Etude aux chamins de fer (Railway Study)

Pierre Schaeffer was the inventor of musique concrète, an early form of what is now known as electro-acoustic music. He called it “concrete” music because unlike “abstract” music, which consists of symbols on a page, it is made up from reality – the sounds of church bells, say, birdsong, speech, wind, water, machines… Having recorded the raw sounds, the concrete composer manipulates them in the studio and arranges the developed material into a musical form, which he then commits to a new recording. The Etude aux chemins de fer, one of the earliest of all pieces of elctro-acoustic music, was created from recordings Schaeffer made at the Gare des Batignolles in Paris in 1948 and ­first performed in a Concert de bruits (Concert of Noises) on French radio in the same year.

While no one will have no difficulty in recognising the source of the sounds, Schaeffer insisted that the listener should not attempt to read a narrative into them - whistles blowing, engine starting, gathering speed, rattling along the lines, etc. They are to be heard as music, as a structure defined by the opening, closing and intervening whistles, as an interplay of contrasted themes, a counterpoint of rhythms, a series of modulations in colour and dynamic intensity. In comparison with later developments in electro-acoustic music, Etude aux chamins de fer is not a sophisticated work. On the other hand, bearing mind that it was created before the electronic tape was invented, it is a virtuoso exercise in manipulating sounds on disc. ­