Pierre Boulez - Etudes I sur un son (1951)

Pierre Boulez participates with Étude 1 and 2, from as early as 1951. This was even before Rune Lindblad had his revelation of a new sound, waking up, hung-over, in the park of Slottsskogen in Gothenburg, Sweden, and, amazingly, one year before Stockhausen’s first concrete Etude, which was executed in 1952.
Pierre Boulez’s Étude 1 bears all the features typical of its time, with fragments of brute sounds cutting like shrapnel through the sound space, though, of course, monaural. Your ear seems to equip the material with spatial properties, however; perhaps from the impression of motion that the frantic fluttering about of flaky sound objects with metallic surfaces and sharp corners present, or perhaps just because of our later stereophonic listening, which we have become so accustomed to.
Boulez’s First Étude stands up good to any comparisons to other works of those days, and to what was to come in the years immediately ahead, until Stockhausen swept the arena clean of competitors with Gesang der Jünglinge and… Kontakte.

Boulez’s very first Étude didn’t sound as much concrete as it sounded electronic, in fact, though you might have been able to detect some source sounds, like creaking doors and so forth – but Étude 2 bears witness to a more obvious concretism. The sounds are clearer, more rounded off, with distinct contours, and also a bit softer, arranged like fruits in a bowl in a still life. I hear percussive sounds in sequence with dripping and ticking sounds, followed by glissandi and glassy intrusions, as well as speedily rotating objects. Étude 2 seems to explore a more complicated and diverse sound world than did Étude 1 – and development of the art of electronic and concrete music was rapid; each step a step forward into new, pristine sonic worlds.

video created with Sonic Visualizer and vokoscreen on an openSUSE 13.1 Linux system.