Two different takes on using electronic equipment will duke it out (an old expression for some old genres) to see which is the most influential!
In the red corner we have Musique Concrete, the sampling-obsessed French genre that loves its microphones and manipulation!
In the blue corner we have Elektronische Musik, the German synthesizer-savvy style that values computer-generated sounds over real recordings any day of der Woche!
Let the battle commence!
Roots of ConcreteLet's start in France, 1948, when the French Composer "Pierre Schaeffer" created the first pieces of musique Concrete - a style where acoustmatic music (acousmatic sound is when you hear a sound without seeing the thing that causes it. Acousmatic music is when this recorded sound is used in a musical context.) was used for the entirety of the composition.
Now, considering the music at the time was mainly big band stuff, this was quite a diversion from the norm and was (and still is) met with considerable criticism. Many people failed to see how resampling trains was musical.
But that didn't stop Schaeffer from carrying on with his microphones, mixing desk and even some seriously old school effects (some very rudimentary filters and mechanical reverb were used)
During this time, a german composer named Karlheinz Stockhausen worked in Schaeffer's studio.
In comes Elektronische Musik...Karlheinz eventually wrote Elektronische Studie II, which was the first electronic music piece to have a score. He was not the only founder of what they defined as "Elektronische Musik" however.
German music theorists Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert joined him and completed the four horsemen of the noisy apocalypse. This apocalypse intended to eclipse the naturally generated sounds that Musique Concrete valued with electronically produced signals.
So that's how they began, where did they go from there?
If we follow Musique Concrete through the 50s and into the 60s, it began popularizing the art form of sampling sound for music. The "Groupe de Recherches Musicales" - a collection of experimental musicians working under Schaeffer pushed the envelope of acousmatic music...
They created devices such as keyboards that could be used to change the speed of playback, machines with several playback heads that could create an echo effect and a "replay tape" which could play loops at a variable range of speeds.
Elektronische Musik, however, inspired bands such as Kraftwerk, who formed in 1970 - revolutionizing music by bringing melody into synthesized sound for the first time in a popular context.
So where are they now?
Take a look in the charts - They will be dominated with Synthesizer-ridden pop music and sample-studded Hip Hop. Both ideologies live on long after they were first created, but in very different forms.Sampling has become commonplace in the electronic music scene, with samplers like the Akai MPC bringing it to a massive market, and of course synthesizers, not ones to be left in the dust, have been developing too, with pioneers like Moog pushing them until they are so powerful that we take for granted that we can get a powerful multi-oscillator Saw-tooth wave at the touch of a button.
A large amount of synthesizers involve some element of both sampling and synthesizing and have done for a while, for example, using a sampled attack from a piano sound and using a synthesized tail to the sound for more control over it.So when it comes to asking the question: "Which was the most influential?" Take a look in the charts. Do you see something synthesized or do you see an artistic sampling of something you've seen before?
Chances are it's a sample of something that was synthesized in the first place! In which case Musique Concrete and Elektronische Musik have been used in conjunction to create the biggest hits of this generation! And that's a message we can all learn from (Sorry for the cheesy end, I just had to do it!)
