Concert of Concrete Shortly after World War II, in 1948, a French sound artist credited John Cage and Luigi Russolo as the inspiration for his monumental broadcast, Concert of Noises. Pierre Schaeffer was working as an engineer at the Radiodiffusion Television Francaise, or RTF, when he began experimenting with sound effects recordings via phonograph speed change. His first work Etude aux Chemins de Fer (Concert of Locomotives), was based on, you guessed it, sounds made by locomotives. Schaeffer dubbed his sound art Musique Concrete and credited the title to the experimental organization of physical material used in its construction; in opposition to traditional music which he saw as an abstraction transcribed on paper and only materializing in some way in its performance. Schaeffer was inventive in his use of discs, he was perhaps the best disc cutter ever. Not just simply varying the speed of recordings in performance, he made one-off pressings of altered sound playback and, in turn, made pressings of the manipulation of the one-off pressings, etc. Schaeffer was using a disc cutting machine and a player phonograph to achieve the same possibilities that would not be widely attainable until multi-track tape recording a few years later. In the program notes for one of the early performances of Musique Concrete—a title which was later used as an ad hoc term for any composition using tape as an instrument—Schaeffer responds to criticisms and expresses his thoughts on sound art: If concrete music were to contribute to this movement, if, hastily adopted, stupidly understood, it had only to add its additional bellowing, its new negation, after so much smearing of the lines, denial of golden rules (such as that of the scale), I should consider myself rather unwelcome. I have the right to justify my demand, and the duty to lead possible successors to this intellectually honest work, to the extent which I have helped to discover a new way to create sound, and the means—as yet approximate—to give it form . . . Photography, whether the fact be denied or admitted, has completely upset painting, just as the recording of sound is about to upset music . . . For all that, traditional music is not denied; any more than theatre is supplanted by cinema. Something new is added: a new art of sound. Am I wrong in calling it music? The exploration into sound was continuing, and Schaeffer insisted on the legitimacy of this work, this art —pushing for public and professional acceptance. In 1951 the RTF opened the first dedicated electronic music studio under the direction of Schaeffer, who was joined by Paul Boisselet—Boisselet had been giving live performances of tape music in France before the radio broadcast of Schaeffer’s work. Pierre Henry also began a long collaborative effort with Schaeffer the same year—pairing recorded sound manipulation with outside art forms and incorporating a number of Eastern influences to provide structure for his solo and joint compositions.