Œuvres 1948-1952

In 1948, as postwar France rebuilt its cultural life, Pierre Schaeffer broadcast his Cinq Études de Bruits on Radio-Paris, turning railway recordings, piano attacks and kitchen-like clatter into a radical challenge to musical convention. Working inside the state broadcasting system, he cut, looped and altered recorded sounds until their everyday identities began to dissolve. Œuvres captures musique concrète at the moment it emerged, not from synthesizers, but from the studio as an instrument and listening as an act of reconstruction.