Dockstader on Dockstader
I don't remember just when I first heard musique concrète; it must have been in the early 50s. I think I liked the idea of it more than the Toonerville-Trolley sound of the early pieces. In Pierre Schaeffer's original definition, it meant working with the sound in your ears, directly with the sound, as opposed to "abstract" music in which the sounds are written. Like Schaeffer, a working sound engineer, I had the training to be a "worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities." As a non-musician, I couldn't write music, but this "new art of sound" didn't need notation. In the beginning, musique concrète wasn't even agreed upon to be music; Schaeffer's first presentation of his work was called "a concert of noises."
It also seemed to me, this new art of sound, a very democratic art. I'd studied painting for five years and gave it up, primarily because I came to dislike the exclusivity of it; a painting became the property of one person, one institution. I liked the idea that Schaeffer's first work was created in a (public) radio studio; his first premieres were broadcasts, not the "narrowcasts" of concert hall performances. And, when you bought a recording of it, you owned the work just as much as anyone else, because the work was a recording. So, I pursued that.
Any art is, of course, not just all the possibilities; it is also choice - organization. That this new sound-art could be rigorously organized I first learned by hearing Edgar Varèse's Poeme Electronique of 1958 - a powerfully dramatic work in which the strength and personality of choice among all the possibilities is very evident. My choice of the term "Organized Sound" for my own work was, in part, a tribute to the Poème and Varèse.
I also chose it because, in the '60s, the term "electronic music" was coming to mean music made purely of synthetic sound, and I was working in both "concrete" and electronically generated sounds.