Pierre Schaeffer

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Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (August 14, 1910–August 19, 1995) was a French composer, noted as the inventor of musique concrète.

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[edit] Life

Schaeffer was born in Nancy. His parents were both musicians, and at first it seemed that Pierre would also take this as a career. He studied at the École Polytechnique and after a stint as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg from 1934, he is posted in 1936 at Radiodiffusion Française in Paris. It was there that he began to experiment, in 1948, with records because he has many questions about modern musical expression. He tried playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up and juxtaposing them with other sounds, all techniques which were virtually unknown at that time. His first completed piece as a result of these experiments was the Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) which was made from recordings of trains.

By that time, Schaeffer had founded the Jeune France association, which had interests in theatre and visual art as well as music. In 1942, he created the Studio d'Essai (later known as the Club d'Essai), which played a role in the activities of the French resistance during World War II, and became a centre of musical activity afterwards.

In 1949, Schaeffer met Pierre Henry. In 1951, he founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in the French Radio Institution. This gave him a new studio, which included a tape recorder. This was a significant development for Schaeffer, who previously had to work with turntables to produce music. Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape. His continued experimentation led him to publish A la recherche d'une musique concrète (The Search for a Concrete Music) in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point.

Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953, marked out for others offices. He will reform the group in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM) (at first without "s", then with "s"). One of his last pieces came in 1959, the Etudes aux Objets

Schaeffer became an associate professor at the Paris Conservatoire from 1968 to 1980 after creating a "class of fundamental music and application to the audiovisual." Towards the end of his life, he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. He died in Aix-en-Provence in 1995.

[edit] Musique Concrète

The term is often misunderstood as referring to simply making music out of "real world" sounds, or sounds other than those made by musical instruments. Rather, it is a wider attempt to allow new ways of musical expression. Traditionally, (classical / serious) music starts as an abstraction, musical notation on paper or other medium, which is then produced into audible music. Musique concrète strives to start at the "concrete" sounds, experiment with them, and abstract them into a musical composition. The importance of Schaeffer's work with musique concrète is threefold from the contemporary point of view. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the musical vocabulary. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound. He was among the first to manipulate recorded sound in the way that it could be used in conjunction with other such sounds in the making of a musical piece. This could be thought of as a precursor to contemporary sampling practices. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of play (in his terms, jeu) in the creation of music. Schaeffer's idea of jeu comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. This notion is at the core of the concept of musique concrète.

[edit] External links

[edit] Recordings

  • CDeMusic Distribution for EMF / Electronic Music Foundation - also INA-GRM Recordings

[edit] Bibliography

  • ROBERT, Martial, Pierre Schaeffer : des Transmissions à Orphée, Pr. J.-Cl. Risset Preface, Paris, éd. L'Harmattan, 1999, 13 boards, discography, sonography, filmo-vidéography, 181 schaeffer bibliographics references, 416 p.
  • ROBERT, Martial, Pierre Schaeffer : d'Orphée à Mac Luhan, Pr. A.-J. Tudesq Preface, Paris, éd. L'Harmattan, 2000, 18 boards, sonography, filmo-vidéography, 294 schaeffer bibliographics references, 496 p.
  • ROBERT, Martial, Pierre Schaeffer : de Mac Luhan au fantôme de Gutenberg, Pr. B. Vecchione Preface, Paris, éd. L'Harmattan, 2002, 18 boards, sonography, filmo-vidéography, general chronology of Pierre Schaeffer in his century, 249 schaeffer bibliographics references, 464 p.