Acousmatics Versus Soundscapers

Your description of acousmatic composers harks back to Pierre Schaeffer's original description of musique concrète and its objet sonore, and I have most commonly seen the term in reference to Schaeffer's successors at the INA-GRM, especially Francois Bayle (who designed a playback system called the acousmonium). The Montreal label empreintes digitales is often stylistically similar to the INA-GRM work. IIRC, R. Murray Schafer explicitly took issue with Schaeffer's positions in his book The Tuning of the World (although it's been a while since I read it, and I don't own a copy to verify).

It's actually a 3-way split. The acousmatic approach is by tradition French, exemplified by Pierre Henry's Train Etude in 1948. The soundscapers are more recent, and date probably from the 1970s with the advent of high-quality small portable tape recorders. But there's a third stream, by tradition German, the synthesists, exemplified by Stockhausen's early electronic works.

The 3 groups blend into one another. William Schottstaedt's Colony Five starts out with bird calls that morph by computer resynthesis into chimes and then cathedral bells: it starts as a soundscape and transforms into an acousmatic piece and then eventually into a fully synthetic piece. Jean-Claude Risset's Sud imitates natural sounds with synthezied sounds and recordings of real-world sounds. Luigi Russolo's intonarumori use acoustic sound-makers to synthesizer various types of sounds.

Some hybrids prove hard to classify as either/or. Track 1 on Jon Hassel's Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics makes extensive use of environmental recordings of crickets in the hills of Alhambra, albeit as a backdrop for synthesized drones. One of Paul Lansky's compositions applies tuned resonant filters to an environmental recording of freeway traffic.

My idea about the difference between the two terms is that soundscape music doesn't have to be electronic or prerecorded, but refers to its character and the intention with composing it, namely to describe a real or an abstract, fantasy landscape or other type of environment in sounds (this is also what in popular culture is called ambient music), while acousmatic music refers to how listeners will experience the sounds, namely as music (distinct sounds, not like a landscape) coming from an invisible and sometimes also unrecognized instrument/source (which strictly speaking will define all recorded music as acousmatic).

There is also the possibility that the use of different terms may have something to do with differences in language, discourse and philosophy between English- and French-speaking groups of composers...

Urg. Pierre Schaeffer's Etude Aux Chemin de Fer. Not Henry.

Also I'm clearly and obviously wrong about soundscapes dating from the 70s. Henri Pousseur's Trois Visages de Lieges dates from 1961.

KG replies: Forgot about Trois Visages de Lieges. I should mention that, shouldn't I?

Perhaps soundscapers have a more or less explicit intention to represent a sonic environment, whether that representation takes a documentary form, as in the case of the composers associated with Schafer's World Soundscape Project, or a more abstract form, as in the case of most of the composers mclaren mentions above and many others.
Acousmatic composers would then be non-representationalists, formalists, for want of a better word.
A composer like Francisco Lopez would then occupy an interesting bordeline position. His works are often based on processed recordings of particular environments but he disavows any representationalist intentions and calls for a kind of attention to sound that sounds very much like Schaeffer's reduced listening.

Also in between these categories is the electronic work of Swedish composer, Palle Dahlstedt. For example, the music of his Gaudeamus Prize-winning multi-media collaboration "Anakolut" comprises sound recordings made in the port of Gothenburg speeded-up, edited and otherwise-transformed beyond any immediate recognizability.

Simon Emmerson hasd written several books on the subject (actually, he wrote some and edited others). They make for great reading (the most recent, I think, is Living Electronic Music).

I think it's too big a stretch to call Trois Visages de Liège a soundscape, any more than you would the Pastoral Symphony. Pousseur didn't use any environmental sounds; other than voices, everything was electronically generated. But it wasn't strictly acousmatic either, since it was written to accompany an outdoor light spectacle. Ferrari's Presque Rien is probably the first soundscape to come from the European electroacoustic community. I agree with Rod and mclaren that the several artists (Lopez is a great example) deliberately blur the category, and with Maria's observation that ambient composers often create fantasy soundscapes.

I was under the impression that the word was coined by Michel Chion - who, while perhaps steeped in academia, is worth investigating for his detailed analysis of these matters.

KG replies: I've many times now seen the word credited to Pierre Schaeffer, but I dunno.