In this essay, I propose to think about the emergence of musique concrète following the propositions of Jacques Rancière on the aesthetic regime of art. Starting from a text by Pierre Schaeffer on radio, I first highlight the overthrow of muthos (the plot or the narrative) in favour of opsis (the sensible) that conditions the possibility of musique concrète. I show how this overthrow traces a thread in the formation of musique concrète through different displacements that took shape in literature, radio and cinema, as well as in the field of sound composition. In doing so, I detail some aspects of a distribution of the sensible that Schaeffer articulates and I show how it belongs to the aesthetic regime of art. The very idea of sound specific to musique concrète or the concept of the ‘sound in itself’ will then appear as resulting from a singular configuration or redistribution of the sensible, where the visible and the audible interweave or oppose each other, where words can become noise and things, making sense or not of the sensible. Through this discussion, we will see that Rancière's propositions can shed new light on musique concrète, recapturing its possibilities, its conditions and its limits.

The background and the narrative