SIGNED FRENCH EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSER ELECTRONIC Musique Concrète PIERRE SCHAEFFER

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176284773371 SIGNED FRENCH EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSER ELECTRONIC Musique Concrète PIERRE SCHAEFFER. A VERY RARE AUTOGRAPH OF EXPERIMENTAL AVANT-GARDE COMPOSER PIERRE SCHAEFFER IN A BOOK WITH GREAT INSCRIPTION Schaeffer PIerre  Excusez-moi je meurs et autres fabulations. (Excuse me I'm dying and other fabrications.) Flammarion, 1981, 202pp, good condition ISBN: 2080643673 SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY COMPOSER PIERRE SCHAFFER Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician. 


Pierre Schaeffer, (born Aug. 14, 1910, Nancy, France—died Aug. 19, 1995, Aix-en-Provence), French composer, acoustician, and electronics engineer who in 1948, with his staff at Radio-diffusion et Télévision Française, introduced musique concrète in which sounds of natural origin, animate and inanimate, are recorded and manipulated so that the original sounds are distorted and combined in a musical fashion. The means of manipulation include changing the speed of the playback to alter pitch, playing the tape backward, cutting the tape so as to exercise precise control over duration, filtering out or reinforcing certain sound-wave frequencies, and other more complex manipulation. Schaeffer’s 10-movement Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; “Symphony for One Man Only”), produced in collaboration with Pierre Henry, was the first major concrete piece. This and other works of musique concrète reflect an approach to sound that had an important influence on composers of aleatory, or chance, music. His other works include the experimental opera Orpheé 53 (1953). Schaeffer taught electronic composition at the Paris Conservatory from 1968 until 1980. His writings include novels, short stories, and essays, as well as theoretical works in music, such as À la recherche d’une musique concrète (1952; “In Search of a Concrete Music”), Traité des objets musicaux (1966; “Treatise on Musical Objects”), and the two-volume Machines à communiquer (1970–72; “Machines for Communicating”). Before Trevor Horn sampled a sound, Akin and the Chipmunks squealed, or Run-DMC scratched a record; when synthesizers were a twinkle in the imagination of Varese and Cage and at about the same moment that Eno formed his first infant gurgles, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (pronounced: Ahn-ree) were transmuting the world of sound. In the mid-'60s, their techniques were arcane: by the early '80s they were nouveau-chic. But in 1948, they were revolutionary. "Our direction was to turn our back on music and that is crucial," proclaimed Schaeffer in his elegant, old Paris apartment. "People who try to create a musical revolution do not have a chance, but those who turn their back to music can sometimes find it." Shortly alter World War II and shortly before the widespread use of magnetic tape (developed in Germany), Schaeffer and Henry began their revolt by recording sounds from the natural world onto phonograph discs, altering them through the primitive means available, and creating an alarming music that they dubbed musique concrète (pronounced: muzeek kon-kret), or concrete music. Think of The Art of Noise without a rhythm box and you have a rough approximation of the first masterpiece of musique concrète, Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony for a Man Alone), Schaeffer and Henry created audio portraits for the end of the machine age and the beginning of the electronic age that burst with mechanical noises, orchestral hits, trains, and text-sound babble. Doors open and close on indecipherable conversations; engines start, stop and transform into screams and moans; disembodied pianists jam with mouth noise rhythm sections. Now, almost 40 years later, the scratches on the records they used give this vanguard work a charming, antique quality. Their studios in the '50s and '60s were hotspots of experimentation. They formed the ORTF (French Radio) Experimental Studio in the '50s, and in 1960 Henry founded the studio APSOME and Schaeffer founded the Groupe De Recherches Musicales. Among his many students was French synthesist Jean-Michel Jarre, who regards Schaeffer as a mentor. "He was very important in my life," claims Jarre, "because he was the first man to consider music in terms of sound and not notes, harmonies, and chords." Schaeffer despised the trends of classical music in the 20th Century, still embroiled in the 12-tone and serialist methods of Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples. "This made for a century," exclaims Schaeffer, "of the most boring music. Schoenberg, a teacher lacking genius, had a 'brilliant' idea. One was supposed to use all 12 notes without repeating any. One is sure in this way to avoid the problems of tonality and to avoid copying Mahler's music. "Unfortunately," he continues, "when you suppress the intervals between notes you suppress music. You make it insignificant. You take the feeling, the intelligence, and meaning away." It was Schaeffer who first developed the ideas of musique concrète. Though he was born into a musical family in 1910, his parents forbade him to study music. Instead he went to the Ecole Polytechnic (the French equivalent of MIT), and studied electronics, eventually winding up as an engineer on French radio. During World War II, he was an operator for the French Resistance Radio Network. Schaeffer's method of returning meaning and emotion to music was to go into the world and the sound effects library of his radio studio. "I was actually concerned with the possibilities of radio art," he recalls. In the process, he became more interested in his sound effects for radio plays rather than the dramas themselves. "From the moment you accumulate sounds and noises, deprived of their dramatic connotations, you cannot help but make music," he insists. Using disk lathes, Schaeffer went to locales like the Batignolle Railway Station and etched the rumble of trains into the record's grooves. "I was attracted to external events and impressive machines," he states with a grand sweep of his cigarette. "It was an emotional experience because the railroad carries many memories, many psychological and psychosomatic feelings. Sometimes these feelings can be very violent, deeply rooted in your childhood." Unlike the earlier Futurist work of Russolo, Schaeffer wanted to remove the original meanings and definitions of his sounds and create a deeper psychological-emotional response. In works such as Etude aux Chemins de Fer (Etude on Railroads), Etude Pathetique (Etude on Pathos), and Etude aux Objets (Etude on Objects), the sounds were familiar, but rearranged into bizarre juxtapositions, in the surrealist style of the era. The techniques of speeding up, slowing down, reversing, editing, and looping were all used to create sonic "collages," as Schaeffer calls them, all before the advent of tape recorders, let alone digital samplers. After recording their sounds, they went back into the studio and isolated them, re-recording them onto other disks with different manipulations, including what they called "the locked groove:" putting an intentional skip in the record so a sound would be repeated, not unlike a tape loop or sequencer. Schaeffer describes the recording process. "We would have seven or eight turntables playing together, but with only one sound playing on each. Then we would try different variations, montages with let's say, sound 'A' repeated twice, then a sound 'B' then 'C' repeated and so on. It was similar to an orchestra rehearsal where you would be trying different themes, different variations." Schaeffer has the air of a French aristocrat, dabbling with sound as a philosophical exercise. Pierre Henry, on the other hand, is a classically trained musician and composer who diverged from the traditional route to join in Schaeffer's experiments in 1949. Henry is restrained and self-absorbed, convinced that he is on the only true musical path. Henry and Schaeffer's relationship has been turbulent. They are reputed to have broken up in a violent fight in the '60s, only resuming their friendship a few years ago. Now Schaeffer, who has since stopped composing, gives much of the credit for their music to Henry. Henry, on the other hand, sat silently during Schaeffer's interview and demanded his own session. By 1951, they had tape recorders, a medium in which Henry still works almost exclusively. His studio contains a mixing console, two 8-tracks, several 2-track Studers, and rooms full of reel-to-reel tapes of raw sounds. He now calls his work "electro-acoustic music." Both he and Schaeffer are disdainful of the electronic music that in many ways they helped spawn. "It is important to understand that there is no use of electronically generated sounds in our music," says Schaeffer. "It is concerned with the acoustics of recorded natural sounds on which we then have the power of transformation." These statements aren't entirely true, however. Synthesizers appear on Schaeffer's 1978 Etude aux Sons Animes (Etude on Animated Sounds) and sitting unobtrusively next to Henry's mixing console is an analog synthesizer. "It is just a decoration," he says with a conspiratorial grin to his aide and translator. "It is not wired in. I do not use it, but it could happen." Henry can appear like an "electro-acoustic" snob, but he has also been willing to place his work in a more pop context. In 1969, he added electronic scribbles to the British hard rock of Spooky Tooth's Ceremony, and in 1967 collaborated with French rocker Michel Colombier on Mass For Today. Most recently, he worked with French avant-gardist Gilbert (Lard Free, Urban Sax) Artman. Yet he considers himself part of the traditional classical music stream. He studied at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris, and with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. "I am still a traditional composer," he insists. "It is not the recording of the sound that made me different." Henry tends towards manipulations of musical instruments rather than natural sound. "In the Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul all the instrumental parts, piano, percussion, were played by myself," he boasts. "It was a music that I played and then, only afterwards was this music fragmented, elaborated upon, using the techniques of the time. I was also experimenting at the time with objects, noises, anything you could create inside the studio, noise from composed objects, invented objects." Their compositions sought a musical language that fell between natural sounds and instrumental ones. They wanted the sounds to stand apart from their original context, yet have the musical values and complexity of instruments. So a door wasn't a door, but a scraping wipe across a bleak landscape. A violin no longer played scales, but a descending drone into a personal hell. "Music has to do with sounds," explains Schaeffer, "so we need to find them somewhere and it is preferred to find musical ones. You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something-a door cracking, a dog barking, the thunder, the storm; and then you have instruments. An instrument tells you, la-la-la-la (sings a scale). Music has to find a passage between noises and instruments. It has to escape. It has to find a compromise and an evasion at the same time; something that would not be dramatic because that has no interest to us, but something that would be more interesting than sounds like Do-Re-Mi-Fa..." Works like his Masquerage (1952) and Henry's Well-Tempered Microphone (1951) were far removed from conventional musical scales or language. In the latter work, Henry prepared a piano a la Cage and used different miking placements to generate a discordant orchestra. Remember that this was the early 1950s, and even the microphone was still a recent and relatively unexplored development. "In the Well-Tempered Microphone," relates Henry, 'the idea was to show all the resources of the microphone and of the instrument. By using the microphone for your recording, you could go further than with the instrument itself. The microphone could amplify and magnify the effect of the instrument and, if combined with other little acoustical transformations possible at that time, it could make this effect more magic." Some of these performances would fit nicely into Looney Toons cartoons. The piano works in particular, like Concerto Des Ambiguites, have the effect of Cecil Taylor on helium. At their best, they succeeded in removing expectations and preconceptions from music, allowing newer thoughts and feelings to prevail. Schaeffer seized upon a fire engine squealing past his Paris apartment to illustrate their philosophy. "Let us use the example of the fire engine," he exclaimed. 'What we are hearing is a musical third, a woodwind instrument, which is here a horn, and finally the siren itself. What the locked groove allows you to do is to conceal the fact that it is a fire truck, to forget that it is a musical third and it allows you to make the instrument sound like another instrument." Although Henry worked sparingly with electronics on early compositions like Haut Voltage (1955), his best work bends acoustic material into seemingly synthesized designs. Le Voyage (1961-62) is a timbrally rich and varied excursion based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, with only violins and voice as its principal sound sources. "There was absolutely no electronically generated sound on Le Voyage," Henry insisted indignantly. "Le Voyage was a continuation of the experiments of the '60s, but it was done in a new studio. I think that people should consider me as a creator of music and sounds who worked in different studios that he personally designed. So if there is a difference between Le Voyage and Haut Voltage for instance, it was mostly due to the studio where I was working. The sound depends on the studio where you work." The sound also depends upon the stage where you present the work. While Schaeffer's and Henry's first compositions were designed for radio concerts, their music caught the fancy of many choreographers and playwrights, chief among them, Maurice Bejart, with whom Henry has had a continuous relationship since the '50s. Their collaborations, including Haut Voltage, Le Voyage, Mass For Today, and Variations for a Door and a Sigh, brought Henry's music onto the concert stage where he would sit among his mixers, filters, and tape recorders, performing live mixes and manipulations of his tapes, not unlike Stockhausen working his potentiometers or Brian Eno, who processed Phil Manzanera's guitar solos with Roxy Music. In the '70s, Henry staged expansive works for the concert hall like The Second Symphony, which was "composed for a circular space, the Cirque d'Hiver," Henry explains. "It was a work for a 16-track recording, which was very ambitious for the time; we used eight stereo tape recorders, wired together and about 100 loudspeakers that would diffuse the sound circularly. People would feel immersed and surrounded by the music." It makes you wish quadraphonic sound had caught on. In a more recent work, Futuriste (1980), Henry channels his sound through a variety of acoustic spaces placed on the stage. He had room-sized boxes filled with speakers, bathtubs, old tanks, basins and pipes, all lending their own peculiar resonance to Henry's prerecorded scores. "It was a work of acoustic and electric diffusion," he proudly proclaims. "For me it was the best definition of an electro-acoustic concert. It was at the same time vibrant, live, and on tape." Curiously, some regard these vanguard artists as anachronistic in the context of new music in general, and the French avant-garde in particular. Composers associated with Pierre Boulez's Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, are reputed to snipe at Henry and Schaeffer like they were doddering old tinkerers. For their part, Henry and Schaeffer take any opportunity to lampoon the high-tech computer music of IRCAM. Schaeffer relates a Pierre Boulez story from the 1950s, illuminating the schism in French music circles. "One day we had the visit of a young and unknown musician, Pierre Boulez. At the time, I was involved in trying to create a solfege that could include many sounds and timbres. I thought we should classify the sounds in terms of their effect on the listener, of their psychological effect. We would classify them in high, low, hard, harsh sounds. Boulez objected to that. He refused to collaborate and left after composing one piece, as boring as usual, with one single sound (Etudes, 1952)." Of course, with the sophisticated computers at IRCAM, like the 4X Real Time Digital Computer, Boulez and his disciples are able to work at a subtler, almost sub-atomic level of musical sound and structure than Henry and Schaeffer ever could. Schaeffer, who has spent the last ten years composing philosophical treatises on the state of the world, relates to high technology the way people probably related to his own work when he began in 1948. "I am convinced that synthetic music, so fashionable today, is making a mistake feeding the ear with synthetic sounds. We need to come back to that." Schaeffer may get his wish with the abundance of digital samplers on the market, taking sounds from the acoustic world with their harmonically richer structures, and manipulating them into new shapes. Yet, when queried about it, neither Schaeffer nor Henry seemed very interested in the new technology. But embracement of new technology isn't really the point. Technique ultimately is not music. Henry's methods may be archaic by contemporary standards, but the resulting music is powerfully evocative by any standards. Popular artist Bill Nelson records his personal music this way, claiming it has an intrinsic and emotional value not unlike woodcarving. He's joined in this opinion by Brian Eno and Holger Czukay. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry made a contribution that has helped shape music for the last 38 years, be it the early tape music works of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia, and Stockhausen in Germany, the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper days, or producers Arthur Baker and Martin Rushent today. They owe their genesis to the sounds of a world rearranged by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. "Photography, whether the fact be denied or admitted, has completely upset music..for all that, traditional music is not denied; any more than theater is supplanted by the cinema. Something new has been added, a new art of sound. Am I wrong in calling it music?" (1) _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Pierre Schaeffer 1910-1995 born in Nancy, France _____________________________________________________________________________________________     Like many of the pioneers of electronic music, Schaeffer was not a musician. He received his diploma from L'Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and did an apprenticeship at the Radiodiffusion- Television Francaises (RTF) which led to a full time job as an engineer and broadcaster. He was a member of the French resistance during the occupation of France by the Germans. He also was a writer and biographer.    After being rapidly promoted in 1942, at the age of 32,  he persuaded the RTF corporation (which was under the control of the German occupying forces), to initiate the science of musical acoustics with himself as the director. He had at his disposal the resources of RTF such as phonograph turntables, disc recording devices, a direct disc cutting lathe, mixers, and a large library of sound effect records owned by the studio. Initially the new studio was known as Studio d'Essai and later renamed Club d'Essai.   Schaeffer spent months experimenting with the technology available to him. He discovered that he could lock-groove records. In other words, instead of spiraling toward the center of the record, the needle could be made to stay in one groove creating a loop. He was drawn to the possibility of isolating naturally produced sounds. This would lead eventually to the term ' Musique Concrete' which meant that the sounds were based on natural sounds recorded and played back in a musical context. He was influenced by Russolo and the Futurist Manifestos.  In 1948, he studied the effect of striking percussive instruments different ways. He observed that a single sound event could be characterized not only by timbre, but by attack and decay as well.  On April 21 of that year, he recorded bell tones to disc using a volume control between the mike and cutter to eliminate the attack.  On the 23rd, he speculated that an instrument could be created that would provide the sounds of an orchestral instrument by means of a bank of prerecorded events. (The Mellotron eventually fulfilled this prophecy.) Go to his invention the  phonogene.  His first official composition, Etude aux chemans de fer  (Concert for Locomotives), was a montage of sounds recorded at the train depot in Paris. Sounds included six steam locomotives whistling, trains accelerating, and wagons passing over the joints in the tracks.  Although the composition is considered to be more of an experimental essay rather than a serious composition, it was significant in four ways. 1. An act of musical composition was accomplished by a technological process. 2. The work could be replayed multiple times. 3. Replaying was not dependent on human performers. 4. Elements were "concrete."   Schaeffer then began to play records at different speeds. This affected not only pitch and duration, but also the amplitude envelopes of the sounds. This led to a series of Etudes  during the summer of 1948.   Etude pour piano et orchestre  combined the sounds of an orchestra tuning up with spontaneous improv piano playing by Jean-Jacques Grunenwald. The effect was of two unrelated ideas and  therefore had no coherence.   Etude au piano I  and I Etude au piano II .These were based on piano sounds alone. Pierre Boulez played multiple styles of piano such as classical, romantic, atonal, etc. Schaeffer tried to piece the parts together into a cohesive production but failed to do so. Oct. 5, 1948, these pieces were broadcast by RTF on a show named  Concert a bruits. The reactions by the public were sharply divided. Schaeffer was then sent abroad to give symposiums on recording and broadcasting. Upon his return he asked RTF for funds for assistants. RTF assigned Pierre Henry, a composer who had studied with Messian, and Jacques Poullin, as sound engineer to assist him. Their first work,  Suite pour quatorze instruments , was the starting point for the syntax for  musique concrete . It consisted of five movements. The Courante was a montage of an entire library of source material. The Gavotte was a simple musical phrase on different instruments. Pitch transposition was used for variations. Schaeffer was not happy with the results since the phrase retained many of its original characteristics, even with all of the treatments. This led him to analyze the nature of sounds, which led to his definition of oblect sonore. The isolation of a basic sound, separated from its context and examined for its characteristics outside its normal time continuum. He began to observe sound not only by a broad definition, but also in a finer analytical sense such as the filter and amplitude envelope.   His next composition was a collaboration with Henry entitled Symponie pour un homme seul  (Symphony for a Man Alone). He divided the composition process into two lines: 1. Using new technical aides to extend the possibilities of instrumental sources. 2. Incorporating his objets sonores  principles. He decided to use human sounds as his main source material, as well as some non-human sounds. He divided the material into two groups: 1. Human sounds (breathing, vocal fragments, shouting, humming, whistling). 2. Non-human sounds (footsteps, knocking on doors, percussion, prepared piano, orchestral instruments). Symphonie was divided into eleven movements. Repeated patterns of spoken words were used as rhythmic patterns mixed with other sounds such as prepared piano, etc. The first public performance of  musique concrete  took place in 1950 in Paris. Schaeffer used a PA system, several turntables, and mixers. The performance did not go well as creating live montages with turntables had never been done before. After a break, Schaeffer decided to arrange sounds (objets snores) into categories (solfege), much as Russolo had done. 1. living elements such as voices 2. noises 3. prepared instruments 4. conventional instruments. With this categorization he began to try and devise a system of notation that could be used.   In 1951, RTF provided Schaeffer with a new studio. It included a tape recorder. This was an important event as the phonograph had been his tool for composition up to that point. One of the recorders had 5 track capability. One , known as the Morphophone, had 12 playback heads, which allowed for tape echo and a pseudo reverb effect. Two other decks known as Phonogenes were designed to play prerecorded loops at different speeds (one came with a 12 note keyboard!). At this time, while stereo was still in developement, Schaeffer had the means of playing up to 5 separate tracks with 5 separate speakers. (MPEG-2 technology allows for 5 distinct outputs as used in DVD production, here we see the idea in affect almost 50 years ago). This allowed for spatial experimentation of sounds. Four speakers were used for  playback. Two speakers were located in front of the stage on the left and right, one was placed directly in the back in the middle, and one was suspended from the ceiling. The ceiling speaker allowed for experimenting with vertical sound placement as well as the usual horizontal placement. The fifth track contained an additional channel spread between the four speakers that represented a performer using a handheld coil which could be positioned near one of four wire receiving loops that sent the info to each speaker.   During this time, Schaeffer and Henry began work on the first opera concrete, Orphee . A premiere in Paris did not fare well. It received such ferocious criticism in the press that the world actually began to take notice.   Schaeffer felt that his music was the link between the polytonal - polyrhythmic works of Stravinsky, and that the  objet sonore  was similar to Shoenberg's pieces.   He felt for the new music to flourish, that a new syntax had to be created, so he further broke sounds into  two more detailed classifications: A sound event (objets sonore) was to be classified in one of two ways. The first was a set of 25 definitions for the use in the description of objets sonores and the processes which might be applied (length, complexity, extracts, etc.). The second was concerned with the application of these definitions to create a language for the synthesis of musique concrete (manipulation, transmission, modulation, etc.). These characteristics were published in his book, A la recherche d'une musique concrete (The Search for a Concrete Music), which went into detail defining sound to the most exact descriptions possible. He also described the composer of musique concrete as one who"...Takes his point of departure the objets sonore, the sound objects, which are the equivalent of visual images, and which therefore alter the procedures of musical composition completely...The Concrete experiment in music consists of building sonorous objects, not with the play of numbers and seconds of the metronome, but with pieces of time torn from the cosmos." (3) Many composers of the day such as Milhaud, Boulez, Messian and even Stockhausen were enticed with the views Schaeffer put forth about sound. Many of them visited the studio and composed using the tools made available to them.  Schaeffer and the studio went on to create many patents.   Schaeffer died in 1995 from Alzheimer disease. He was remembered as the 'Musician of Sounds.' "..Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi...I think of myself as an explorer struggling to find a way through in the far north, but I wasn't finding a way through..There is no way through. The way through is behind us." (2)   _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Bibliography. Russcol, Herbert, The Liberation of Sound :  An Introduction to Electronic Music , Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1972. 1) p.32    3) p.85 Manning, Peter, Electronic and Computer Music, NY, Oxford Press, 1985. Hodgkinson, Tim, Re-records Quarterly Magazine, Vol. 2 No 1., (March 1987) 2) pp. 5-9 Appleton, Jon H. and Ronald C. Perera, The development and Practice of Electronic Music , Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1975. Simms, Bryan R., Music of the Twentieth Century-Style and Sructure, NY, Schirmer Books, 1996. Between 1945 and 1953, writes Mitcham (1994), technology took the world stage in defiance of the human mind that fostered it up: USA A-bomb (1945), Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (1946), USSR A-bomb (1949), kidney transplant (1950), USA H-bomb (1951), USSR H-bomb (1952), DNA (1953). Between 1954 and 1962 the new powers were put to use within traditional frameworks, with increasingly conflictive results: USS Nautilus (1954), commercial electricity from nuclear power (1955), birth control pill (1955), Sputnik I (1957), radioactivity accidents in Western and Eastern Europe (1957), integrated circuit (1959), laser (1960), Vostok I (1961), Mariner 2 (1962). Then came a period of trying to adapt or alter those frameworks, punctuated by more technological disasters. The period comprised between 1963 and 1972 was one of the most creative in the history of science and technology policies. Human, political, and economic frameworks were adapted or altered, initiatives in assessment and control were taken: limited nuclear test ban treaty (1963), USS Thresher sinks (1963), Vostok 6 (1963), Harvard University Programme on Technology and Society (1964), New York City power failure (1965), B-52 carrying four H-bombs crashes in Spain (1966), Torry Canyon spills 30 million gallons of crude oil onto UK beaches (1967), Humanae vitae rejects artificial contraception (1968), USS Scorpion sinks (1968), Apollo 11 (1969), Environmental Protection Agency (1969), oil well blow-out in Santa Barbara (1969), Greenpeace (1969), Earth Day (1970), Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Committee on the Social Implications of Technology (1972), DDT banned (1972), United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972), The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome (1972). The Moon, 20 July 1969 Pierre Schaeffer was born in Nancy on 15 August 1910. His father was a violinist, his mother a singer. Schaeffer studied the cello at the Nancy conservatoire. Between 1918 and 1922 ‘Spengler saw in the downfall of the West the promise of a golden age of engineers’ (Adorno 1951). In 1928 Beyer stated that the music to come should no longer be expected to follow from compositional practice and Valéry claimed that changes in the old business of the beautiful had been such as to bear upon the notion itself of art. Schaeffer attended the École Polytechnique from 1929 to 1931 and went on to study electricity and telecommunications. In 1932 Jakobson (1932a) remarked that European and African musical systems were not reducible to one another, and he argued for the shift from silent screen to sound film (Jakobson 1932b). In 1934 Schaeffer was appointed to the Strasbourg telecommunications service. In 1935 Heidegger asserted that violence had long been done to the thingly element of things, and that thought had played a part in that violence. In 1936 Benjamin affirmed that, in the age of technical reproducibility, art could take on a political function; Schaeffer was transferred to the Paris radio service. In 1938 Adorno bemoaned the decay of hearing brought about by modern technology; Schaeffer (1938b) committed to paper lessons and exercises for the mixing-desk musician and took up discussion on ‘ordinary binaural listening and radio listening’ in the Revue musicale (Schaeffer 1938a). In 1941 he subsumed cinema and radio under the notion of relay-arts, likening their media to an instrument whose dual role was ‘to retransmit in a certain manner what we used to see or hear directly and to express in a certain manner what we used not to see or hear’ (Schaeffer 1941b): at ease in the abstract domain, ill at ease in the concrete domain, writing yearned for concretion; at ease in the concrete domain, ill at ease in the abstract domain, the relay-arts yearned for abstraction (Schaeffer 1941a). With the metteur en scène Jacques Copeau in 1942, Schaeffer organized the Beaune workshops on radio acting, to ‘exploit the new margin of nuances offered by the blind listener’s sharpness of hearing’. In 1943 Copeau set forth a poetics of microphone diction; Schaeffer set up a laboratory for experiments in radio production, the Studio d’Essai of the Radiodiffusion Nationale. From 1943 to 1944 he created the experimental radio series La coquille à planètes and, on 22 August 1944, 10:30 p.m. (Schaeffer 1990), was responsible for the first broadcasts in an almost liberated Paris. In 1946 Schaeffer (1946a) published on the non-visual component of cinema. On Thursday, 18 December 1947, Ponge (1961) mused: ‘Perhaps I am not very intelligent; in any case, ideas are not my forte. I have always been disappointed in them.’ In January 1948 Schaeffer started research into noises, which led to the five Études de bruits (Bayle org. 1990) that set musique concrète afoot.   Paris, 24 August 1944 The Études were broadcast by the French Radio in a concert de bruits on 5 October 1948. Their genesis and manufacture were narrated in ‘Introduction à la musique concrète’ (Schaeffer 1950). Working in a modified radio studio, Schaeffer employed a disk-cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber, and a mobile recording unit. Techniques at play involved variation of recording and reproduction speeds, sampling and editing by manipulation of the pickup, locking of recorded grooves, backwards playing of disks, loudness modulations, fade-in and fade-out. Sound-producing bodies sampled included, on the same footing, stokers on six locomotives with personal voices and buffers conducted by Schaeffer at the Batignolles depot (later combined with library samples of rolling wagon wheels); an amateur orchestra at Salle Érard tuning up to a clarinet call thus embellished with fioriture (later combined with Jean-Jacques Grunenwald’s piano improvisations live at the studio); Boulez on the piano in classic, romantic, impressionist, and atonal harmonizations of a given theme (later cut, reversed, and spliced). Closing the set, an ad libitum mix of objets trouvés gathered Balinese music, American harmonica, and French barge round Sacha Guitry’s singing — which the continuity-girl’s coughing halted — in a ‘virtuoso performance at four potentiometers and eight ignition keys’ (Schaeffer 1950) by a techno DJ half a century ahead of the times (see Riddell 1996 and Henry in interview to Khazam 1997).   Control room of the Studio d’Essai Being mentally conceived, notated in symbols, and performed by instrumentalists, traditional music moved from musical abstraction to sonic concretion. Discovering sound-producing bodies and manners of putting them into vibration, recording the sounds obtained, manipulating such recordings, listening to them and trying out structurations, musique concrète would move from the sonic concretum to musical abstraction. Schaeffer advocated a cross-fertilization of procedures. À la recherche d’une musique concrète (Schaeffer 1952) expanded the narrative, advanced new theorizations, and sketched an operational lexicon. To establish a new sonic domain on the edge of music or to engraft new sounds upon old musical forms? Olivier Messiaen, Henry Michaux, and Claude Lévi-Strauss urged Schaeffer to break with the past.   Pierre Henry at the potentiomètre d'espace in a concert at the Salle de L'Ancien Conservatoire, Paris, 1952 In 1951 the French Radio presented the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, which at the time consisted of Pierre Schaeffer, [1] the engineer Jacques Poullin, and the composer-percussionist Pierre Henry, with the first purpose-built electroacoustic music studio ever. The collaboration between Schaeffer and Poullin, in its fourth year, was resulting in a three-track tape recorder, a machine with ten playback heads to replay tape loops in echo (the morphophone), a keyboard controlled machine to replay tape loops at twenty-four pre-set speeds (the keyboard, chromatic, or Tolana phonogène), a slide-controlled machine to replay tape loops at a continuously variable range of speeds (the handle, continuous, or Sareg phonogène), and a device to distribute live an encoded track across four loudspeakers, including one hanging from the centre of the ceiling (the potentiomètre d’espace). Output from 1951 to 1953 comprised 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 music Masquerage (1952) by Schaeffer and Astrologie (1953) by Henry. In 1954 Varèse and Honegger visited to work on the tape parts of Déserts and La rivière endormie.   Schaeffer at the chromatic phonogène, 1953 In 1953 the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète of the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française rallied elektronische Musik, music for tape, and ‘exotic music’ under the banner of experimental music to compare methods and establish complementary research programmes (Palombini 1993). Written in 1953 and published in 1957, ‘Vers une musique expérimentale’ minimized frictions. Considering that tonal relations were inherent in the construction and technique of Western instruments, Schaeffer in principle objected to serial methods as applied to traditional instruments, but he observed that, in practice, the listening to such pieces could be validated by a certain technique of hearing. Considering that when applied to sound qualities other than pitch the series would lose its negative character and open to new sounds the domains of tradition, Schaeffer in principle accepted the application of serial methods to complex sounds, but he observed that, in practice, such sounds had little to gain from systematic recourse to serial techniques. The methodological syncretion awaited failed to materialize. In Paris and in Cologne, manipulated samples and electronically-produced sounds amalgamated into Henry’s Haut voltage and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge in 1956. In 1957 Schaeffer (1957a) outlined the method of research after musique concrète. Étude aux allures (1958), Étude aux sons animés (1958), and Étude aux objets (1959) illustrated that method. In 1958 the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète was transformed into Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1959 Tolana advertised the phonogène Universel, which dissociated downward and upward shifts in tessitura (spectral transposition) from distension and contraction of dynamic shapes (temporal transposition). In 1954 Heidegger (1954b) stated that humans were delivered over to technology in the worst possible way when they regarded it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which they particularly liked to do homage, made them utterly blind to the essence of technology. [2] Because the essence of technology was nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it ought to happen in a realm that were, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm was art. But only if the arts were not conceived as deriving from the artistic, if art works were not enjoyed aesthetically, if art were not a sector of cultural activity. Art demanded to be reconducted to the golden age of Greek techne. In 1958 Simondon saw culture as unbalanced because it enshrined the aesthetic object in the world of significations while driving the technical object back into the structureless world of what had no signification but a use. Simondon sought to integrate the machine into the family of human things as a component of a global rebirth of culture (Hart 1989). The gap which separated the occidental man from the work of his hands demanded to be bridged. And the activities of the craftsman, simultaneously ancient and modern, provided a model of understanding, employment, and humanization of the machine. Schaeffer delivered Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines in 1966 after fifteen years of labour. The work was dedicated to the memory of his father, whose precept — ‘practise your instrument’ — the author passed on. Traité follows a zigzag course in seven jumps named books. ‘Book One’ links the genesis of music to the birth of the musical instrument, defined as the causal permanence that engenders an organization of sound characters (and hence timbre), out of which variations of musical values (paradigmatically, pitch) appear. ‘Book Two’ postulates four functions of listening. Ouïr (to hear) is to posit iconic (i.e. similarity based) relations between representamen and object (or signifier and signified): on the verge of semiosis, creaks lay dormant in the background noise. Écouter (to listen) is to posit indexical (i.e. causal) relations between representamen and object: creaks stand for ungreased hinges. Comprendre (to comprehend) is to establish symbolic (i.e. consensual) relations between representamen and object: creaks stand for tempered pitches agreeable to a metrics of successive divisional operations. And because hearing, listening, understanding, and comprehending all are lexicalized acceptations of entendre — by semantic derivation from the etymological sense, ‘to turn one’s attention’ — the French language allows Schaeffer to construe entendre as to hear, listen, understand, and comprehend in mindfulness of one’s intention. [3] Thus sounds open themselves up to iconism, indexicality, and symbolism with intent. Reduced listening follows thence as a bracketing of symbolic and indexical relationships such as references to the traditional solfège and to source or causality might afford, whereby the sonic object unveils itself as an aggregate of shape and matter qualities. As ouïr ebbs entendre flows, as entendre ebbs ouïr flows, and as such movements alternate, sonic things disclose themselves as sonic objects whose intrinsic qualities bespeak details of the sound-producing event and novel abstractive possibilities. [4] ‘Book Three’ shows the distinct natures of, on the one side, the physical measurements of frequency, time, amplitude, and spectrum, and, on the other, the subjective perceptions of pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre, thus highlighting the perceptual frailty of the soundest parametric construction. ‘Book Four’ appropriates Husserl, Gestalt, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, and Saussure in the interest of musical research. ‘Book Five’ sets forward criteria to single out sound units from sound continua (identificatory typology) and to select sonic objects where musicalness dwells in posse (classificatory typology). ‘Book Six’ expounds the method of musical research and outlines seven criteria of the morphology of the potentially musical object that are likely to emerge as musical values in the context of structurations: mass, dynamics, harmonic timbre, melodic profile, mass profile, grain, and allure. Enlarged for the 1977 reprint, ‘Book Seven’ comes to the conclusion that no universal polymorphous musicalness has arisen from the systematic analysis of sonic objects. 4. COMPRENDRE — for me: signs — facing me: values (sense-language) Emergence of a content of sound and reference to, comparison with, extrasonorous notions 1. ÉCOUTER — for me: indices — facing me: external events (agent-instrument) Emission of sound 1 and 4: objective         2 and 3: subjective 3. ENTENDRE — for me: qualified perceptions — facing me: qualified sonic object Selection of certain particular aspects of sound 2. OUÏR — for me: raw perceptions, sketches of the object — facing me: raw sonic object Reception of sound 3 and 4: abstract  1 and 2: concrete The four functions of listening: listening, hearing, listening out for and comprehending The Solfège of the Sonic Object purports to take, from the practice of sound-producing bodies, to a universal musicalness through a technique of hearing. It comprises a preliminary stage, four operations and an epilogue. In the preliminary stage, heterogeneous sound-producing bodies are put into vibration by various processes and the resulting sounds are recorded. In the first operation — Typology — sonic objects are singled out from sound continua and selected or discarded according to a musicianly penchant. [5] In the second operation — Morphology — the objects selected are compared, perceptual criteria that make them up are named, and the objects are classed as tokens of such criteria. [6] In the third operation — Characterology — interactions of criteria within a given object are identified and referred to a sound-producing event. [7] In the fourth operation — Analysis — objects evincing a particular criterion are set against the perceptual fields of pitch, duration, and intensity so as to establish cardinal (absolute) or ordinal (relative) scales of criteria. In the epilogue — or Synthesis --- new musics are expected to arise, based on reference structures that should play, for each of the seven morphological criteria, a role similar to that played by interval relations and the games of tonality and modality. [8] The nexus of Schaeffer’s research becomes transparent when some avatars of the question concerning the instrument speak their names: ‘relay-arts’ (Scaheffer 1941a, 1941b, 1946b), or analogue techniques of sound and image reproduction as instruments of new art-forms; ‘noise piano’ (Schaeffer 1950), or organizing heterogeneous sound-producing bodies into new musical instruments; ‘turntable piano’ (Schaeffer 1950), or analogue techniques of sound reproduction as applied to the conception of a most generic musical instrument; ‘cut bell’ and ‘locked groove’ (Schaeffer 1950), or analogue sound manipulations as instrumental in the disclosure of the sonic reality; ‘pseudo-instrument’ (Schaeffer 1952), or organizing sonic objects into virtual musical instruments; ‘piano law’ (Schaeffer 1960, 1966, Schaeffer and Reibel 1967), or the inverse relation between spectral richness of resonance and incisiveness of attack across the piano tessitura (i.e. the lower the tone, the richer the spectrum and the less incisive the attack; the higher the tone, the poorer the spectrum and the more incisive the attack); ‘characterology’ (Schaeffer 1952, 1966), or the systematic investigation of such laws as a means to retrieve the sound-producing event in sonic matters and shapes; ‘translation (from symbols) into sound’ and ‘translation from sound (into a simulacrum on the analogue medium’ (Schaeffer 1966, Schaeffer and Reibel 1967), or the traditional composer’s and the sound recordist’s divergent technologies of listening; ‘acousmatic listening’ (Schaeffer 1966), or sound recording as an instrument to resurrect the poiesis of presocratic techne. In 1936 Benjamin expounded the decline of that unique appearance of a remote reality, however near (the ‘aura’ of artworks and nature), as a result of the proliferation of technical reproduction. In 1954 Heidegger (1954a) evoked the flow of distanceless uniformity where all things were carried away and mixed up; by plane, the radio, the film, television, and the H-bomb. The bomb and its explosion were the mere final emission of what had long since taken place: the estrangement of Western thought from the thingness of the thing. Also in 1954, Heidegger (1954b) depicted the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve under the rule of Ge-stell, the essence of modern technology, according to which everything, including man himself, had become material for a process of self-assertive imposition of human will on things, regardless of their own essential natures (Hofstadter 1971).   Cover of Davis et al. 1950 Schaeffer’s relay-arts instrument pertains to the history of technical reproducibility, and there is a close resemblance between the two manifestations of technical reproduction as expounded by Benjamin — ‘artwork reproduction and the art of film’ — and the double role of the relay-arts instrument as expounded by Schaeffer: ‘to retransmit in a certain manner what we used to see or hear directly and to express in a certain manner what we used not to see or hear’ (Palombini 1997, 1998). In the history of technical reproducibility, the relay-arts instrument materializes the shift from ‘older handwork technology’ to that technology which, in the words of Heidegger, ‘unlocks, transforms, stores up, distributes, and switches about’ the energies of nature, and whose essence Heidegger terms Ge-stell. The ‘decline of the aura’ — a feat of technical reproducibility — is intersected by ‘the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve’ — a feat of Ge-stell — but while the former paves the way for art as political praxis, the latter elicits from Heidegger an invitation to a return to the golden age of Greek techne. Is this not praxis? Pythagoras (see Kirk and Raven 1957) professed cyclic recurrence of events, metempsychosis, and kinship of humans with all living things. Yet he ‘carried out scientific investigation more than anyone else’ (Heraclitus in Kirk and Raven 1957) and ‘was not the lesser of Greek sages’ (Herodotus, ibid.). Upon Pythagoras’ death, his followers split into Acousmatics (practitioners of the mystic doctrine) and Mathematics (remarkable scientists). For Schaeffer (1966), music had not sprung from the numeric proportions of intervals. Larousse presented the Acousmatics as disciples of Pythagoras who, for five years, listened to the master speak from behind a veil, observing the strictest silence. Schaeffer metaphorized the analogue medium into that veil to unveil a hearing to which we have grown accustomed today: listening — on the telephone, tape, the radio — to sounds whose original source remains unseen. “Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light” (Heidegger 1954b). The musical note, a notable assortment of pitch, duration, and intensity, has borne sway over European tradition and laid claim to universality. Owing to a notational system, the composer sings in silence, plays in silence, sight-reads in silence. The score prefigures the work, which is one and the same with the symbols of writing: ‘Beethoven’s quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar’ (Heidegger 1935–36). The composer does not hear but reads, ‘pre-listens’. Schaeffer likens his demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from one’s mother tongue into a foreign language. The performer translates symbols and notions into sound, and an implicit, readable work, becomes explicit, audible to laymen. Still, there is something sonorous in a musical composition. ‘The thingly element is so irremovably present in the art work that we are compelled rather to say conversely that the musical composition is in sound’ (ibid.). The sound recordist does not read but listens. Comparing the sound image generated by the electroacoustic chain with the original sound phenomenon, which originates from real instruments and unfolds in real magnitude over the acoustic field, he translates from sound. Schaeffer likens this demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from a foreign language into one’s mother tongue. In the first century Plutarch (n.d.) expostulated with youth about the exertion of speech to the detriment of listening: to listen extempore is ill-advised! ‘He who plays the ball simultaneously learns to throw it and to catch it, but when it comes to speech, on the contrary, reception takes precedence of deliverance, just as conception and pregnancy precede birth.’ In 1931 Spengler showed vision as the Nordic predator’s sense par excellence, hearing as the prey’s. In 1953 Barthes traversed the geometry of the writer’s space: horizontally, the language, a consensual corpus common to all writers of a period; vertically, style, a repertoire of gestures — imagery, delivery, vocabulary — springing from the writer’s past; obliquely, écriture, an act of historical solidarity binding the writer’s utterance to the vast History of the Others. Schaeffer set sail from Literature in avoidance of the commitment of écriture for which writing pleaded. Bound for music, his commitment was all too clear: to reconcile technology to nature. Substituting perception for expression as the locus of such a commitment, he raised écriture to the second power; substituting hearing for seeing, he cubed it. Notwithstanding, three fallacies — ‘Schaeffer is a composer’, ‘écriture is writing’, and ‘written note and written word are the selfsame sign’ — have compacted into a petitio principii: ‘Schaeffer is the antithet to the écriture composer’. When a boy communicates he collects his thoughts, makes silence; he awaits something from Himself or his Visitor; he waits upon some Thing to increase the feeling of His presence to It and of Its presence to Him. ‘Bereft of words, prior to any intention, adoration is attention, a summons to consciousness’ (Schaeffer 1969). Listening reducedly, we receive a sonic thing whose image starts forming in our consciousness. The flow of distanceless uniformity where all things are carried away and mixed up is halted thereby. ‘That the thingness of the thing is particularly difficult to express and only seldom expressible is infallibly documented by the history of its interpretation’ (Heidegger 1935–36): a bearer of traits (i.e. the sonic object as qualified by the seven morphological criteria); the unity of a manifold of sensations (i.e. the raw sonic object and the transcendental sonic object); formed matter (i.e. the shape/matter pair that underpins morphology). That remoteness, however near, is the sonic thing itself. From the objectlessness of the standing reserve Schaeffer elicits a sonic object that relapses into there as musicalness reservoir. There is in the sonic object ‘the impetus of a break and the impetus of a coming to power, there is the very shape of every revolutionary situation, the fundamental ambiguity of which is that Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess’ (Barthes 1953). For all that, the sonic object is not an aesthetic product but a signifying practice, not a structure but a structuration, not an object but a work and a game (Ponge’s objeu), not a group of closed signs but a volume of traces in displacement, not signification but the signifier, not the old musical work but the Text of Life (cf. Barthes 1974). [9] In 1942 Ponge observed that kings never touched doors: ‘They do not know this happiness: to push before oneself, sweetly or harshly, one of those great familiar panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place — to hold a door in one’s arms.’ In 1951 Adorno deplored the loss of the human ability to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly: ‘Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them.’ In 1979 Calvino enlarged upon Ponge’s describing simple objects outside any worn-out perceptual habit: ‘Then something indifferent and almost amorphous such as a door reveals an unexpected richness; suddenly, we get happy to find ourselves in a world full of doors to open and close. And this not for any reason alien to the fact in itself (such as a symbolic, an ideological, or an aestheticizing reason might be), but simply because we re-establish a relationship with things as things, with the diversity between one thing and another, and with the diversity of any thing from us.’ Pierre Henry was born in Paris on 9 December 1927. He studied composition with Boulanger, harmony with Messiaen and percussion with Passerone. In 1949 he took his percussions to a studio at the French Radio to improvise, in the sight of the images, the music for Voir l’invisible, a television documentary on slow-motion and the big close-up as devices to disclose natural phenomena. Henry went to Schaeffer disk in hand. Schaeffer was fed up with hitting boxes and grating sound-producing bodies: ‘I said to myself: after all, the conservatoire trains good percussionists, and it was at that point, I think, that someone mentioned Pierre Henry’ (Chion 1980). ‘When Schaeffer heard my recording he said that it was similar to what he was doing and he showed me how to speed it up, slow it down, reverse it and record sounds on locked grooves’ (Henry interviewed by Khazam 1997). In July 1962 Henry took his Tolana tape recorder to a farmhouse near Carcassone. Microphones were installed at the pigsty, poultry yard and streams across the meadow. Incoming signals were fed to a mixing desk in the ground floor, from where the farm was auscultated. Henry made the pigs go without food for the sake of their squeals, chased the chickens to make the most of their cackling, built weirs in the streams to take full advantage of the flowing water. He practised the barn door daily. A Neumann U-47 bore witness to his performance: ‘now with tiny wrist movements, now shaking it like a madman, bestriding it, making it yell’ (Chion 1980). The door flew off the handle but did not come off its hinges. Henry did obeisance to its law: the faster the movement, the higher the tone and the smoother the grain; the slower the movement, the lower the tone and the craggier the grain. On a huge wooden table in Paris, the door was cut and the cuts were classed, numbered and named. Experiments of association were made. Takes underwent minute slicing and splicing. Manipulations were kept to a minimum: echo chamber, panning, multi-tracking. In June 1963 the barn door from Vic unbosomed its secrets from inside the confessionals of the magnificently reverberating church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris.   Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre In the fourth century BC Lieh-Tzu (732) asseverated: ‘The perfect discourse is wordless, the perfect act is not to act.’ In 1857 Baudelaire limned the Orient of the Occident, the China of Europe, an Occidental China, where Nature was recast by dream. In 1881 Nietzsche argued: ‘You say that food, place, air, and society determine you and transform you? All the more so do your opinions, for they determine you as to your choice of food, place, air, and society.’ In 1925 Artaud avowed: ‘I suffer from the translation Mind or from the Mind-that-intimidates-things so as to make them enter into the Mind.’ In 1947 Ponge (1961) italicized: ‘the variety of things is in reality what makes me up.’ In 1974 Barthes uphold: ‘We must above all aim at fissuring the meaning system itself: we must emerge from the Occidental enclosure’. In 1995 Handelman averred: ‘To alter our way of perceiving is to alter who we are, to alter the structure of knowledge and the process of knowing itself. Similarly, alterations in knowledge and the process of knowing are impossible without corresponding changes in perception.’ With musique concrète Schaeffer has brought the technical object’s concrescence (see Simondon 1958) to bear upon the ‘problematics’ of Western composition. With acousmatic listening he has brought the tape machine into play as a component of a global rebirth of culture. With the sonic object he has brought listening to recorded sounds into the world of significations. With reduced listening he has brought hearkening to sonic things up to date with the poetics of Varèse, Scelsi, Ponge, Freud, Heidegger, Barthes, Lacan, and Calvino. Schaeffer died on 19 August 1995. ‘My essential role is to communicate a manner of comprehending, feeling, and acting that may seem, from the outside, terribly personal. In fact, I am but a relay myself’ (Brunet 1969). So far as it sets upon the independent and self-supporting sonic thing and challenges it to reveal itself, in the mode of scales that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence, as standing reserve of a musicalness which is conceived as universal, reduced listening partakes of Ge-stell. Yet measuring is inherent in the digital sound domain and the Book of Changes provides a notoriously ancient example of binary data happily married to highly refined representations of nature. Repertoire bm: ballet music; dc: dramatic cantata; ds: décor sonore; fm: film music; iw: music for installation work; mm: music for mime show; mt: music for a text; oc: opéra concret; pl: pantomime lyrique; rp: music for a radio production; tm: music for the theatre [10] Schaeffer 1948 Études de bruits, Concertino diapason 1949 Variations sur une flûte mexicaine, Suite pour quatorze instruments 1950 L’oiseau RAI 1952 Les paroles dégelées (rp), Masquerage (fm) 1958 Étude aux allures, Étude aux sons animés 1959 Simultane camerounais, Étude aux objets, Musique de scène pour Phèdre (tm), Nocturne aux chemins de fer (mm) 1979 Bilude Schaeffer/Henry 1950 Bidule en ut, Symphonie pour un homme seul 1951 Orphée 51 or Toute la lyre (pl) 1953 Orphée 53 (oc) 1957 Sahara d’aujourd’hui (fm) Schaeffer/Rollin 1952 Scènes de Don Juan (tm) Schaeffer/Ferrari 1958 Continuo Schaeffer/Arrieu 1962 L’aura d’Olga (rp) Schaeffer/Dürr 1975 Le trièdre fertile Henry (1950–57) 1950 Fantasia, Bidule en mi, Concerto des ambiguïtés, Aube (fm), Musique sans titre, Batterie fugace, Tam tam I, II, III, and IV, La grande et la petite manœuvre (tm), La course au kilocycle (rp), La fille de Londres (rp) 1951 Tabou clairon, Micro rouge I and II, Mouvement perpétuel, Dimanche noir I and II, Sonatine, Étude noire, Étude à Chopin, Le microphone bien tempéré, Antiphonie 1952 Vocalises 1953 Astrologie (fm), Léonard de Vinci (fm), Les fils de l’eau (fm), Art précolombien (fm), La voile d’Orphée (dc) 1954 L’art populaire mexicain (fm) 1955 L’amour des quatre colonels (tm), Rose rouge (tm), Spatiodynamisme (iw), Arcane (bm), Imagerie Saint Michel (bm), Le Musée d’Or de Bogota (fm) 1956 Haut voltage (bm), Le cercle (bm), Au seuil de la nuit (mt, rp) 1957 Le mariage de la feuille et du cliché (ds), L’an 56 (mt), L’occident est bleu (mt) Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (English pronunciation: /piːˈɛər ˈhɛnriː məˈriː ˈʃeɪfər/ (About this soundlisten), French pronunciation: ​[ʃɛfɛʁ]; 14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995)[1] was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician. His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime. Amongst the vast range of works and projects he undertook, Schaeffer is most widely and currently recognized for his accomplishments in electronic and experimental music,[2] at the core of which stands his role as the chief developer of a unique and early form of avant-garde music known as musique concrète.[3] The genre emerged in Europe from the utilization of new music technology developed in the post-war era, following the advance of electroacoustic and acousmatic music. Schaeffer's writings (which include written and radio-narrated essays, biographies, short novels, a number of musical treatises and several plays)[1][3][4] are often oriented towards his development of the genre, as well as the theoretics and philosophy of music in general.[5] Today, Schaeffer is considered one of the most influential experimental, electroacoustic and subsequently electronic musicians, having been the first composer to utilize a number of contemporary recording and sampling techniques that are now used worldwide by nearly all record production companies.[2] His collaborative endeavors are considered milestones in the histories of electronic and experimental music. Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life and education 1.2 First experimentations and work in broadcasting and engineering; marriage and fatherhood 1.3 Beginnings of writing career 1.4 Club d'essai and the origin of musique concrète 1.5 Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète 1.6 Later life and death 2 Legacy 2.1 Musique concrète 2.2 Influences on music 2.3 Other 3 Works 3.1 Music 3.2 Broadcast narratives 3.3 Selected writings 3.3.1 Fiction 3.3.1.1 Novels and short stories 3.3.1.2 Plays 3.3.2 Non-fiction 4 References 5 External links Life Early life and education Schaeffer was born in Nancy in 1910.[3] His parents were both musicians (his father a violinist; his mother, a singer),[5] and at first it seemed that Pierre would also take on music as a career. However his parents discouraged his musical pursuits from childhood and had him educated in engineering.[2] He studied at several universities in this inclination, the first of which was Lycée Saint-Sigisbert located in his hometown of Nancy. Afterwards he moved westwards in 1929 to the École Polytechnique in Paris[3][6][7] and finally completed his education in the capital at the École supérieure d'électricité, in 1934.[7] Schaeffer received a diploma in radio broadcasting from the École Polytechnique.[8] He may have also received a similar qualification from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications, although it is not verifiable as to whether or not he ever actually attended this university.[8] First experimentations and work in broadcasting and engineering; marriage and fatherhood Later in 1934 Schaeffer entered his first employment as an engineer, briefly working in telecommunications in Strasbourg.[7][9] In 1935 he began a relationship with a woman named Elisabeth Schmitt, and later in the year married her and with her had his first child, Marie-Claire Schaeffer.[7] He and his new family then officially relocated to Paris where he joined the Radiodiffusion Française (now called Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française; French for "French Radio and Television Broadcasting") in 1936 and began his work in radio broadcasting and presentation.[6] It was there that he began to move away from his initial interests in telecommunications and to pursue music instead, combining his abilities as an engineer with his passion for sound. In his work at the station, Schaeffer experimented with records and an assortment of other devices—the sounds they made and the applications of those sounds—after convincing the radio station's management to allow him to use their equipment. This period of experimentation was significant for Schaeffer's development, bringing forward many fundamental questions he had on the limits of modern musical expression.[6] Schaeffer presenting the Acousmonium. In these experiments, Pierre tried playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up and juxtaposing them with other sounds,[10] all techniques which were virtually unknown at that time.[6] He had begun working with new contemporaries whom he had met through RTF, and as such his experimentation deepened. Schaeffer's work gradually became more avant-garde, as he challenged traditional musical style with the use of various devices and practices. A unique variety of electronic instruments—ones which Schaeffer and his colleagues created, using their own engineering skills—came into play in his work, like the chromatic, sliding and universal phonogenes, François Bayle's Acousmonium and a host of other devices such as gramaphones and some of the earliest tape recorders.[10] Beginnings of writing career In 1938 Schaeffer began his career as a writer, penning various articles and essays for the Revue Musicale, a French journal of music. His first column, Basic Truths, provided a critical examination of musical aspects of the time.[citation needed] A known ardent Catholic, Schaeffer began to write minor religiously-based pieces, and in the same year as his Basic Truths he published his first novel: Chlothar Nicole — a short Christian novel.[11] Club d'essai and the origin of musique concrète The Studio d'Essai, later Club d'Essai, was founded in 1942 by Pierre Schaeffer at the Radiodiffusion Nationale (France). It played a role in the activities of the French resistance during World War II, and later became a center of musical activity. Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In 1949, Schaeffer met the percussionist-composer Pierre Henry, with whom he collaborated on many different musical compositions, and in 1951, he founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in the French Radio Institution. This gave him a new studio, which included a tape recorder. This was a significant development for Schaeffer, who previously had to work with phonographs and turntables to produce music.[12] Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape. His continued experimentation led him to publish À la Recherche d'une Musique Concrète (French for "In Search of a Concrete Music") in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point. His only opera, Orphée 53 ("Orpheus 53"), premiered in 1953. Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953 and reformed the group in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherche Musicale[s] (GRM) (at first without "s", then with "s"). In 1954 Schaeffer founded traditional music label Ocora ("Office de Coopération Radiophonique") alongside composer, pianist and musicologist Charles Duvelle, with a worldwide coverage in order to preserve African rural soundscapes. Ocora also served as a facility to train technicians in African national broadcasting services. Today, it is still run by Duvelle. Over the years, Schaeffer mentored a number of students who went on to have successful careers in their own right including Éliane Radigue, and the young Jean Michel Jarre. His last "etude" (study) came in 1959: the "Study of Objects" (Etudes aux Objets). Later life and death Schaeffer became an associate professor at the Paris Conservatoire from 1968 to 1980 after creating a "class of fundamental music and application to the audiovisual."[1] In the aftermath of the 1988 Armenian earthquake, the 78 year old Schaeffer led a 498-member French rescue team to look for survivors in Leninakan, and worked there until all foreign personnel were asked to leave.[13] Schaeffer suffered from Alzheimer's disease later in his life, and died from the condition in Aix-en-Provence in 1995.[citation needed] He was 85 years old. He is buried in Delincourt in the very nice and green Vexin region (55 minutes from Paris) where he used to have his countryside property.[citation needed] Schaeffer was thereafter remembered by many of his colleagues with the title, "Musician of Sounds".[clarification needed] Legacy Musique concrète Main article: Musique concrète See also: Acousmatic music Schaeffer often created his "concrete music" with real-world sounds. The notable Railroad Study (French: "Étude aux chemins de fer"), for instance, featured recordings of the noises made by trains running along railroad tracks. Sound is the vocabulary of nature. — Pierre Schaeffer The term musique concrète (French for "real music", literally "concrete music"), was coined by Schaeffer in 1948.[14] Schaeffer believed traditionally classical (or as he called it, "serious") music begins as an abstraction (musical notation) that is later produced as audible music. Musique concrète, by contrast, strives to start with the "concrete" sounds that emanate from base phenomena and then abstracts them into a composition. The term musique concrète is then, in essence, the breaking down of the structured production of traditional instruments, harmony, rhythm, and even music theory itself, in an attempt to reconstruct music from the bottom up. From the contemporary point of view, the importance of Schaeffer's musique concrète is threefold. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the vocabulary of music. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound. He was among the first musicians to manipulate recorded sound for the purpose of using it in conjunction with other sounds in order to compose a musical piece. Techniques such as tape looping and tape splicing were used in his research, often comparing to sound collage. The advent of Schaeffer's manipulation of recorded sound became possible only with technologies that were developed after World War II had ended in Europe. His work is recognized today as an essential precursor to contemporary sampling practices. Schaeffer was among the first to use recording technology in a creative and specifically musical way, harnessing the power of electronic and experimental instruments in a manner similar to Luigi Russolo, whom he admired and from whose work he drew inspiration. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of "playing" (in his terms, jeu) in the creation of music. Schaeffer's idea of jeu comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. This notion is at the core of the concept of musique concrète, and reflects on freely improvised sound, or perhaps more specifically electroacoustic improvisation, from the standpoint of Schaeffer's work and research. Influences on music In 1955, Éliane Radigue, an apprentice of Pierre Schaeffer at Studio d'Essai, learned to cut, splice and edit tape using his techniques. She then went on to work as an assistant to Pierre Henry in 1967. However, she became more interested in tape feedback and began working on her own pieces. She composed several works (Jouet Electronique [1967], Elemental I [1968], Stress-Osaka [1969], Usral [1969], Ohmnht [1970] Vice Versa, etc [1970]) by processing the feedback between two tape recorders and a microphone.[15] Pierre's aforementioned student in GRM, Jean Michel Jarre, went on to great international success in his own musical career. Jarre's 1997 album, Oxygene 7-13, is dedicated to Schaeffer. Pierre Henry also made a tribute to the man, composing his Écho d'Orphée, Pour P. Schaeffer alongside him for Schaeffer's last work and second compilation, L'Œuvre Musicale. His other notable pupils include Joanna Bruzdowicz, Jorge Antunes, Bernard Parmegiani, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, Armando Santiago, Elzbieta Sikora.Pierre Schaeffer distanced himself – voluntarily – from the musical universe in the early 1980s after criticizing the avant-garde of the 1950s, which intended to break with tradition. Contrary to this view, Schaeffer returns to music when he recognizes the virtuoso Otavio Henrique Soares Brandão as his most faithful disciple, who under his guidance performed a reading of his work "Traité dos Objets Musicaux". This reading aims to create an innovative piano and musical instrumental technique, which does not break with tradition. Pierre Schaeffer writes four fundamental texts about this recognition Apropos of the transcription pour piano by Otavio Brandão from Pierre Schaeffer's “Étude aux Objets”, In program of Soares Brandão's concert at Maison de l'Amérique Latine (Paris January 9, 1988). “Réponse à Otávio”, In text of the program of the concert performed by Soares Brandão at Salle Pleyel in honor of the 80 years of Pierre Schaeffer (January 12, 1990). DECLARATION DE PIERRE SCHAEFFER SUR IBIS ET OTAVIO SOARES BRANDÃO (Paris le 13/09/1990) Declaration by Pierre Schaeffer (Porte Parole) https://issuu.com/ibisfsb/docs/textes_de_pierre_schaeffer_sur_ohsb [1] Many rap albums, such as It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy and 3 Feet High And Rising by De La Soul take ordinary sounds and use them to create a finished product.[16] Other Today, in his honor, the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards has named several of its past events after Schaeffer. Pierre himself was a prize winner at the awards more than once. Works Music All of Schaeffer's musical compositions (concrète or otherwise) were recorded before the advent of the CD, either on cassettes or a more archaic form of magnetic tape (therefore the term "discography" cannot be appropriately used here; rather his music in general). Mass-production for his work was limited at best, and each piece was, by Schaeffer's terms, intended to be released foremost as an exposé to the masses of what he believed was a new and somewhat revolutionizing form of music. The original production of his marketed work was done by the "Groupe de Recherches Musicales" (a.k.a. GRM; now owned and operated by INA or the Institut national de l'audiovisuel), the company which he initially had formed around his creations. Other music was broadcast live (Pierre himself being notable on French radio at the time) and/or done in live "concert". Some individual tracks even found their way into the use of other artists, with Pierre's work being fronted in mime performances and ballets. Now after his death, various musical production companies, such as Disques Adès and Phonurgia Nova have been given rights to distribute his work. Below is a list of Schaeffer's musical works, showing his compositions and the year(s) they were recorded. Concertino-Diapason (1948; collaboration with J.-J. Grunenwald) Cinq études de bruits (1948) Suite pour 14 instruments (1949) Variations sur une flûte mexicaine (1949) Bidule en ut (1950; collaboration with Pierre Henry) La course au kilocycle (1950; radio score, collaboration with Pierre Henry) L'oiseau r.a.i. (1950) Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; collaboration with Pierre Henry; revised versions in 1953, 1955, and 1966 (Henry)) Toute la lyre (1951; pantomime, collaboration with Pierre Henry. Also known as Orphée 51) Masquerage (1952; film score) Les paroles dégelées (1952; music for a radio production) Scènes de Don Juan (1952; incidental music, collaboration with Monique Rollin) Orphée 53 (1953; opera) Sahara d'aujourd'hui (1957; film score, collaboration with Pierre Henry) Continuo (1958; collaboration with Luc Ferrari) Etude aux sons animés (1958) Etude aux allures (1958) Exposition française à Londres (1958; collaboration with Luc Ferrari) Etude aux objets (1959) Nocturne aux chemins de fer (1959; incidental music) Phèdre (1959; incidental music) Simultané camerounais (1959) Phèdre (1961) L'aura d'Olga (1962; music for a radio production, collaboration with Claude Arrieu) Le trièdre fertile (1975; collaboration with Bernard Durr) Bilude (1979) Broadcast narratives Apart from his published and publicized music, Schaeffer conducted several musical (and specifically musique concrète-related) presentations via French radio. Although these broadcasts contained musical pieces by Schaeffer they cannot be adequately described as part of his main line of musical output. This is because the radio "essays", as they were appropriately named, were mainly narration on Schaeffer's musical theories philosophies rather than compositions in and of themselves. Schaeffer's radio narratives include the following: The Shell Filled With Planets (1944) Cantata to Alsace (1945) An Hour of the World (1946) From Claudel to Brangues (1953) Ten Years of Radiophonic Experiments from the 'Studio' to the 'Club' d'Essai: 1942–1952 (1955) Selected writings For a complete list of literary works by Pierre Schaeffer, see the bibliography of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer's literary works span a range of genres, both in terms of fiction and non-fiction. He predominantly wrote treatises and essays, but also penned a film review and two plays. An ardent Catholic, Schaeffer wrote Chlothar Nicole (French: Clotaire Nicole; published 1938)—a Christian novel or short story—and Tobias (French: Tobie; published 1939) a religiously-based play. Fiction Novels and short stories Chlothar Nicole (1938) The Guardian of The Volcano (1969) Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1981) Plays Tobie (1939) Secular Games (1946) Non-fiction Traité des objets musicaux (1966) Solfège de l'objet sonore (1967) America, We Ignore You (1946) The Non-Visual Element of Films (1946) In Search of a Concrete Music (1952) Music and Acoustics (1967)
  • Topic: Electronics
  • Subject: Science & Medicine
  • Language: French

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