Concrete music, free improvisation:

a question of space
ALEXANDRE CAHEN

In the present essay, I will compare the notion of space from the perspective of free improvisation
and concrete music.

In my own musical practice, I have been playing free, non-idiomatic improvisation using mainly
acoustic instruments (piano, prepared piano). My knowledge in electronic music is quite poor but
surprisingly speci c. I happened to grow up surrounded by the sounds of concrete music.
My father studied concrete music composition at the GRM with Pierre Schae er in the 70’s. His
way of listening to sounds, in a musical context (like a concert hall) or in a non-musical context
(the street, a forest, a cave), has always fascinated me.

The di erent principles of concrete music, the importance of the sound itself over an abstraction
of it (a note or a rhythm), the separation between the sound and its source, the absence of
hierarchy between di erent sounds,… this particular way of listening to sounds and music made
me think di erently about the piano and pushed me towards free improvisation.

I will use in this essay concrete music and free improvisation to speak about acoustic space
because my personal experience as free improviser and the concepts I learned documenting
myself on concrete music felt very much connected.

In this speci c genres, space is being played like a musical instrument. This statement could be
applied for all musical genres, but I nd particularly true for concrete music and free
improvisation. In these genres, the music’s characteristics can change drastically depending on
the space where they are played. The music itself is composed thinking about the space, which in
not necessarily the case in other genres. A jazz musician will tend to play the same in a small
venue as in a big hall, dealing with the acoustic space as a constraint. A free improviser will play
with the space and it a key element of the newly created music. And the concept of acousmonium
is an invention of concrete music.

Before digging deeper into these perspectives on space, here is the rst de nition of concrete
music by its inventor, Pierre Schae er, published in the French journal Polyphonie in 1948:

“We use the term abstract to speak about the music we listen usually because it is an
intellectual construct, notated theoretically, eventually realised in an instrumental performance. We
call our music concrete because it is constituted from pre-existing elements taken from any kind
of sound material, noise or music, then composed experimentally by direct construction.”
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Inner Space, external space
For the main part, the composition of concrete music happens inside the studio. It is then
destined to be played on speakers in a concert hall, a living room, or whatever space in which it
can be deployed. In his book L’art des sons xés, Michel Chion has theorised the existence of two
levels of space existing in concrete music.

“The space within the piece itself, xed on the tape (and characterised by the level of presence of
every plane, the di erent reverberations surrounding the original sounds,...) and the external
space, depending on the listening conditions each time di erent (acoustics of the concert hall,
number/nature/display, use of lters during the concert, the intervention of a sound engineer,…).”.

The inner space of the piece is part of the sound identity as much as the pitch, the timbre, the
dynamics. To play the music in an external space is to modify the nature of the piece itself. The
idealistic situation would be to play the piece in a neutral acoustic environment, but sometimes,
the environment can be used to magnify and reveal some aspect of the concrete music piece.
Concrete composers have developed an instrument to help the creation of a modular external
space, explicitly created for concrete music di usion: the acousmonium. It is constituted of at
least 16 speakers of di erent characteristics. It is di erent from a classical sound system in the
way that the acousmonium focuses on sound spatialisation, the sound « grain » , and not a faithful
restitution of the sound. The acousmonium is played live by a sound engineer, or the composer,
the bring the concrete composition to its highest possible level of expression in the speci c space
where it is being played.
The acousmonium being the main protagonist of the concrete music concert (there are no
musicians on stage, and the sound engineer is usually hidden in the back of the room), concrete
music initiate also a revolution of the performing space, the stage. The audience have nothing to
see to distract them from the sound (in application of the principle: the sound is separated from
its source).

In free improvisation, we can say that we play the external space as much as we play our
instruments. The music created is conditioned by the space in which it deploys, and each space
has its own advantages and issues. For example, in a church with a 10 seconds reverb, we would
tend to play with less density, controlling the dynamics. The simplest sounds would become
complex, and we could play more with the resonance than with the sound itself. Playing loud
would be di cult because the sounds are blending and becoming blurred. Whereas a very dry
acoustic space, for example, the Regie 2 in Jazz Campus, would make us play denser, the sound
dying quickly and impoverished by the absence of resonance. We would maybe tend to create
more complex timbres to overcome the dead space. On the other hand, playing loud wouldn’t be
a problem.

There are examples of free improvisation recordings in which the space is the main instrument
creating the music. The recording Deep Listening (recorded in 1988) by Pauline Oliveros, Paniotis
and Stuart Dempster. This album was recorded in Fort Worden Cistern, an underground cave with
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an incredible 45 seconds reverb. The musicians brought an accordion, trombone, didgeridoo,
garden hose, conch shell and a pipe, but what really mattered was the space.

The idea of inner space is common to every kind of music (every recording has its own space
crafted by the sound engineer), but usually, the use of space is standardised depending on the
music genre. Recording a jazz quartet, the sound engineer will try to create a space that gives the
illusion of listening to the band at a venue (for example, soloist upfront, the rhythmic section
behind). In concrete music, this objective of faithful reproduction is replaced by the creation or
suggestion of an « imaginary or poetic space ». Creating space for free improvisation recordings is
similar. It leaves a lot of freedom and can be a compositional process on its own. For example,
the smallest details of the sound, barely hearable in reality can be put up front. The instruments
can be placed so that their physical integrities melt into one another to cover the tracks of who is
playing what. Without changing the sound’s nature, the use of space can completely change the
record’s identity.

Conclusion

Free improvisation and concrete music both use space as a tool for expression.
Concrete music composers have theorised the concepts of inner space and external space
demonstrating the power of recording technology and electronic sounds for creating new kind of
spaces. In order to deploy these new types of sound, the concrete musicians have invented the
acousmonium, a powerful tool of sound di usion from which the modern spatialisation sound
system are derived.
Free improvisation use space as an instrument, and the music being created is necessarily
function of the space where the music is played.

The way concrete musicians and free improvisers listen to sound is similar and is also a question
of space. As written by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book A l’écoute : « Listening opens an inside-
outside space, like a Möbius strip. The sound, once internalised causes a chain of reactions, a
movement of musical expression, an energetic cycle between our body and what surrounds it. »
The process in free improvisation consists of this movement of back and forth: we listen and
produce sounds, in a perpetual oscillation between what happened and what could happen,
what’s inside and what’s outside. Sound is the source of emotions, and it is these emotions that
make us move and play.
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