Schaeffer, Pierre (EN)

Schaeffer Pierre, *14 August 1910 Nancy, †19 August 1995 Aix-en-Provence, French composer, teacher, theoretician, writer, creator of musique concrète (concrete music). He completed engineering studies at the Ecole Polytechnique in Strasbourg (electronics and telecommunications, diploma 1934). In the field of music, he was an autodidact. From 1936, he worked at the Direction de la Radiodiffusion Française (ORF) as a sound engineer. In 1939, he was mobilised and served in the French army as a lieutenant telegraphist. Demobilised in 1941, he was one of the founders and head of the Studio d’essai of the French radio in Beaune in 1942 (in the unoccupied part of the country), which played an important role in the French resistance movement (La Résistance). After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Schaeffer was appointed to a managerial position in French radio. After a not very successful career at the ORF management, he returned to the Studio d’essai, which, renamed Club d’essai in 1946, became the nucleus of the future studio of concrete music, systematically equipped with new devices enabling the conduct of experiments. In 1949, the work of the initially solitary Schaeffer was joined by the young composer and percussionist P. Henry. Despite the difference in temperament and musical preparation, their common goal allowed them to start an extremely effective cooperation. In 1951, as a result of the strenuous efforts of P. Schaeffer, P. Henry and the engineer J. Poullin who worked with them, the first independent unit for work on a new branch of music was established in French radio, called Groupe deRecherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). The equipment included tape recorders; previously, they had only worked with so-called “soft record” (wax) record players. In 1953, Schaeffer was seconded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to set up local French radio networks in North Africa. In 1956, he became director general of SORAFOM (Societé de Radiodiffusion de la France d’OutreMer). Dismissed in 1957, he returned to Paris and advocated that the studio should be focused on research. In 1958, the GRMC was renamed the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). Schaeffer once again became its head; P. Henry left the group and founded his own studio, APSOME (Applications de Procédés Sonores de Musique Electroacoustique). In 1961, Schaeffer organised the first internship for young composers at the GRM. From 1960 to 1965, he worked hard on his fundamental theoretical work, Traité des objets musicaux, which was published in 1966 by Le Seuil. In 1960–74, Schaeffer headed the Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF; he left the GRM management in 1966. In 1968–76, he was a professor of experimental composition at the Paris Conservatory. He devoted himself to teaching and further theoretical considerations, dealing, among others, with semiotics.

In the second half of the 1940s, while working on radio plays, Schaeffer experimented with recorded and processed sound. These experiments led him to the idea of ​​organising recorded sound, musical and non-musical effects into a sequence of runs with the characteristics of a musical piece. In the spring of 1948, Schaeffer created the first two short etudes based on manipulations with sounds played back at different speeds and with a change of direction: Etude aux chemins de fer and Etude concertante ou étude pour orchestre, in which he used artificial editing, artificial reverberation and layering. Several others soon followed. For these intended-to-be “musical” pieces, Schaeffer first used the term musique de bruits, repeated in the title of the first broadcast of new music on Radio-Paris on 20 June 20 1948 (Concert de bruits). He introduced the term musique concrète only in 1950. In collaboration with P. Henry, two large, joint works were created: Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) and the concrete opera Orphée 51 ou Toute la lyre (1951). The first of these compositions, consisting of a dozen or so short movements based on human voices and partly on processed and re-edited instrumental material, quickly gained the recognition of listeners, appeared on gramophone records and became the basis for a ballet performed in Paris in 1955 (Les Ballets del’Etoile choreographed by M. Béjart). While composing Orpheus, the differences in the understanding of the musical work by both composers became more apparent. The piece was created slowly and had many versions: after the first Orphée 51, called a lyrical cantata, with the participation of singers, a reciter, instrumentalists and a recorded tape, there were further versions: Le voile d’Orphée and Orphée 53, which already bore the name Opéra concret. However, the work did not find recognition, neither with critics nor with listeners, and despite revisions in 1970, it fell into oblivion. Only the spectacular Le voile d’Orphée, which was almost exclusively the work of P. Henry, remained as a flagship composition of that period.

Schaeffer was not only a composer and creator of a new genre of music, which he called concrete music; he was perhaps more of a philosopher of music. Schaeffer’s ideas and theoretical writings, and especially his flagship work Traité des objets musicaux, show that he was interested not only in experimental music but in the totality of phenomena defined as music. The perception of sounds, distinguishing between the concepts of “hear,” “listen,” “perceive,” and “understand,” issues of differentiating music from non-music, reaching the essence of what constitutes the perception of a given sound course as musical; later also in the classification of sounds based on their morphological features, regardless of their source of origin. Schaeffer also introduced the important concept of a sound object (objet sonore) as the basic unit of perception of acoustic phenomena and its narrowing – the musical object (objet musical). In this arrangement, “note” is just one form of the musical object. The subject can also be a chord, passage, glissando, etc. Schaeffer, with his works, writings and attitude as a creator and a human being, had a significant influence on the entire next generation of French and other composers. He was an authority and model for many of his students and successors. Schaeffer also felt like a man of letters; he was the author of several works of fiction: novels, short stories and plays.

Literature: M. Pierret Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer, Paris 1969; Itinéraires d’un chercheur. Bibliographie commenée del’oeuvre éditée de Pierre Schaeffer/ A Commented Bibliography of Published Works, ed. S. Dallet and S. Brunet, Montreuil-sous-Bois 1997; S. Brunet Pierre Schaeffer suivi de Réflexions de Pierre Schaeffer, Paris 1969; A. Skrzyńska Świat przedmiotów dźwiękowych Pierre Schaeffera, “Ruch Muzyczny” 1974 no. 1; Le traité des objets musicaux dix ans après, collective work, ed. M. Chion, “Cahiers de recherche musique” no. 2,1976; S. Brunet Pierre Schaeffer. De la musique concrète à la musique même, Paris 1977; M. Chion Guide des objets sonores. Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale, Paris 1983; W. Kotoński Przedmioty dźwiękowe (wg Pierre Schaeffera), in: Muzyka elektroniczna, Kraków 1989, revised 2^nd ed. 2002; Pierre Schaeffer. L’oeuvre musicale, ed. F. Bayle, text and 4 CDs (complete works of Schaeffer), Paris 1990; J.-P. Teyssier Pierre Schaeffer: La mémoire du future, Paris 1995; J.A. Riedl Pierre Schaeffer lebt nicht mehr. Eine Jahrhundertpersönlichkeit starb im August 1995, “MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik” 1996 no. 62– 63; J.-F. Augoyard, F. Bayle, S. Dallet et al. Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer, Paris 1999; X.R. Martial Communication et musique en France entre 1936 et 1986. Des transmissions à Orphée, Paris 1999; C. Palombini Musique Concrète revisited, “Electronic Musicological Revue” IV, 1999 (BeloHorizonte); E.M. Pade Schaeffer, sérieux og Pierre Schaeffer, “Kvinder i musik: Årsskrift” 2003; M. Laliberté Sons naturels et sons industriels. Dans la musique concrète de Pierre Schaeffer, “Musicalia: Annuario internazionale di studi musicologici” 2004 no. 1; F. Coupigny Comment Pierre Schaeffer voyait-il la recherche technique et la recherche image?, in: Pierre Schaeffer, seria: Portraits polychromes, no. 13, ed. E. Gayou, Paris 2008; N. Frize Une histoire de locomotive (au souffle de Pierre Schaeffer), in: Pierre Schaeffer, seria: Portraits polychromes, no. 13, ed. E. Gayou, Paris 2008; K.T. Goldbach La réception de la linguistique structurale dans le Traité des objets musicaux de Pierre Schaeffer, in: Les relations texte-musique. Prospective et exemples de recherches, ed. E. Reibel, Paris 2008; P. Henry Envoi à Pierre Schaeffer. Lettre de 1990, avec post-scriptum de 2008, in: Pierre Schaeffer, seria: Portraits polychromes, no. 13, ed. E. Gayou, Paris 2008; J.-C. Risset Pierre Schaeffer et l’ordinateur, in: Pierre Schaeffer, seria: Portraits polychromes, no. 13, ed. E. Gayou, Paris 2008; I.R. Reyner Pierre Schaeffer e sua teoria da escuta, “OPUS: Revista da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e PósGraduação em Música (ANPPOM)” 2011 no. 2; C. Delhaye Orphée 53 de Pierre Schaeffer et Pierre Henry. Aux origines du scandale de Donaueschingen, “Revue de musicology” 2012 no. 1; G. Ferrari, M. Kaltenecker La coquille de Pierre Schaeffer, in: K. Le Bail, M. Kaltenecker Pierre Schaeffer. Les constructions impatientes, Paris 2012; T. Möller Was ist eigentlich aus Pierre Schaeffer geworden? Vom Nachleben der musique concrete, “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” 2012 no. 3; Ch. Haffter De bouche à oreille. Pierre Schaeffer, Michel Chion, Lionel Marchetti – Drei Stimmen der musiques concretes, “Dissonance: Schweizer Musikzeitschrift für Forschung und Kreation” 2013 no. 121; C. Delhaye Pierre Schaeffer et le mythe d’Orphée. Adaptations, réminiscences et controverses autour du premier opéra de musique concrete, in: D’un Orphée, l’autre, ed. A. Ramaut, P. Saby, Saint-Étienne 2014; M. Kaltenecker Pierre Schaeffers Theologie des Hrens, “Musik & Ästhetik” 2014 no. 18; D. Donato As quatro funções da escuta de Pierre Schaeffer e sua importância no projeto teórico do Traité, “Debates: Cadernos do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Música” 2016 no. 16; B. Syroyid Traité des objets musicaux de Pierre Schaeffer. Breve guía conceptual para las correlaciones entre la señal física y el objeto musical, “Sul ponticello: Revista on-line de música y arte sonoro” 2021 no. 79.