Established in the 1950s by musician and engineer Pierre Schaeffer, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales would become the nerve center for avant-garde artists experimenting with sound and acoustics, as well as the birthplace of a genre of music-making enabled by new recording technologies and sound pioneers: musique concrète. Évelyne Gayou—herself a researcher, composer, and producer at the GRM—tells the history of the storied institution through the people, works, technologies, and research developed there. Placing musique concrète within a broad historical context extending from the early twentieth-century avant-garde's experiments with noise to the development of techniques in sound recording (at the Studio d'Essai in the 1940s) and later in sound synthesis, Gayou shows how recording technology made it possible for composers to not only create music from sounds in the world around them but also create acousmatic music—novel sounds without a visible connection to their source. Available in English translation for the first time, this updated edition will be an important resource for readers interested in the pioneering works and techniques of Schaeffer and his contemporaries, as well as their influence on the makers of new music and the contemporary avant-garde.
Évelyne Gayou is a French musicologist and composer, and a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales since 1975.
David Vaughn is an interdisciplinary artist and arts translator, whose extensive translation experience includes an enduring collaboration with the GRM and its associates.
"Finally, a text that is a reference source and tells the story and impact of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales from its beginning with Pierre Schaeffer and his many experiments at French National Radio."—John Chowning, Stanford University
"The clearest, most insightful, and most comprehensive history of the GRM in print. It is absolutely indispensable for understanding how musique concrète became a school of composition, a research program, a technological laboratory, and an institution."—Brian Kane, Yale University
"Évelyne Gayou's pathbreaking history of the GRM is now available in this beautiful English translation by David Vaughn. Of interest to both scholars and a general audience, it charts the course of a musical revolution that contributed to the evolution of cultural life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."—David W. Bernstein, Mills College at Northeastern University
"The evolution of musical languages is inextricably linked to technology. A Revolution in Music identifies the seminal importance of both the recording medium and the radio station to the development of contemporary musical thought. In this fluent translation, Gayou provides a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between people, technology, and composition at the GRM."—John Dack, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, UK
424 pp.6 x 9Illus: 29 b/w figures, 2 tables
9780520409774$45.00|£38.00Paper
Feb 2025