Schaeffer, Pierre

(b Nancy, 14 Aug 1910; d Les Milles, 19 Aug 1995). French composer, theorist, writer and teacher. His tape compositions of 1948 originated musique concrète. Although his parents were musicians he embarked on a scientific career, entering the Ecole Polytechnique in 1929. In 1934 he began work as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg and from 1936 he was a technician with Radiodiffusion Française. Soon he discovered that he was more attracted to literature and philosophy than to technology, and he wrote a number of essays and novels. At this time he developed a taste for communal life, first in scouting, later at Georges Gurdjieff's group meetings. In 1940 he founded Jeune France, an interdisciplinary association interested in music, theatre and the visual arts; the following year he joined Copeau and his pupils in the establishment of the Studio d'Essai, which was to become the centre of the Resistance movement in French radio and later the cradle of musique concrète. There he started work on a Symphonie de bruits, a project which later materialized as the Symphonie pour un homme seul, created with the collaboration of Pierre Henry, who joined him in 1949 and with whom he worked as a team until 1958. This work led Schaeffer away from simple tricks with disc recordings and towards systematic techniques, soon to be greatly facilitated by the availability of the tape recorder. A composer despite himself, he attracted enough attention to obtain official status for the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in 1951.

Two years later Schaeffer left the GRMC in the charge of Henry in order to direct the foundation and management of Radiodiffusion de la France d'Outre-mer (French overseas broadcasting). He returned to the GRMC in 1958 when, together with Ferrari and Mâche, he re-formed it as the more ambitious Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). The investigation of sounds and of new techniques progressed to more general research (which also incorporated instrumental resources) on the bases of musical perception. Schaeffer stopped composing and gave his attention to increasingly wide theoretical speculations after the establishment in 1960 of the Service de Recherche de la RTF, within which was set up a Groupe de Recherches sur l'Image complementary to the GRM. In 1968 he was appointed associate professor at the Paris Conservatoire to teach electro-acoustic composition. His teaching, which set out to ‘decondition the ear’ in order to facilitate a new perception of the world of sound was supplemented and continued by practical work carried out under the supervision of Guy Reibel. These ideas and methods were propounded at length in his fundamental theoretical work, the Traité des objets musicaux (Paris, 1966).

A man who had studied science at the Polytechnique and who looked askance at established ideas, a philosopher of art and science, a controversial anti-authoritarian, ever active, quick to question routine practices, Schaeffer was always a disturbing figure. During a sometimes stormy administrative career, he fought many battles and (with varying degrees of success) set up several movements and work groups that made their mark on the cultural life of France. His final administrative act was the foundation in 1974 of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), which brought together the bodies responsible for research, professional training, cooperation and conservation (archives). After this last battle Schaeffer, who had reached the age of retirement, continued to teach at the Conservatoire National de Musique until 1980, maintained his connections with the GRM, now part of the INA, and had premises and studios at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, as well as enjoying considerable autonomy.

Although he had stopped composing in 1960, Schaeffer did return to the studio in 1975 at the request of François Bayle (director of the GRM from 1966) and Bernard Durr, to collaborate with the latter on an exclusively electro-acoustic work entitled Le trièdre fertile. Subsequently, after a final and ironic musical experiment in 1979, Bilude, Schaeffer kept his distance from the musique concrète of which, as he had described himself half in jest, half in earnest to Marc Pierret, he was ‘the unfortunate inventor’ (1969). One may agree with Michel Chion that ‘his profound ambivalence towards the new musical genre he invented was to be one of the outstanding features of his work and thought’ (1990).

During the years that followed, he received many tributes and distinctions, notably from the University of Tel Aviv, the César Bastos Foundation of Brazil, the McLuhan Prize of Téléglobe Canada, and in France from the INA, the SACEM, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie. He had already received the Charles Cros Prize and the Grand Prize of the Académie de Disque Français, and Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, awarded him the insignia of Grand Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite. Dix ans d'essais radiophoniques, La coquille à planète and Pierre Schaeffer: l'oeuvre musicale were also reissued on disc during this period.

The year before he died, Schaeffer set up a non-profit-making organization, inaugurated in November 1995, under the name of the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherche Pierre Schaeffer. The purpose of this Centre, managed by Sylvie Dallet, was to promote Schaeffer's pioneering work and to perpetuate the spirit of research which had inspired him. It holds a large stock of archives, available to artists, scholars and historians.

There are difficulties in considering Schaeffer separately as a composer, novelist and essayist, for one of his deepest wishes was to build bridges between circumscribed fields of thought. Nonetheless, it is through his musical ideas that he reached a wide public. Schaeffer's musical thought rests on the primacy of the ear over conventional aesthetic considerations. It is his view that recording has placed all sounds – whether music, noises, animal cries or whatever – on an equal footing, since all are experienced in the same manner. They may thus be treated as ‘sound objects’, distinct from their acoustic and notated sources. Such objects are not categorized in acoustical terms (which are related only complexly to perception) nor for aesthetic qualities, since Schaeffer distrusted both physical measurements without aural relevance and theories of musical structure. He devoted much effort to a classification of sound objects based on disciplined listening, claiming that this process does not depend on using selected listeners, and that it is a necessary preliminary to further creation.

As a teacher of electro-acoustic techniques Schaeffer was tolerant of his pupils' aesthetic views. His teaching method began with ear training through carefully directed listening, then proceeded to the synthesis of sound objects having predetermined qualities. Manipulative techniques were learnt next and finally studies were produced through the linking of objects. Schaeffer himself proceeded in this way in composing his last works, notably the Etude aux objets, which with the original Etude pathétique of 1948 was one of his most remarkable compositions, although his earlier pieces had been produced in a more empirical manner. But it is not through his compositions that he exerted most influence: his theories and his development of musique concrète were much more significant. Above all, Schaeffer saw from the outset that electro-acoustic techniques would affect many aspects of musical thought and practice, that a revolution comparable with that brought about by photography was taking place. In fact, musique concrète has much in common with photography and the cinema, particularly the fact that none of them exists outside the ‘concrete’ materials on which they are recorded or fixed (disc, tape, film, etc), just as a painter's work is fixed on his canvas. The expression musique concrète does not, as is frequently thought, refer to the musical use of noises (any sound is concrete) but to a method which Schaeffer saw as the opposite of musique habituelle: ‘unlike the traditional procedure, which moves from the score to its execution, the process in musique concrète moves from the sounds to their organization …’ (Pierret, 1969). This idea, based on the phenomenology of perception, gave rise to the magisterial Traité des objets musicaux. On its first publication in 1966 it was rather cooly received because of its nonconformity; today, it is regarded as a major advance in musical thinking, and has initiated prolonged theoretical discussion in modern musical studies, offering composers one of the 20th century's most fertile fields for research and innovation. Among the many original concepts propounded by Schaeffer, the idea of the ‘reduced hearing’ of sound, inspired by Husserl's phenomenological reduction, allowed the development of a generalized method of the classification and description of perceived sounds (sound objects), known as typo-morphology.

WORKS

all for tape alone

WRITINGS

‘Introduction à la musique concrète’, Polyphonie, vi (1950), 30–52

A la recherche d'une musique concrète (Paris, 1952)

‘Lettre à M.A. Richard’, ReM, no.236 (1957), iii–xvi

‘Vers une musique expérimentale’, ReM, no.236 (1957), 11–27

‘Le Groupe de recherches musicales’, ReM, no.244 (1959), 49–51

‘Situation actuelle de la musique expérimentale’, ReM, no.244 (1959), 10–17

Traité des objets musicaux (Paris, 1966)

La musique concrète (Paris, 1967)

Solfège de l'objet sonore (Paris, 1967)

Le gardien de volcan (Paris, 1969)

L'avenir à reculons (Paris, 1970)

Machines à communiquer, i: La génèse des simulacres (Paris, 1970)

‘De l'expérience musicale à l'expérience humaine’, ReM, nos.274–5 (1971) [whole issue]

Machines à communiquer, ii: Pouvoir et communication (Paris, 1972)

De la musique concrète à la musique même (Paris, 1977)

Excusez-moi je meurs et autres fabulations (Paris, 1981)

Prélude, choral et fugue (Paris, 1983)

Faber et Sapiens (Paris, 1986)

‘Les tropismes de la recherche musicale’, ReM, nos.394–7 (1986), 34–43

‘March of Time’, L'espace du Son II (Ohain, 1991), 51–2

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Pierret: Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1969)

S. Brunet: Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1970)

‘Entretien avec Michel Chion’, Cahiers recherche musique, no.4 (1977), 92–7

Répertoire acousmatique 1948–1980 (Paris, 1980)

L'oeuvre musicale, ed. F. Bayle (Paris, 1990)

S. Dallet and S. Brunet: Pierre Schaeffer: itinéraires d'un chercheur (Montreuil, 1997)

FRANCIS DHOMONT