Sam Ridout

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Sam Ridout is a writer based in London. His current research is concerned with the ambivalent cultural positioning of electroacoustic music in France between the 1940s and the 1970s, attending to its various engagements with mass culture, counterculture and avant-garde theoretical and artistic production.

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Freak out! At the acousmonium: François Bayle and the dynamics of the subject

French electroacoustic music in the postwar decades has typically been associated with a high mod... more French electroacoustic music in the postwar decades has typically been associated with a high modernism that spurned popular or mass culture. This article situates electroacoustic music in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to the transformation of the cultural field in this period, which unsettled clear divisions between high and low cultures. Attending in particular to the question of subjectivity as it appears in the theoretical writings of the composers Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, the article aligns Bayle's thinking with that of contemporary writers including Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, who launched a critique of the Enlightenment subject. This theoretical nexus suggests that Bayle's L'Expérience acoustique (1969-1972) posits a form of subjectivity closer to the psychedelic counterculture than to the sober listening of Schaeffer's writings. In unsettling the Schaefferian listening subject, the piece opens itself to a heterogeneous listening, the social consequences of which remain significant today.

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The Musical Text: Theorizing Openness after Structuralism

Twentieth-Century Music, 2023

This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and po... more This article attends to the conjuncture in the early 1970s of post-Cagean musical practice and poststructuralist theory associated with the journal Musique en jeu and the music department of the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes. Reading the theoretical writing of figures including Daniel Charles and Ivanka Stoïanova alongside the music of Costin Miereanu, the article elaborates the account of the open work that emerges there, before turning to an LP by Miereanu, Luna cinese (1975), which grapples with the aporetic figure of the open record and in so doing takes the 'openness' of post-Cagean experimentalism in new directions. In conclusion, I begin to theorize what Miereanu's open record suggests about the listening that records call for and the fixity of records in general.

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Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde

Electronic Inspirations charts the development of the electronic music studio at the Westdeutsche... more Electronic Inspirations charts the development of the electronic music studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, the central point around which elektronische Musik orbited for much of the 1950s and 1960s. This represents the first English-language monograph devoted to a studio that has long been regarded as seminal in the history not only of post-war New Music, but also of popular musical forms. Rather than focussing her attention on proverbial great men and works, Iverson traces...

The aesthetics of animated sound: François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani and the Service de la recherche de l’ORTF

Founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1960, the Service de la recherche at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Fra... more Founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1960, the Service de la recherche at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française sought to incubate technical and aesthetic research in television and radio, supporting the development of novel animation techniques, pedagogical films for television and experimental short films. As such, the Service served as a fertile meeting point for composers and filmmakers, playing a significant role in the early careers of a number of well-known French composers of electroacoustic music. The early work of both François Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani principally consisted of music and sound for the moving image – and in particular for experimental animated shorts by filmmakers including Robert Lapoujade and Piotr Kamler – created with the support of the Service de la recherche. In attending to the particular configurations of sound and image worked out in these collaborations, the idea of ‘animation’ emerges as a recurring concern in the electroacoustic music of the period, ...

‘From the Totem to the Antenna’: Musique Concrète and the Universal at the end of the French Empire

Music & Letters, 2020

This article situates Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète in the context of the end of the French... more This article situates Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète in the context of the end of the French empire. In drawing out conceptual continuities between Schaeffer’s administration of colonial radio in the mid-1950s and works of musique concrète from the same period, I argue that both projects are predicated on a commitment to the capacity of acousmatic listening to provide access to universal essences. The invocation of the ‘primitive’ in Schaeffer’s writing and music thus serves to buttress the universalizing rhetoric of musique concrète, portraying it as a neutral site for the reconciliation of different cultures, underwritten by a shared human essence. As such, musique concrète partakes in the logic of a colonial humanism, in which empire is conceived of as another such neutral framework. By way of conclusion, a form of acousmatic listening opposed to essence and empire is elaborated from the writings of Schaeffer’s anticolonial contemporaries.

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Freak out! At the acousmonium: François Bayle and the dynamics of the subject

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The Musical Text: Theorizing Openness after Structuralism

Twentieth-Century Music, 2023

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Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde

The aesthetics of animated sound: François Bayle, Bernard Parmegiani and the Service de la recherche de l’ORTF

‘From the Totem to the Antenna’: Musique Concrète and the Universal at the end of the French Empire

Music & Letters, 2020

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Sam Ridout

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