Glossary
Some words come back often in the texts of our records. Here they are, said simply.
- Acousmatic music
- Music made to be heard through loudspeakers only, with no players on stage and often no clue to where its sounds came from. Composers build it in the studio from recorded sound, and in concert it is played back and spread across many speakers.
- Ambient
- Music meant to sit in a room like light or weather: it can be listened to closely or left in the background. The word was given to it by Brian Eno in the 1970s; it is usually slow, quiet and without a beat.
- Drone
- A sound held for a long time, a note or a chord that does not move. Drone music is built on it: the changes happen inside the sound, in its overtones and its texture, and the ear slowly learns to follow them.
- Electroacoustic music
- Music that joins acoustic sound (voices, instruments, objects) with electronic means: recording, transforming, synthesising. It covers a wide field, from studio works on tape to live electronics with players.
- Extended techniques
- Ways of playing an instrument beyond its usual sound: blowing into a saxophone without a note, bowing a cymbal, playing inside a piano, singing through a flute. They are part of the vocabulary of much improvised and contemporary music.
- Field recording
- Sound recorded outside the studio, where it happens: a forest, a city, a factory, a river under the ice. Some records present it as it is, others use it as material for composition.
- Free improvisation
- Music made up on the spot by the players, without a score, a tune or agreed chords. Born in the 1960s around jazz and contemporary music, it counts on listening: every sound answers the others.
- Free jazz
- Jazz that from the late 1950s set itself free of fixed chord changes and steady time, with Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra among the first. It is often intense and collective, but can also be very quiet.
- Granular synthesis
- A way of making sound by cutting recordings into tiny grains, a few thousandths of a second long, and putting them back together in clouds. It can stretch a single note into a long, shimmering mass.
- Graphic score
- A score made of drawings, shapes or words instead of notes on a stave. The players read it and turn it into sound, so each performance can be different.
- Industrial
- Music born in the late 1970s with Throbbing Gristle and their label Industrial Records: noise, tape, machines and harsh subjects, made outside the record industry. Its traces run through much later electronic music.
- Just intonation
- Tuning notes by simple ratios between their frequencies, as harmonics do in nature, instead of the equal tuning of the piano. Chords sound very still and pure, and the ear notices a slight strangeness.
- Krautrock
- German music of the late 1960s and 1970s (Can, Neu!, Faust, Cluster, Tangerine Dream) that left rock behind for long repetitive pieces, electronics and the studio. Kosmische Musik is its more spacious, electronic side.
- Library music
- Music recorded for radio, television, film and advertising, sold to producers through catalogues rather than to the public. In the 1960s and 1970s, in Italy above all, composers used it to experiment freely; the records are now sought after.
- Microtonal music
- Music that uses the intervals between the keys of the piano, smaller than a semitone. It can sound out of tune at first, then opens up a much wider range of harmony.
- Minimalism
- Music built from few elements repeated and slowly changed, born in the United States in the 1960s with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Listening, one hears the small changes grow large.
- Modular synthesizer
- An electronic instrument made of separate units (oscillators, filters, envelopes) joined by cables. Each patch makes a different instrument; it is used for long evolving sounds as much as for rhythm.
- Musique concrète
- Music made from recorded sounds of any kind, cut, slowed, reversed and joined on tape. Pierre Schaeffer began it in Paris in 1948, and the GRM studio grew from his work.
- Noise
- Music that takes noise as its material instead of notes: loud, dense, often abrasive, sometimes very quiet. Japan, with Merzbow and Hijokaidan, has one of its great scenes.
- Prepared piano
- A piano with screws, rubber, paper or other objects placed between its strings, which turn it into a small percussion orchestra. John Cage made it known in the 1940s.
- Sound art
- Art made with sound outside the concert: installations, sound sculptures, radio pieces, works for a place. It belongs as much to the gallery as to music.
- Sound poetry
- Poetry made of the sound of the voice more than the meaning of words: breath, syllables, cries, often worked on tape. It runs from the Dada poets to Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck.
- Spectral music
- Music written from the inner make-up of sound, its spectrum of overtones as computers can show it. It started in France in the 1970s with Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.
- Tape music
- Music composed directly on magnetic tape: recorded, cut, spliced, played at other speeds or in loops that repeat. Before computers it was the main tool of the electronic studio.