Francis Dhomont arranges natural recorded sounds onto stereo tape (now CD), and plays them back through eight speakers, mixing the two channels live throughout the room. This creation of fixed-media art came to be called musique concrète, a term which began in France with Pierre Schaeffer.
There are things we (an educated classical music audience) come to expect and recognize in music: the “arc,” harmonic movement (or stasis), the grammar of an ending. The natural sounds strip away any harmony, any recognizable form, and timbre — or “sonority,” why a trumpet and a saxophone can play the same note and sound different — is the only thing left. At one point in time, primarily with the Romantics beginning around Beethoven, this was achieved through orchestration, or the differentiation of instruments. Whereas Bach’s Die Kunst Der Fuge was completely devoid of instrumental markings (it has since been played by string trios, pianists, the organ, and many others), Mahler rides on the powerful sonority of the brass, and Grieg’s “Spring” from Peer Gynt is unimaginable on anything but the pure flute. Timbre serves as a support to harmony, such that we know that the blaring brass signify a climax. We realize discrepancies within the instruments as well, as a flute can be soft and pure (Grieg’s Peer Gynt) or the voice of a flaming bird (Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite).
If timbre can support and even eclipse harmony, then can harmony be removed completely? Dhomont’s music is pure sonority, without harmony or signposts given to traditional (harmony-based) musical analysis. Instead, it creates much the same form using nothing but the sounds themselves. And this is the key: the form is recognizable. Dhomont (at age 84 — Friday was his birthday) seems to be a product of that late modernist generation, schooled before the formlessness (and silence) of John Cage. The endings were endings, the grammar still underlying every musical movement, even if the sounds themselves were entirely foreign. It was Modern music in the capital sense, the sense that can be better read as post Modern because of its extension of the methods, rather than questioning of the motives. It was still the work of an artist, as sounds are still given voice by the man at the mixer; there were no dice rolled.
This begs the question of writing, possibly the greatest leap that musique concrète made. In the French school (meaning not Stockhausen), there was no score for these tape works (feel free to correct this statement — I’m curious to hear if examples exist). The expectation exists that the audience is hearing the voice of the artist (composer) directly, without any interference from a conductor or performer. It would seem to be a war waged against the precariousness of writing, if not for one thing: the sounds’ origins. These “natural” sounds, not sprung fully-formed from the artist and his tools but rather shaped on the chopping block (although now shaped on the MacBook Pro digital audio workstation) are appropriation itself. Like a poet’s appropriation of words, the composer creating musique concrète shapes sounds by their contexts — by what other sounds appear near them, and how those sounds may carry multiple meanings. Dhomont’s music, then, becomes even closer to writing than ever before, not because it is seemingly fixed but because it is appropriated.
![Francis Dhomont [Lisbon (Portugal), November 30, 2018]](https://res.electrocd.com/image.php/image/d/dhomont_fr.9171.jpg?width=n2&cropratio=1:1)
