Music by Jean Dubuffet

This is not a typo. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), a world-famous French sculptor and painter, also wrote music. More than written, however, we should use the term "realized," since it is musique concrete, partly of instrumental origin, for which no score exists.

Moreover, Dubuffet himself states:

I find that true music should not be written, that all written music is a false music, that the musical notation which has been adopted in the west, with its notes on the staves and its twelve notes per octave, is a very poor notation which does not permit to notate the sounds and only allows the making of a totally specious music which has nothing to do with true music. It is impossible to write true music, except with a stylus on the wax, and this is what they do now in recordings.
This is a way of writing and the only one that’s proper to music.

His compositional method, in fact, consisted of freely improvising with various Western and Eastern instruments, as well as with found objects, recording everything, and then moving on to an editing phase using various recorders and a mixer.

In reality, Dubuffet had studied music as a young man, but had never practiced or studied it continuously. His attention had been awakened, at the end of 1960, by a series of improvisations made for fun with his friend Asger Jorn. But then the passion had reawakened to the point that

I transformed a room in my house into a music workshop and in the periods between our get-togethers with Asger Jorn I became a one-man band, playing each of my fifty-odd instruments in turn. Thanks to my tape recorder I was able to play each part successively on the same tape and have the machine play everything back simultaneously.

And then

The subsequent recordings are the result of two diverging approaches which I hesitated between and which are probably both apparent in at least some pieces. The first was an attempt to produce music with, a very human touch, in other words, which expressed people’s moods and their drives as well as the sounds, the general hubbub and the sonorous backdrop of our everyday lives, the noises to which we are so closely connected and, although we don’t realize it, have probably endeared themselves to us and which we would be hard put to do without. There is an osmosis between this permanent music which carries us along and the music we ourselves express; they go together to form the specific music which can be considered as a human beings. Deep down I like to think of this music as music we make, in contrast to another very different music, which greatly stimulates my thoughts and which I call music we listen to. The latter is completely foreign to us and our natural tendencies; it is not human at all and could lead us to hear (or imagine) sounds which would be produced by the elements themselves, independent of human intervention.

Dubuffet also states:

In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure.

From these improvisations two albums were born that you can find in flac format on AGP74 and AGP79.

Meanwhile, some extracts:

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