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In music, montage (literally "putting together") or sound collage ("gluing together") is a technique where newly branded or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as musique concrète. This is often done through the use of sampling, while some sound collages are produced by gluing together sectors of different vinyl records. Like its visual cousin, sound collage works may have a completely different effect than that of the component parts, even if the original parts are recognizable or from a single source. Audio collage was a feature of the audio art of John Cage, Fluxus, postmodern music hip-hop and postconceptual digital art.
Earlier traditional forms and procedures such as the quodlibet, medley, potpourri, and centonization differ from collage in that the various elements in them are made to fit smoothly together, whereas in a collage clashes of key, timbre, texture, meter, tempo, or other discrepancies are important in helping to preserve the individuality of the constituent elements and to convey the impression of a heterogeneous assemblage.J. Peter Burkholder, "Collage", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001). What made their technique true collage, however, was the juxtaposition of quotations and unrelated melodies, either by layering them or by moving between them in quick succession.
A first documented instance of sound collage created as electronic music is Wochenende (in English, Weekend), a collage of words, music and sounds created by film-maker and media artist Walter Ruttmann in 1928.Richard James, "Avant-Garde Sound-on-Film Techniques and Their Relationship to Electro-Acoustic Music", The Musical Quarterly 72, no.1 (January 1986): 78. Later, in 1948, Pierre Schaeffer used the techniques of sound collage to create the first piece of musique concrète, Étude aux chemins de fer, which was assembled from recordings of . Schaeffer created this piece by recording sounds of trains onto several , some of which had lock grooves allowing them to play in a continuous loop. He then set up multiple turntables in his studio, allowing him to trigger and mix together the various train sounds as needed.Horace Kemwer, " Case Study: Pierre Schaeffer", Against the Modern World. Retrieved on 2009-12-29.
According to music theorist Cristina Losada, the third movement of Luciano Berio's Sinfonia is often considered "the prototype of a musical collage."Losada, Cristina Catherine. "A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of Collage in Music Derived from Selected Works by Berio, Zimmermann, and Rochberg". PhD diss., City University of New York, 2004. p. 55. In an essay written in 1937, John Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical sound materials and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise music, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Cage began in 1939 to create a series of found sounds works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1 for instruments including two variable speed with frequency recordings.
Important modern sound collage pieces were created by Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1950s and early-1960s Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Michel Philippot, and Arthur Honegger all worked with sound collage. Examples are Étude I (1951) and Étude II (1951) by Boulez, Timbres-durées (1952) by Messiaen, Étude aux mille collants (1952) by Stockhausen, Le microphone bien tempéré (1952) and La voile d'Orphée (1953) by Henry, Étude I (1953) by Philippot, Étude (1953) by Barraqué, the mixed pieces Toute la lyre (1951) and Orphée 53 (1953) by Schaeffer/Henry, and the film score Masquerage (1952) by Schaeffer and Astrologie (1953) by Henry. In 1954 Varèse and Honegger created Déserts and La rivière endormie". John Cage created his influential collage piece Williams Mix in 1952. More recently, George Rochberg used collage in Contra Mortem et Tempus and Symphony No. 3.Stephen Jaffe." Conversation between SJ and JS on the New Tonality", Contemporary Music Review 6, no. 2 (1992): 27–38. In the 1980s Minóy made many palimpsest-like multi-tracked soundscape compositions that used sound collage.
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