pre-term-project.md

Pre- Term Paper Project Assignment // Andrew Monks

This isn't exactly a

• pre-approved performance,
• video/DVD with music, or a
• score or performance plan

But, if it's acceptable, I'd like to build an informative website about Musique Concrète, focused around Pierre Schaeffer. I'll use Musique Concrète as a lens through which to examine the politics of the mid 20th century, and the music that has developed since then.

After the Second World War, Schaeffer wanted nothing to do with anything German. Of course, much of the canon of western music is German, so Schaeffer had to turn in a new direction. The result of these explorations was Musique Concrète. It was a reactionary, challenging music, described by some as noise. And, it set the stage for the enormous transformations that would overtake Western music through the next 50 years and beyond. Hip hop, for example, is fundamentally indebted to Scaheffer's work and to Musique Concrète.

The website will take the form of several well-cited essays, each exploring a different facet of Musique Concrète and its relation to music and politics.

The goal of the work is to create a secondary/tertiary-source resource valuable to the following imagined users:

1. A student of 20th century music seeking a bibliography of high-quality primary and secondary sources
2. Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the lineages of 21st century musical genres
3. Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the politics of music since the 1950s
4. Anyone seeking to hear hard-to-find recordings of avant-garde 20th century music

Partial bibliography

A big part of this project is collecting high-quality sources, and then finding the most pertinent passages within those sources. As with many subfields of art-writing [see October], a preliminary research into primary sources leads to a tangled maze of poorly-translated, misattributed, possibly-lost French journal articles. I have not (even close to) finished culling through this maze. That said, here's a partial list of (mostly English language!) sources I'm checking out.

• organised sound a recently-started journal
• the ina grm, the studio started by Schaeffer
• this interview with Schaeffer conducted in 1986
• In Search Of A Concrete Music by schaeffer, translated in 2012
• A variety of texts by Schaeffer scholar Carlos Palombini (which I found because one of Palombini's articles shares a title with both a book and an article by Schaeffer himself)
• this survey of writing about Schaeffer, published by Palombini in Leonardo in 2001
• Shaeffer's Treatise of Musical Objects, translated here into Spanish, which I can read competently than French.
• this book by Seth Kim-Cohen

Of course, this project hinges on my ability to find high-quality sources that I am able to read and synthesize. I know there's more out there for me to find, but I don't know how far I'll get.