Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry
Symphonie pour un homme seul

Once upon a time, there was musique concrète, and it was made in Paris at the Studio d'Essai of the RTF, the French broadcasting corporation. It was called "concrete" because it was based on the idea of recording noises and sounds from the real world (such as tops, pots, trains) to then rework them in the studio, giving them a different acoustic form. Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) was the inventor of musique concrète and devoted himself to it for a long time with genuine passion, also leaving us some theoretical essays of notable importance (among others, A la recherche d'une musique concrète and L'objet musical). With Pierre Henry, a musician of more traditional training who was also working in the Parisian studio, he created the most famous piece of musique concrète, "Symphonie pour un homme seul": the first version from 1949, elaborated by Henry into its final form in 1951.

This piece has nothing of the classical symphony, it rather resembles a suite being divided into 12 short sections, lasting 21 minutes. A kind of collage teeming with snippets of voices, both male and female, variously recomposed and repeated; at times, the voices are played backward or sped up. Other sound ingredients include screams, whistles, noises of steps, doors slamming, metallic crackles, along with the recorded sound of a prepared piano.

An acoustic potpourri more than musical, albeit not lacking a certain unique charm. The choreography of "Symphonie pour un homme seul" by Maurice Béjart in 1955 for the Avignon Festival has remained famous. But let's not hide it: this piece, like all musique concrète, is very fragile from the point of view of musical values. Its interest does not lie so much in artistic merit as in the fact that Schaeffer's interest in noise as a musical element paved the way for many trends and expressive forms in the decades to come, rock included.

In essence, Schaeffer and his peers invented the technique of sampling, albeit with means that now seem rudimentary. It was an attempt, in Europe, trying to leave behind the smoldering ruins of war, to imagine new sonic horizons. Others would do so in a much deeper and more incisive way, but that intuition, sampling, remains very valid to this day. Therefore, we can say that once there was musique concrète, and now it is no longer here. But in the meantime, it has greatly transformed.