ABSTRACT
John Dos Passos himself related the narrative techniques he used in Manhattan Transfer to those of film montage: Direct snapshots of life. The technique of film montage is a non-medium-specific technique, so it triggers only passive intermedial reference. The Certain avant-garde musical experiments of Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch uncovered by Mark Katz resemble the principle of musical montage and also emerged in the milieu of the early European avant-gardes. In the full instantiation of the term, musical montage consists of the recording of sounds, which are then re-assembled and processed in the studio and included in new musical material. Pierre Schaeffer, the initiator of concrete music, was an electronic engineer who worked for the French television when he started his research into musical acoustics. Schaeffer emphasized the dramatic element of the piece and pointed out that the sounds of the locomotives force us to imagine a possible scenario, departure, and arrivals of people in the train station.
