What? Are you asking that seriously? Because, really, that’s a stupid question. OK, not stupid; perhaps the idea of two doughy old Frenchmen going at each other with smokin’ hot theory isn’t exactly your idea of hard-core pornography, you debauched hedonist, but who needs that when you’ve got hard-boiled intellectualism, state-controlled radio, a backdrop of Résistance and anti-orthodox radicalism, and a hot-and-heavy student-teacher rivalry. It’s like Amadeus, only in French, with cooler gear.

Like most tales of intellectual musical intrigue, the story starts with John Cage; and like most stories involving John Cage, his involvement is indirect and mostly spiritual. Now, Cage got some, if not all, of his early noise-cues from Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise, substituting, as did many subsequent electronic experimentalists, his total surrender to the crushing noise of modern industrial endeavor—RIYL: fascist pageantry, lock-step, shackles, boots—for a Zen-styled informality and constant questioning of established conventions. (Interesting to side-note about how a single radical idea can bridge even the widest ideological divide with little change in the fundamental idea.) So Cage hitched with the Futurists down the road and hopped off where it suited him; he hammered out his prepared pianos with screwdrivers and dinner plates, and spun vari-speed turntables into Imaginary Landscapes. It was that latter that inspired Pierre Schaeffer, then simultaneously a French resistance fighter against Hitler and an engineer and broadcaster at Radio diffusion-Television Francaises, the state-sponsored radio and broadcasting arm, then controlled by the occupying forces. (Kinky, huh?)

In 1942, he somehow convinced the powers-that-be at the RTF to start an acoustic lab—the Studio d’Essai—with Schaeffer acting as director. There, he developed his musique concrete, using pre-recorded sounds, in the form of affected tape loops, and discovered the vinyl lock-groove, in which the needle could be persuaded to stay in one groove, caressing that one spot, forever. Aw yeah. Now, bear in mind, Schaeffer was not a classically-trained musician, he was an engineer by trade—but an electro-acoustic engineer, from a family of musicians, with some theory and musical training, with no small abiding interest, and possibly most importantly, a deep ache to rid France of all that butt-ugly Teutonic twelve-tone music that the more-cultured Nazis dropped in their laps. Schaeffer saw his new music as a celebration of humanity, utilizing the sounds and the tools of humanity in mirroring and emphasizing everyday experience, and everyday beauty. It was also anarchic music, but without some anarchy, some faith in the uncontrolled, in the face of the stricture just recently banished, how could there be poetry; how could there be life? Perhaps his “Étudeaux Tourniquets” from 1948 might sound malformed at first blush, just mashed-up music boxes, hand-claps, and tape-splices; but closer listening reveals beautifully-placed turns—if still a bit whiplash—and peaks and valleys. It’s still outside the bounds of classical Western phrasing, but that was the point, to come closer to true existence by unmooring and heading off for points unknown. This made him the scorn of his post-war German analog (no pun intended) Nord West Deutscher Rundfunk, with their tightly-controlled electronics and “pure” wave tones. Fuckers.

In 1951, Schaeffer picked up a collaborator named Pierre Henry. Henry, as it happens, was (well, is) a classically-trained musician, studying at the Conservatoire de Musique Paris—percussion with famed jazz-hand Félix Passerone, and composition with Olivier Messiaen and renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. He’d already developed an interest in Finding a New Way, though didn’t involve himself with electronic instruments until he joined up with Schaeffer’s group. And then the fur started flying! Actually, not really. Together, they collaborated on Symphonie pour un Homme Seul. Given Henry’s history with rhythm and percussion, and Schaeffer’s constant striving for The New Sound, you wouldn’t be surprised to find that the collabo would be a more tightly-structured variant of Schaeffer’s own work, and you’d be right, but not in the way you’d think. This bit here, “Eroica,” shows off a beginning, a middle, and an end, all right, and there’s a rhythm, to be sure. But Henry’s idea of rhythm, coming out of a jazz tradition and a suitable disrespect for The Old Forms, creates a clicking, puffing, hotly sped-up hive of pitters and pats that sounds for all the world like Ryoji Ikeda or Pole or somebody is behind the decks. Schaeffer draws in voices, spoken and sung, to hover around, while both pile up sounds and noises in a, ahem, heraldic fashion. (”Eroica,” heral—forget it.) Supposedly the piece revolves around a man walking alone down the street, but the pair take off from there, making every moment feel like some monumental, uncommonly strange thing (which, if you think about the probability of anyone’s coming into existence, here and now, it kind of is). After creating—no kidding—the first concrete opera, Henry set out on his own.

Apparently, it was amicable. Gotcha! So for an idea of what Henry’s investigation of rhythm sounds like unencumbered by anyone else, have a listen to his Le Livre des Morts Égyptien. He brings in a low hum, either off tapes or out of electronic boxes, slowly pulsating, before the vari-speed pianos and God knows what else arrives to send everything out of orbit. His rhythmic notions, as we commonly know them (i.e. percussion) are often backgrounded and implied, in favor of steady evolution over time, stretching and compressing the sound into something that resembles a simple, grounded experience. And if that sounds familiar, as if every electronic experimenter since has had those words pass his lips, well perhaps it is.