French organization devoted to electro-acoustic music production, concert-giving, research and teaching. Its foundation dates back to 1948 when Pierre Schaeffer invented musique concrète, which emerged out of his work on experimental approaches to radiophonic arts. This work was carried out under the auspices of the Club d'Essai, a group within Radiodiffusion Française, which had originally been established in 1942 as the Studio d’Essai. Schaeffer was joined by Pierre Henry in 1949 and the two embarked on a fruitful period of collaboration. With the formation of the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète under Schaeffer’s direction in 1951, musique concrète was accorded official status, with its own specially equipped studio; the first trainees included Boulez and Stockhausen, and later Messiaen and Barraqué. In 1954 Schaeffer left the group for three years in order to found the Radiodiffusion de la France d’Outre-Mer, and after his return the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) was created in 1958. Among the founding members were Luc Ferrari, François-Bernard Mâche, Ivo Malec and Iannis Xenakis; later members included Bernard Parmegiani and François Bayle. The new name for the group signalled a change in orientation towards developing a theory (solfège) of the total sound world as a precondition to the establishment of ‘electro-acoustic music’ – the new term devised around 1960 – as a fully fledged musical genre. The theoretical culmination was the publication of Schaeffer’s Traité des objets musicaux in 1966, and a series of examples with commentary on disc – the Solfège de l’objet sonore – jointly produced with Guy Reibel in 1967. The shift in emphasis following the formation of the GRM led to a split with Henry, who wanted to devote more time to promoting electro-acoustic music: relations between Schaeffer and his colleagues were frequently volatile, and differences in approach had previously led to the departure of both Boulez and Stockhausen. Schaeffer’s advocacy of experimental research was so persuasive in certain quarters that in 1960 Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française was prepared to create a research sector – the Service de la Recherche – with Schaeffer as its director. The GRM was one of four groups within the Service, the others being Image, Language (which became Critical Studies) and Technologies. Schaeffer ceded direction of the GRM to Bayle in 1966, initiating a period during which production of works, concert-giving, and a new teaching programme were to flourish. The reorganization of the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF) in 1975 provoked the dissolution of the Service de la Recherche and Schaeffer’s retirement, and the GRM became part of a new ORTF société, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). Daniel Teruggi succeeded Bayle as director in 1997.
Without the vision, dominating personality and agenda of Schaeffer, there would have been no GRM. But equally, the GRM could only continue to prosper once liberated from his surveillance. Over half a century of continuity has enabled the GRM to exert a strong influence on the development of electro-acoustic music. It has educated several generations of composers who are now active in many countries. In its composition studios it has hosted a prolific production: by 1980, 522 musical works and 413 pieces of ‘applied music’ had been composed. Public concerts, which started in 1950, were given an additional impetus in 1974 with the inauguration of the multi-speaker concert diffusion system, the ‘Acousmonium’, which is still in use: sound diffusion has been a speciality of the GRM in its advocacy of acousmatic music, music in a purely recorded form which allows a free and imaginative play of sound images. Technological research has concentrated on providing analogue and digital means for manipulating and transforming sounds, influenced by compositional practice and by composers’ perceived needs. In the 1950s and 1960s special devices for sound transposition (the phonogène) and multiplication (morphophone) were designed, along with a modular synthesizer. With the advent of digital technology a series of transformation programmes was developed in the digital studio, though these could not act in ‘real time’; from 1985, the real-time system called Syter (système en temps réel) provided transformation programmes controllable via a graphic interface; and since 1992 the Syter programmes have been adapted and further developed to run on personal computers. These real-time systems have also permitted an expansion of live performance possibilities.
The music composed at the GRM is often thought to be closely associated with recorded sound materials, used for their extra-musical associations. While this kind of sound world prevailed in the 1950s, electronic sources were incorporated into acousmatic works from 1961, and analogue synthesis from 1965. Moreover, the research orientation from 1958 emphasized ‘abstract’ approaches to sounds, and acousmatic works since that time have explored the play of abstraction and anecdote. (See Electro-acoustic music.)
P. Schaeffer: A la recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris, 1952)
P. Schaeffer: Traité des objets musicaux (Paris, 1966)
P. Schaeffer: La musique concrète (Paris, 1967)
P. Schaeffer and G. Reibel: Solfège de l'objet sonore, realized Groupe de recherches musicales, ORTF SR2 (1967; reissued 1983) [incl. notes in Fr., Eng.; issued to illustrate Schaeffer, 1966]
M. Pierret: Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1969)
P. Schaeffer: Machines à communiquer (Paris, 1970–72)
G. Mâche and A. Vande Gorne, eds.: Répertoire acousmatique, 1948–80 (Paris, 1980)
M. Chion: Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (Paris, 1983)
M. Chion and F. Delalande, eds.: ‘Recherche musicale au GRM’, ReM, nos.394–7 (1986)
D. Teruggi: ‘What about Acousmatics?’, Journal of Electroacoustic Music, vii (1993), 17–20
DENIS SMALLEY