Walter Murch - What is musique concrete? (12/320)

To listen to more of Walter Murch’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Walter Murch (Film-maker)  

Walter Scott Murch (b. 1943) is widely recognised as one of the leading authorities in the field of film editing, as well as one of the few film editors equally active in both picture and sound. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2016]

TRANSCRIPT: And shortly after that, I came home from school one day and turned on the radio in my room and heard something coming out of the radio that sounded like the kind of things that I had been concocting on this tape recorder, which were collages of sounds, naturally recorded sounds, put in different orders. And my first thought was: how did they get hold of my tapes? And my second thought was: they didn’t - this is somebody else’s work. So I turned on my tape recorder and started recording off the radio, whatever this was and listened very attentively to... Who is this? What is this? And the announcer came on at the end and said this was the first panorama of musique concrète by two French composers. And I turned the tape recorder off and just sat back thinking, what does this mean? Because up to that point, I thought whatever I was doing was just my 11, 12-year-old equivalent of building model airplanes or something. Now, something that to me sounded very similar was being broadcast over the radio and it was from a record and the record was from France. So suddenly, I had this realisation that the world is much bigger than I thought it was as regarding this... whatever this technology was, and so I began to dig into, what is musique concrète? And what can you understand of this at the age of 12 or 13? But I tried to understand it and became a big fan of these two composers, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. I think Pierre Henry is still alive as we speak because they were in their early 20s in the early ‘50s. Schaeffer, I think, has passed on.