A Revolution in Music

The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales

Évelyne Gayou, David Vaughn

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English

University of California Press
25 February 2025

Electronic music; Social & cultural history; Acoustic & sound engineering

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.

By: Évelyne Gayou
Translated by: David Vaughn
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 33mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780520409774
ISBN 10: 0520409779
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 25 February 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Contents List of Illustrations Preface to the English Edition Introduction PART ONE. ORGANIZING FORGETTING: A THEMATIC APPROACH 1. Before 1948: Prehistory 2. A Name—a School—a Style of Music 3. Concepts—Pedagogy—Tools 4. Space—Concert—Audience 5. In Search of Music Writing PART TWO. MEMORIALIZING THE FACTS: A CHRONOLOGICAL APPROACH 6. 1948–1958: The Avant-Garde of Musique Concrète 7. 1958–1968: Birth of the GRM 8. 1968–1978: End of the Schaeffer Era 9. 1978–1988: Real and Nonreal Time 10: 1988–1998: Innovation 11. 1998 and Beyond Postscript Notes Bibliography—Discography Index

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.

Reviews for A Revolution in Music: The History of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales

""Ms. Gayou rightly takes note of how the approach to sound developed by musique concre`te has gradually infiltrated the thinking of musicians more generally, in particular through a greater awareness of timbre and the components of sound, including spatialization. . . .The devotion to exegesis and pedagogy have rarely been treated elsewhere as such critical, complementary components of creative work with sound as they have been by Schaeffer and his GRM legacy."" * Computer Music Journal *