Schaeffer Pierre
(1910–1995)
Born in Nancy, he graduated from the local polytechnic school, and obtained employment at the head office of regional telecommunications in Strasbourg. During the years 1935–43 he attended Nadia Boulanger ’s class of music analysis. In 1936 he joined the French Radio in Paris, where he worked on the re-emission of recordings. From 1938 he had his own radio column in “Revue Musicale”, also devoting much time to literature: it was then that he published his first novel, Clotaire Nicole. In 1940 he founded Jeune France, an interdisciplinary association for music, theatre and the visual arts under the aegis of the Ministry of Youth. Towards the end of 1941 he obtained employment as sound director in Marseilles. Together with Jacques Copeau he founded the experimental Studio d’Essai, which quickly became the centre of the resistance movement within the French Radio (RDF). It was there that he recorded his radio opera La Coquille à planètes. In 1945 the Studio became Club d’Essai, headed by Jean Tardieu, while Pierre Schaeffer undertook the technical supervision of RDF study and research projects, and then directed the television department.
Even at the Studio d’Essai, Pierre Schaffer was carrying out work which was to lead to his discovery of concrete music. His first work in this genre was Étude de bruits (1948), after which he created others, presenting in them the results of his research on recorded sounds (research made easier by the development of recording sound onto magnetic tape). In 1949 he met Pierre Henry, with whom he collaborated until 1958. Their first jointly created works were Symphoniepour un homme seuland Bidule en ut, presented to the public for the first time in 1950. A year later Pierre Schaeffer founded GRMC (Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète). The opera Orphée, composed at that time (together with Pierre Henry), caused a memorable scandal in Donaueschingen two years later. At that point, Schaeffer left GRMC in the hands of his collaborator, devoting himself to work on a radio system for overseas territories. In order to train African specialists he created a training studio at Maisons-Lafitte.
In 1958 he returned to GRMC to transform it, jointly with his new collaborators, Luc Ferrari and François-Bernard Mâche, into Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), led by himself and possessing more ambitious goals. Research into sound, technical conditions and perception, which he reported regularly in “Revue Musicale”, gave rise, in 1960, to the creation by Radio France of an additional research unit, Service de la Recherche, which also worked on visual transmission. The first Festival de la Recherche took place at that time; this included concerts, film showings and specialist conferences.
During the 1960s Pierre Schaeffer gave up composition, devoting himself to research and to lecturing at important world centres (Italy, Germany, Canada). This was the time when he wrote his fundamental work, Traité des objets mu- sicaux (1966), which at first had a reserved reception from the world of music, but is now regarded as a milestone, opening new perspectives in thinking about this branch of art. From 1968 Schaeffer conducted a class of electroacoustic composition at the Conservatoire Supérieur National de Musique in Paris. A synthesis of his reflection on audiovisuality was provided by the two volumes of Machines à communiquer (1970, 1972). During the years 1971– 75 Schaeffer headed UNESCO’s Research Commission of the International Council for Film, Television and Audiovisual Communication. He was the driving force behind the creation, in 1974, of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), which amalgamated the institutions engaged in research, training, collaboration and archiving.
In 1975 he once again returned to work at the studio; collaborating with François Bayle (director of GRM from 1966) and Bernard Durr, he composed Le trièdre fertile. His final musical work was the experimental Bilude (1979). By then Schaeffer had distanced himself considerably from the musique concrète he had invented, and this is apparent in his consecutive theoretical works, such as De la musique concrète à la musique même. He gave up teaching in 1980, but during the years which followed he continued to participate in academic life and to publish theoretical and literary texts, maintaining his links with GRM and with French Radio, which made available to him research premises and studios at the Maison de la Radio in Paris.
He received numerous awards and distinctions, including from the University of Tel Aviv, Brazil’s César Bastos Foundation, the McLuhan Téléglobe Canada Award, as well as from French institutions, such as INA, SACEM, École Polytechnique and Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie. He had also been awarded the Prix Charles Cros and the Grand Prix of the French Académie de Disque; France’s Minister of Culture, Jacques Lang, presented him with the insignia of Grand Officier de l’Ordre National du Mérite. Schaeffer died in Aix-en-Provence. Schaeffer ’s musical thinking was based on his conviction of the primacy of hearing over conventional aesthetics. Drawing conclusions from the development of recording technology he observed that all registered sounds (music, rustles, animal noises, sounds of machinery) are equal in relation to our perception, and can thus be regarded as “sound objects” regardless of their source. A consequence of this revolution for the listener was the phenomenon of “acousmatic listening”, devoid of “instrumental and cultural conditioning”. This ground breaking thought continues to exert enormous influence on thinking about music and composition until today. Concrete music – however sceptical the attitude of its discoverer to it – inverted the direction of the compositional process: the sequence “score – performance” was replaced by a path leading directly from sounds to their organisation. Pierre Schaeffer ’s achievement was to make composers, theorists and listeners aware of a revolutionary change in the perception of sound, brought about by the development of electroacoustic technology, a change comparable in its significance to that of the expansion of photography.
S e l e c t e d w o r k s: La coquille à planètes, radio opera (1944), Concertino– Diapason (with J. J. Grünewald, 1948), Cinq Études de bruits (1948), Suite pour 14 instruments (1949), Variations sur une flûte mexicaine (1949), Bidule en ut (with P. Henry, 1950), La course au kilocycle, music for radio play (with P. Henry, 1950), L’oiseau r.a.i. (1950), Symphonie pour un homme seul (with P. Henry, 1950; rev. 1953; version for Maurice Béjart’s ballet, 1955), Toute la lyre, pantomime (with P. Henry, 1951), Masquerage, music to a film by Max de Haas (1952), Orphée 53, radio opera (with P. Henry, 1953), Sahara d’aujourd’hui, music to a film by Pierre Goût and Pierre Schwab (with P. Henry, 1957), Continuo (with L. Ferrari, 1958), Étude aux sons animés (1958), Étude aux allures (1958), Exposition française à Londres (L. Ferrari, 1958), Étude auxobjets(1959), Nocturne aux chemins de fer, music to a pantomime by Jacques Lecocq (1959), Phèdre, music to a play by Jean Racine (1959), Simultané camerounais (1959), Le trièdre fertile (with Bernard Durr, 1975), Bilude(1979). Selected writings: À la recherche d’une musique concrète (1952), Traité des objets musicaux (1966), La musique concrète (1967), Solfège de l’objet sonore (1967), Le gardien de volcan (1969), L’avenir à reculons (1970), Machines à communiquer: 1. La genèse des simulacres (1970), 2. Pouvoir et communi-cation (1972), De la musique concrète à la musique même (1977), Excusez- moi je meurs et autres fabulations (1981), Prélude, Choral et Fugue (1983), Faber et Sapiens (1986).
Films: Essai visuel sur l’objet sonore (1962), La recherche image (1965), Dialogue du son et de l’image (1966), L’observateur observé (1967).
(based on Francis Dhomont’s entry “Schaeffer, Pierre“
in: Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com)
