Musique Concrète
The 8 Best Musique Concrète
Tracks of All Time
Paris, 1948: a radio engineer decides that a recording of a train is material for a composition. The moment recorded sound stops documenting music and starts being it, which is the premise every sampler on this map depends on.
- Origin
- Paris, France, 1948
- Also known as
- concrete music, tape music, elektronische musik, electroacoustic
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Pierre Schaeffer / Étude aux chemins de fer
1948
Six locomotives, cut and looped on shellac discs. The first piece of music made entirely from recordings of things, and the founding act of everything sample-based that followed.
Number 2: Karlheinz Stockhausen / Gesang der Jünglinge
1956
A boy's voice and synthesised tone placed on the same continuum and moved around five loudspeakers. Cologne's answer to Paris, and still the more technically astonishing of the two.
Number 3: Edgard Varèse / Poème électronique
1958
Written for four hundred speakers in a pavilion Le Corbusier and Xenakis designed for it. Eight minutes, heard by two million people, and almost nobody has heard it properly since.
Number 4: Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry / Symphonie pour un homme seul
1950
Breathing, footsteps, humming and a prepared piano, assembled into something that keeps threatening to become a song. The first extended work in the form.
Number 5: John Cage / Williams Mix
1952
Six hundred recordings spliced according to chance operations, taking a year to cut for four minutes of tape. Cage's most laborious piece and his most gleefully pointless.
Number 6: Hugh Le Caine / Dripsody
1955
Made from a single recording of one water drop, transposed and layered into an entire piece. Ninety seconds, and the most charming demonstration of the whole idea.
Number 7: Morton Subotnick / Silver Apples of the Moon
1967 · Nonesuch
The first electronic work commissioned specifically as an LP, made on a Buchla. Composed for the living room rather than the concert hall, which is a bigger break than the sound suggests.
Number 8: The Beatles / Revolution 9
1968 · Apple
Tape loops and a repeated announcement, on the best-selling record in the world. However you rate it, it put twenty years of studio experiment into millions of houses at once.
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