using the controls, play these notes as I wish, one after the other or simultaneously.’Footnote ³⁹

The first concert of Schaeffer and Henry's new music was broadcast by the Third on 5 February 1954, well after the debates between the two sides had begun on the Continent, and garnered an immediate reaction from the British public. The broadcast was perhaps a response to Alan Frank, who in the February issue of the Musical Times reaffirmed the frustration some music lovers felt that ‘The appearance of really adventurous music in the Third Programme is in my view too rare. We need shaking up from time to time, and we have a right to hear samples of the most recent developments in contemporary music from all over the world (up to and including the latest manifestations of “La Musique Concrète”, of which the BBC has so far fought shy).’Footnote ⁴⁰ The Radio Times published a letter after the concert of musique concrète displaying real enthusiasm for the genre while managing to sidestep the difficult musical issues. The letter immediately highlights as an asset what many prominent figures in the musical world (those most heavily invested in the BBC's ‘music appreciation’ model of broadcasting) perceived as the greatest threat to the musical establishment: musique concrète’s ability to be understood by those without a specialized musical education:

Another positive response to the first broadcast of ‘a new type of sound-creation’ came from contemporary music advocate David Drew, who felt that ‘there is no doubt that Musique Concrète is a perfectly serious attempt to explore and make fertile a land in the world of sound that has hitherto been closed to the creative artist. As such it deserves our respect and considered attention.’Footnote ⁴²

Although this positively reviewed radio broadcast faded quickly from the memory of listeners, in June 1954 musique concrète made a forceful return to the public consciousness and resonated with larger artistic concerns confronting aficionados. This sudden urgency was triggered by the influential French diplomat Tony Mayer in a musical charm offensive. Parisian Cultural Attaché to London since 1945, Mayer was a respected figure in theatrical and musical circles, and his words were given attention. At the prominent Aldeburgh Festival in June, he delivered a forceful and convincing lecture ‘recital’ on the history and aesthetics of the new art form, and critics initially responded with open ears. Concrete Music, as it was frequently called in Britain, had begun to enter into the collective consciousness of the musical establishment with performances of electronic music at Continental contemporary music festivals steadily increasing. Critic Scott Goddard's delirious review of the Aldeburgh Festival's lecture captures the confusion and fascination expressed by so many British listeners upon first hearing musique concrète:

From the very introduction of musique concrète in the UK, critics were emphasizing its suitability for film, putting their views directly at odds with the Continental distaste for such a use. That the French diplomat himself seemed to be encouraging its understanding as potentially containing an extra-musical function as an accompaniment for film was a canny way of safeguarding the new form of art from the purists who questioned its legitimacy as music. The complex reaction from an anonymous music critic in The Times in July exemplifies the kind of interested confusion expressed by many. After providing readers with a brief summary of the history of musique concrète, including its main players and the influence of the Futurists on its development, the reviewer is reserved in their judgement, perhaps anticipating the likely reaction from audiences: ‘To the orthodox musician and listener the sounds produced by this method are perhaps unacceptable as music, but there can be no doubt that even in its present stage musique concrète can be exciting and evocative. It is certainly a serious attempt to create “new sound.”’Footnote ⁴⁴ This review, for all its qualification, still posits musique concrète as a worthy experiment, and leaves it to others to decide if it warrants the label of ‘music’. An unnamed critic in the same newspaper commented much more disparagingly a week later in a review named ‘Musique Concrète – Tyranny Over Sound’, where the commentator blurs the distinction between Paris and Cologne, lumping them both together as nothing more than scientific experiments – interesting from an investigative perspective, but meaningless as far as music is concerned:

Implicit in this review is the assertion that concrete music is somehow a faddish farce foisted on the world by a Continental avant-garde isolated from the interests of its audience. The writer's hypothetical audience insists that music be ‘interpreted’ and ‘meaningful’. It has to ‘express thoughts’. As the genre stands, it is little more than an ‘amusing toy’, an example of the perceived danger inherent in the mixture of the rational (and detached) sciences with the transcendent arts. The critic mentions repeatedly the mechanical nature of the music's composition, dismissing Henry as a scientist rather than a composer. This opinion had been much more sarcastically articulated in a letter to the Radio Times immediately after the first broadcast in Britain of Schaeffer and Henry's Symphonie:

The belief that the audience was somehow the subject of an avant-garde joke was expressed again and again in the popular press, perhaps best articulated in this letter written several years after the initial wave of electronic music, following a discussion by Philip Laird on computers and music: ‘First the performer is replaced by a machine, then the possibility of an electronic composer arises. May I beg the avant-garde of music to press ardently for their final perfection – the electronic audience?’Footnote ⁴⁷

The fear represented by these letters, that ‘even the arts’ were being taken over by technology, reflected a general feeling that the rapid developments in ‘high technology’ were moving beyond the ability of ordinary people to understand; what was once comprehendible was now practically mystical. In the words of Christine Geraghty, ‘By the 1950s, science had become abstract, had passed into the realm of pure mathematics, so that . . . for the layman, all contact with “reality” was lost.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Many people trusted in science and optimism for what it could do to make people's lives better, which was visible everywhere as a marker of progress. But there was an innate reaction against this tendency in music, which was viewed as somehow ‘transcendent’ and immune to the influences of the culture at large. Musical culture – or at least highbrow musical culture – in Britain thrived on past works and old glories that created a nostalgia for a golden past. But, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the inexorable force of technology acted on the arts with a force equally strong and, ‘as might have been expected in an era of extraordinary techno-scientific revolution [the exogenous forces acting on the arts] were predominantly technological’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The abstraction of technology in culture at large, and the alienation most people felt when confronted by it (especially since throughout the early 1950s Britons still lived in a world controlled by rationing and poverty, and had very little contact with this new technology) meant that this music could most easily be understood as a kind of ‘science fiction’, and a manifestation of the kinds of inhuman, impersonal, unfeeling thought that had, only a few years before, created and used the atomic bomb. The science fiction analogy is carried to the extreme in a review from The Times that seems to (for all its supposed acknowledgement of the genre's ‘newfound legitimacy’) view electronic music with the same distain widely felt towards sci-fi pulp fiction:

Not everyone in the musical press rejected musique concrète or electronic techniques with such a blanket dismissal. The music, after all, represented a sincere attempt by a composer to convey their skill, talent, and ingenuity, elements carried over from traditional classical music, and its Romantic legacy. This was in marked contrast to the impression given by aleatoric composer John Cage. After a prominent concert of his music, which also included a performance of Schaeffer and Henry's Symphonie, The Times described Cage's music as better than Schaeffer's, with a classic backhanded compliment, as being ‘bloodless, almost as inhuman as the symphonic concrete music that followed it in the programme’.Footnote ⁵¹ The Musical Times, hardly a journal known for its adherence to the avant-garde, felt that Cage's contribution took away from the legitimacy of musique concrète through his ‘buffoonery’. Their reviewer worried that ‘This kind of thing can only bring discredit on the whole experimental school, which after all has some backing among serious musicians and has the official encouragement of the French Radio.’Footnote ⁵²

Complaining that traditional concerts of dull nineteenth-century classical music were occupying way too much broadcast time on the Third Programme, one critic in the Musical Times lamented the absence of more experimental music supposedly on the one place on the airwaves where a diversity of musical materials ought to be made available, ‘If [the Third] is indeed a cultural programme, we need to have more things that we cannot have elsewhere . . . This applies to musique concrète as much as to musique ancienne or musique primitive.’Footnote ⁵³

By 1956, most of the positive reviews for musique concrète in the music press (particularly in more mainstream journals such as the Musical Times) had dried up, however, with critics consigning it to the trash heap reserved for most ‘difficult’ contemporary music. British critics (and, by extension) audiences, having been subject to thirty years of ‘music appreciation’-type broadcasting from the BBC, were simply not willing to alter their notions of what constituted ‘music’ at a fundamental level. By the second half of the 1950s, this definition excluded serialism as well. Anthony Milner expressed the opinion, clearly shared by many, that:

In Ian Parrott's estimation, serial music and musique concrète were also equivalent in their meaninglessness, having both gone down a blind alley, ‘from which any amount of witty or solemn comment by their apologists has been unable to extricate them. . . . “Modern” music was so “noisy” for this group [Parisian composers] that they came to the conclusion that notes did not really matter’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the end, what enabled musique concrète to emerge as an important art form by the late 1950s in Britain was its removal from the music scene altogether. Music critics did not like what it meant for contemporary music. Remove the label ‘music’ from the equation. Lawrence Leonard, one of the first reviewers to reposition the musicality of musique concrète, has to tie himself into some pretty reactionary knots to arrive at his conclusions. After dismissing the possibility that photography and film can be an art, ‘because [they are] representational and not artificial’, Leonard goes on to say:

Leonard was close to envisioning musique concrète’s ultimate function in Britain: as sound working in collaboration with words, images, action, to enhance primarily theatrical and dramatic productions. Theatre critics came with no ingrained philosophical issues opposing such uses and enthusiastically embraced the possibilities of concrete music. One excited theatre critic, having borrowed Cultural Attaché Tony Mayer's recordings and notes on the subject, reported that ‘Experiments are going on in France, Germany and Switzerland on a new idea for composing sound through the medium of the tape recorder . . . The French call this new device Musique Concrète . . . I think this sort of sound has great possibilities in the theatre and film.’Footnote ⁵⁷

Throughout 1956, while music producers and critics were panning musique concrète, producers within the BBC Drama Department began collecting recordings and examples of concrete techniques and subtly experimenting with concrete sounds to accent their more ambitious productions. By the time Samuel Beckett's first radio play, All That Fall, was broadcast on the Third Programme in January 1957, critics were raving about exactly those experimental elements that had so disturbed music critics.

This direction, the antithesis of both the French and the German intentions, would go on to be the approach most preferred by the British. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s within the musical community in England does not emerge out of a vacuum; rather, such reactions are a reflection of prevalent attitudes towards contemporary music that had existed since at least the beginning of the century. It was these hostile attitudes which eventually caused electronic and concrete techniques to make the leap onto the drama platform. This is most evident in the establishment in 1958 of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, created for the express purpose of providing tape and electronically generated sound for drama productions. There, occurring outside of the Music Department, and facing no such stigma, tape music and electronic sounds proliferated on radio and television, as ‘special sound’, and ‘Radiophonic music’, often in a tonal language. Unlike Continental and American studios, during its forty-year life, the Workshop would introduce and normalize electronic sounds to generations of British listeners, having repositioned the concrete and electronic from the highbrow to the popular.