Pierre Schaeffer

Pierre Schaeffer was born on August 14, 1910 in Nancy and died on August 19, 1995 in Aix-en-Provence. He was a French composer composerbroadcaster, engineer and writer. In the first half of the 20th century, Schaeffer developed a new musical practice that left behind the accusation that Western music was closing itself off from an important sphere by limiting itself to traditional musical instruments and the resulting restriction to fixed pitches. He coined the term musique concrète and assumed an open approach to sounds.

By working with tapes, Schaeffer dispensed with traditional notation. In doing so, he not only questioned the traditional instruments, but also dissolved the relationship between composer and performer.

His innovative work emerged in the natural sciences, particularly in communication and acoustics, as well as in various arts such as music, literature and radio presentation after the end of the Second World War. His anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism earned him widespread recognition during his lifetime. Schaeffer is best known for his achievements in electronic and experimental music. He was the main developer of a unique and early form of avant-garde music known as musique concrète. This genre emerged in Europe through the use of new music technologies developed in the post-war period following the advance of electro-acoustic and acousmatic music.

Schaeffer’s writings include essays, biographies, short novels, musical treatises and plays. They are oriented towards his development of the genre as well as theory and music philosophy in general. Today, Schaeffer is considered one of the most influential experimental, electro-acoustic and later electronic musicians. He was the first composer to use contemporary recording and sampling techniques, which are now used by almost all record production companies worldwide. His joint efforts are considered milestones in the history of electronic and experimental music.

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Early experimentation

Later in 1934, Schaeffer began his first job as an engineer and worked briefly in telecommunications for Postes et Télécommunications in Strasbourg. In 1935, he began a relationship with Elisabeth Schmitt, later marrying her and having his first child with her, Marie-Claire Schaeffer. He then officially moved to Paris with his new family in 1936, where he began working in the broadcasting and presenting industry.

He began to move away from his original interest in telecommunications and devote himself to music instead. In doing so, he combined his skills as an engineer with his passion for sound. While working at the radio station, Schaeffer experimented with records and other devices. He investigated the sounds they produced and the applications of these sounds. Schaeffer’s period of experimentation was significant for his development and raised many fundamental questions, particularly about the limits of modern musical expression.

In these experiments, Pierre tried to play sounds backwards, slow them down, speed them up and compare them with other sounds. These techniques were practically unknown at the time. He collaborated with new contemporaries he had met through RTF and thus deepened his experiments. Schaeffer’s work became increasingly avant-garde. He challenged the traditional musical style by using different devices and practices.

After all, his work involved a unique variety of electronic instruments were used in his work. Schaeffer and his colleagues had developed these instruments using their own technical skills. These included the chromatic, gliding and universal phonogens, François Bayle’s Acousmonium and a variety of other devices such as gramophones and some of the earliest tape recorders.

Writers, religious works and the birth of musique concrète

Schaeffer began his writing career in 1938 with various articles and essays for the French music magazine Revue Musicale. His first column, “Basic Truths”, took a critical look at the musical trends of the time. As a convinced Catholic, Schaeffer began to write religiously inspired works. In the same year as his “Basic Truths”, he published his first novel: “Chlothar Nicole – a short Christian novel”. In 1942, Pierre Schaeffer founded the Studio d’Essai, later known as the Club d’Essai, at Radiodiffusion Nationale (France). It played an important role in the French resistance during the Second World War and later developed into a center for musical experimentation.

In 1949, Schaeffer met the percussionist and composer Pierre Henry, with whom he collaborated on numerous compositions. In 1951, he founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) at the Institut français de radio. This gave him a new studio, which also included a tape recorder. This was an important development for Schaeffer, who had previously worked with phonographs and record players to produce music. Schaeffer is generally regarded as the first composer to make music with tapes.

His continued experiments led to the publication of À la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète (In Search of a Concrete Music) in 1952, a summary of his previous working methods. His only opera, Orphée 53 (“Orphée 53”), was premiered in 1953.

Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953 and reformed it in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherche Musicales (initially without an “s”, then with an “s”). In 1954, together with the composer, pianist and musicologist Charles Duvelle, Schaeffer founded the traditional music label Ocora (“Office de Coopération Radiophonique”) with a worldwide reach in order to preserve the rural soundscapes of Africa. Ocora also served as a training center for technicians of the national African radio stations. Over the years, Schaeffer mentored a number of students who went on to have successful careers, including Éliane Radigue and the young Jean-Michel Jarrewho called his mentor the first disc jockey. His last étude was composed in 1959: the Études aux Objets.

Theoretical position

With his main theoretical work, the “traité des objets musicaux”, Pierre Schaeffer was the first to develop a linguistic system that made it possible to grasp and communicate the new musical structures of electroacoustic music. He was primarily reacting to a development that he himself had driven forward: musique concrète required a new theoretical foundation and a new vocabulary as it deliberately broke away from harmonic structures.

In addition to his work, Schaeffer published the “Solfège de l’objet sonore” on three records. By experimenting with sound transformations on tape, he was able to show that there is a surprising discrepancy between the physical appearance and the perceived quality of sounds. Based on this insight, he developed a catalog of sound characteristics that was not based on physical appearance but directly on hearing. Schaeffer also commented on the discrepancy between physical time and the perceived duration of musical events.

The theoretical dispute between musique concrète from Paris and the electronic music of the Cologne style, which arose in the middle of the 20th century, was often attributed to Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Karlheinz Stockhausen reduced to Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The sound object, typology and morphology

The central prerequisite for Schaeffer’s theoretical considerations was the definition of the sound object as the lowest denominator of musical experience. These should be regarded as the smallest unit of music. Schaeffer saw human perception in connection with music fundamentally through the rudimentary division into individual musical events: the sound objects. In his Traité, Schaeffer developed a typology of sound objects. He distinguished between balanced and unbalanced sounds on the basis of the parameters of mass and temporal extension. In a second step, he developed a morphology of the sound object, which is divided into seven criteria: mass, harmonic timbre, grain, allure, dynamics, melodic profile and mass profile. This serves both as an orientation for compositional work and as a tool for analysis.

Musique Concrète

Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète, which distinguishes itself from traditional music by starting from concrete sounds and abstracting them. It is an attempt to construct music from scratch by reinterpreting traditional instruments, harmony and rhythm.

Schaeffer’s work has three main meanings: the inclusion of all sounds in music, the manipulation of recorded sounds for composition and the emphasis on “playing” in the creation of music. Using techniques such as tape looping and tape splicing, he created sound collages and became a forerunner of contemporary sampling practices. His use of recording techniques and experimental instruments, inspired by Luigi Russolo, paved the way for new musical possibilities. The idea of “playing” reflects improvised sound experiments and electro-acoustic improvisation as the core of musique concrète.

Life

Pierre Schaeffer was born in Nancy in 1910. His parents were both musicians, his father a violinist and his mother a singer. Although it initially looked as if he would also take up music as a profession, his parents discouraged him from musical activities from an early age and had him trained as an engineer. He studied at several universities in this direction. The first of these was the Lycée Saint-Sigisbert in his home town of Nancy. In 1929, he moved west to Paris to attend the École Polytechnique and graduated from the École supérieure d’électricité in 1934.

He obtained a diploma in broadcasting from the École Polytechnique. It is unclear whether he also received a similar degree from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications, as it cannot be proven whether or not he ever attended this university.

Schaeffer worked for French radio after the Second World War. He experimented with everyday sounds and recorded them on vinyl and tape. He alienated these recordings and assembled them into new sound compositions. The means of alienation were limited to the playback speed and direction. He also developed a way of playing back short sections of a record as a loop. He called the resulting experimental music musique concrète (concrete music). This had a great influence on electronic music and the radio play.

From 1968 to 1980, Schaeffer was an associate professor at the Paris Conservatoire, where he set up a class on musical principles and their application in the audiovisual field. After the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, the then 78-year-old Schaeffer led a 498-strong French rescue team to Leninakan to search for survivors. He stayed there until all the foreign aid workers had been evacuated. Schaeffer later developed Alzheimer’s disease and died in Aix-en-Provence in 1995 at the age of 85. He was buried in Delincourt in the green Vexin, where he once owned his estate. Many of his colleagues later remembered Schaeffer as the “musician of sounds”. He created his last work in 1979.

Influences on the music

Schaeffer’s influence on the music world is undisputed. His students, including Éliane Radigue, adopted his techniques and created groundbreaking works using tape feedback and other innovative approaches. These artists, as well as Jean Michel Jarre and Pierre Henry, have honored Schaeffer with their own works and taken his ideas further.

In the 1980s, Schaeffer distanced himself from the avant-garde and promoted a new approach, which was refined by his student Otavio Henrique Soares Brandão. Brandão developed an innovative piano and instrumental technique that respected tradition. This approach influenced not only contemporary music, but also other genres such as rap, where ordinary sounds are used for creative productions. Schaeffer’s legacy lives on in the works of his students and in the broad application of his ideas in the music industry.

Musical works

• 1943/44 La coquille a planetes, INA, ADES, Manuscrit
• 1948 Concertino-Diapason (collaboration with J.-J. Grunenwald)
• 1948 Cinq études de bruits
• 1949 Suite for 14 instruments
• 1949 Variations sur une flûte mexicaine
• 1950 Bidule en ut (collaboration with Pierre Henry)
• 1950 La course au Kilocycle (radio music, collaboration with Pierre Henry)
• 1950 L’Oiseau Rai
• 1950 Symphonie pour un homme seul (collaboration with Pierre Henry; revised versions in 1953, 1955 and 1966 (Henry)
• 1951 Toute la lyre (pantomime, collaboration with Pierre Henry, also known as Orphée 51)
• 1952 Masquerade (film music)
• 1952 Les paroles dégelées (music for a radio production)
• 1952 Scènes de Don Juan (incidental music, collaboration with Monique Rollin)
• 1953 Orphée 53 (opera)
• 1957 Sahara d’aujourd’hui (film music, collaboration with Pierre Henry)
• 1958 Continuo (collaboration with Luc Ferrari)
• 1958 Etude aux sons animés
• 1958 Etude aux allures
• 1958 Exposition française à Londres (collaboration with Luc Ferrari)
• 1959 Etude aux objets
• 1959 Nocturne aux chemins de fer (incidental music)
• 1959 Phèdre (incidental music)
• 1959 Bidule en ut
• 1959 Simultané camerounais
• 1961 Phèdre
• 1962 L’aura d’Olga (music for a radio production, collaboration with Claude Arrieu)
• 1967 Solfège de l’objet sonor
• 1975 Le trièdre fertile (collaboration with Bernard Durr)
• 1979 Bilude

Studio albums

• 1979 Œuvres de Pierre Schaeffer Prospective du XXIe siècle and Classique du XXe siècle, Philips
• 1990 L’oeuvre Musicale, 4 x CD, Box Set