François Delalande is one of the few major figures in the world of electroacoustic music whose renown is not related to artistic work. His oeuvre within electroacoustic musicology is both impressive and significant. Now he has retired from the GRM, where he worked during most of his career, it seems timely to present a volume of selected writings. As I discovered whilst preparing the section on electroacoustic musicology in Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (Landy Reference Landy2007), Delalande’s list of publications is highly extensive and covers a wide territory. It is a shame that so little has been translated and published in English (much more, for example, has been published into Italian) – his excellent ‘Music Analysis and Reception Behaviours – Sommeil by Pierre Henry’ (1998) being the key publication known to anglophones. This problem is not solved through the appearance of this recent volume, but its strength for French readers who have only discovered a selection of his writings is that it involves a ‘best of’ approach within the breadth of his research regarding music analysis.
After an introduction by the GRM’s director, Daniel Teruggi, this book has been ordered according to four general themes: pertinence, points of view, behaviours (‘conduites’); transcription; meaning; and epistemology. What holds all of these together is analysis being primarily undertaken from the listener’s point of view. Delalande often calls upon work in ethnomusicology, a field which, similar to electroacoustic music, is largely dealing with repertoire without a prescriptive score. There is, therefore, in both fields good reason to develop methods for aesthesic analysis and relevant forms of transcription for analytical goals. When Delalande calls upon representation, this is largely informed by aural analysis.
One of the key contributions in the first section is the introduction of Delalande’s ‘conduites d’écoute’ (also called ‘conduites de réception’ – listening/reception behaviours), an approach that is at least as valuable as Schaeffer’s perhaps better-known ‘quatre écoutes’. This approach to listening behaviours has gained great resonance in electroacoustic music studies, in particular in terms of francophone research. With this in mind, it comes as no great surprise to discover a short report of an empirical study in this section by Antonio Alcázar Aranda, which, through case studies, strongly supports Delalande’s approach. The above-mentioned article on Henry in the original French version also appears in this section.
Delalande has been involved with the development of the Acousmographe and, therefore, his theoretical writing on representation is of importance, not least for its historical value. Furthermore, Delalande was one of the first people who investigated semiotic approaches to acousmatic works, an area that unfortunately has not evolved as much as one might have hoped over the years. Therefore, the section on meaning, which includes a chapter on UST (unités sémiotiques temporelles – developed in Marseilles), raises many issues of relevance to today’s analysts. The final section is broader and more philosophical, and introduces many of Delalande’s ideas that have been influential to a large segment of the electroacoustic community.
As mentioned above, this book is an overview of his analytical work. For those interested in his projects involving working interactively with composers and in his more pedagogical publications, many of these texts are still available and a selection may, possibly, appear in a future separate volume. And there are, of course, Delalande’s earlier books. No book extracts have been included here. This in no way lessens the value of this collection. His books are largely focused on his educational work with the exception of his major work, Le son des musique (2001), in which he launched amongst other things, the notion of the electroacoustic paradigm.
My one small criticism of this book is that a list of Delalande’s publications was not included. But fear not: he keeps a reference list online (www.francois-delalande.fr/publications), for those interested in further discovering his work.
Opening this new Ashgate volume, two things caught my eye: firstly that there was an ‘Introduction to the English Edition’ (I noted that previous editions exist in Italian and French), raising high expectations, and secondly that this Introduction commences with a bit of a boast: ‘I am glad to notice that [this book’s previous editions have] been appreciated by an authentically heterogeneous readership, from young people to grey-headed professors appertaining to the worlds of acoustics, art, architecture, geography, landscape, music, sociology and urban planning’ and that the book ‘served in universities, academies, art and music schools for various courses such as Architecture, Arts, Arts Management, Contemporary Media, Design, Sound Art, Composition, History of Music and Sound Technologies’. This raised other expectations; I shall spare you the information about the book launches and the reviews he mentions.
My first thought was that this was going to be an amazing book. My second was a question to myself: why haven’t I tracked the resonance of all of my pieces, articles and books as this author has? (Answer: life is too short.)
After the introductions, this short volume is split into three parts: ‘Urban Sounds Set to Music’, ‘Urban Spaces Resound’ and ‘Constructing Urban Space within Sound’. Based on that introduction and these section titles, one might expect a seriously interdisciplinary overview. In fact, this book largely focuses on music and sound art developments related in one or more ways to the urban environment. Given its brevity – the main text is 100 pages long including a number of useful illustrations – clearly a very significant selection process must have informed the further definition of the content. Part I focuses on the following music subjects: the Futurists and noise; indeterminacy, any sound including silence and Cage; musique concrète (which the author calls concrete music); and soundscapes focusing on Murray Schafer.
Part II moves on to sound artists, their installations and related practices, in particular Llorenç Barber, the collaboration between Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A), Bill Fontana, Max Neuhaus and Janet Cardiff. The step from Schafer et al. to these artists and their various approaches to placing sound in non-concert hall environments is a natural one. This modest selection seems again to makes sense.
Having covered two artistic topics in these first two parts, there remain fewer than twenty pages. What does the author offer in the brief Part III that made this book so exciting to the huge diversity of readers listed in the Introduction? The section title, ‘Constructing Urban Space within Sound’, suggests that we might be introduced to evolving fields such as auditory architecture and the like, but in fact, that’s a bit too optimistic. This final part does, again, pick up from the field of studies that evolved from Schafer and Truax’s work in soundscape studies, also known as acoustic ecology, which in turn forms part of today’s more general field of sound studies. One might then assume that this brief final part represents a survey of possibilities regarding urban sound studies, but, given what has already been presented, shouldn’t these extra-artistic subjects be more rigorously introduced? Subjects discussed include greater aural awareness of urban settings through heightened listening (a product of soundwalks associated with the soundscape pioneers); the need for the evaluation and design of soundscape in urban planning; and the notion of urban sound identities (think, again of Schafer’s ‘iconic sounds’ and the like). The book concludes with a short chapter called ‘Guide Lines [sic] for Constructing Urban Space with Sound’. One might imagine a plea for interdisciplinary urban planning, but in fact this chapter is about animating cities with diverse musical manifestations; thus we are, in a sense, back to Parts I and II here for this closing chapter.
The translation is satisfactory but nonetheless awkward at times. For example, the first two sentences in Chapter 1’s introduction are difficult to parse, and the first line of its main text contains a grammatical error. One would have hoped that the level of copy-editing might have been higher.
A book so short can only cover a finite number of topics; however, I was surprised that it did not cover that many topics outside of music and sound art. In other words, I expected an urban sound-studies survey, which I don’t believe this book quite achieves. So I am not totally clear what its intentions were.
What I enjoyed was reading the author’s slant on these topics, particularly those in the first two parts. But would I use it as an educator? If so, which of those groups would profit from its contents? Suffice to say that there are better surveys of visionary new music, although they clearly do not limit themselves to issues related to urban space. Given the success and the breadth of music and art making with sound, there are also more useful sources that cross between experimental music and sound art. Perhaps those learning about sound in an art department might be satisfied with this ‘capita selecta’. Music students would be better served by other texts within the arts and sound studies fields. And what about people working in all of those other disciplines? Well, they may learn about visions related to art making with sounds; however, the number of subjects that would ideally fit into an urban sound studies survey that are only glossed over makes me wonder how useful this book would be to them, too.
