“I have coined the term Musique Concrete for this commitment to compose with materials taken from given experimental sound in order to emphasise our dependence, no longer on preconceived sound abstractions, but on sound fragments that exist in reality and that are considered as discrete and complete sound objects, even if and above all when they do not fit in with the elementary definitions of music theory.”
P. Schaeffer, May 15 1948
The study relies upon the first of Schaeffer’s Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises) 1948, which was characterised by Schaeffer himself as a ‘false good idea’, as he believed that train sounds are beautiful in the way they are, thus it is difficult to bind them musically (Kane, 2014). Being motivated by the definition of musique concrete as “music created from recordings of real-life sounds”, and having as prime matter the concrѐte movement of the passenger, the choreography deals with the reposition and the transition between the movement events in time.
photo credits: Giorgos Konstantinides
Performance & Choreography: Ioanna Bili
1994 London Underground recording: Alan McFetridge
Tech support: Dani Joss
Presented at the Vitruvian Thing(Thessaloniki, GR) as part of Unit Motives, an evening of studies on Groupe de Recherches Musicales, and its composers Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari, and others.