Dripsody — Hugh Le Caine
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Dripsody – Hugh Le Caine
Amazing Moments in Timbre | Timbre and Orchestration Writings
by Jason Noble
Published: November 30th, 2018
Our second Amazing Moment in Timbre is another classic, but somewhat lesser-known. It’s Canadian composer and inventor Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (1955). A great early example of musique concrète—music made from recordings of real-world sounds that may be manipulated in various ways—Le Caine built up astonishing musical textures from a single recording of a drop of water. He had to physically cut, paste, splice, and loop magnetic tape to achieve the musical result, which may seem like a tremendous feat of labour intensity to those of us now accustomed to digital audio workstations on personal computers. Enjoy!