Pierre Schaeffer was born in Nancy, France, in August 14, 1910. Known
as the father of Musique Concrète, he was a composer, philosopher, musicologist,
writer and sound engineer. After leaving the École Polytechnique in 1934,
Schaeffer joined the French radiodiffusion (RTF) as a broadcast engineer.
In 1942, he joined Jacques Copeau and his pupils in the foundation of the
Studio d’Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale, which became a center of the
Resistance movement in French radio. In August 1944 he was responsible, for the
first broadcasts in liberated Paris. The Studio d’Essai was renamed Club d’Essai de
la Radiodiffusion Télévision Française in 1946. It is in this studio that he starts,
two years later, experimenting with noises by recording sounds in locked groove
disks, creating what it became known as “musique concrète.”
Cinq études de bruits, the first piece known as musique concrète is
broadcasted on the French radio on October 5, 1948.
In 1949 he was joined by Pierre Henry at the Club d’Essai, and together
they composed Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50) which was going to be
known as the first “classic” of the genre.
In March 18, 1950, musique concrète had its first presentation in a public
concert at the École Normale de Musique in Paris with pieces by Pierre Schaeffer
and Pierre Henry.
In 1951, together with Pierre Henry and Jacques Poullin, Schaeffer creates
the Centre de Recherche de Musique Concrète de la Radioffusion-Télévision 1 Some parts of the biography of Pierre Schaeffer were translated from François Bayle, ed., Pierre Schaeffer: L’œuvre musicale — Textes et documents inédits réunis par François Bayle (Paris: INA-GRM, 1990) 115-118
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Française which became later known as Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM)
in 1958. The GRM was created to promote a collective research around the aims of
its creator: definition of an experimental solfège of the universe of sound, based on
listening and questioning the value of sound in the parameters that had been
observed until then.
In 1960 Pierre Schaeffer, claiming that music needed more researchers than
authors, quits composing and dedicates himself exclusively to research in sound
which leads to the publication, in 1966, of the Traité des objets musicaux. He
eventually returned to the studio in 1975 to compose a piece using electronic sounds
(which he used for the first time) with the assistance of Bernard Durr.
Also in 1966, Schaeffer leaves the direction of the GRM to François Bayle
and joins the Research Services of the ORTF, which he was one of the founders in
1960.
In 1968 he starts teaching at the Conservatoire National Superieur de
Musique in Paris a seminar in experimental music in the context of the work
developed at the GRM.
After 1966, Schaeffer extended his Traité and studies in sound through a
vast number of conferences and publications.
Pierre Schaeffer died in August 19, 1995, in Paris, France.
The production of Pierre Schaeffer was very limited in number, consisting
exclusively of electroacoustic music and knew three phases:
1 - The “Primitives”
Cinq études de bruits (1948)
La flûte mexicaine (1949)
Suite 14 (1949)
L’Oiseau RAI (1950)
Étude de bruits was the first piece of musique concrète and was broadcasted
in 1948
La flûte and L’oiseau are little unpretentious pieces (“pièces de genre”) and
2
Suite 14 is an attempt of the reintegration of the “traditional music” (notated music,
using instruments and notes) with the “new music” (musique concrète).
2- The collaborations with Pierre Henry
Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50)
Bidule en “ut” (1950)
Orphée 51 (1951-53, an opera of musique concrète with the libretto written
by Pierre Schaeffer). Orphée was a scandal in Donaueschingen as it was considered
a crime anti-avant-garde.
3- The Etudes
Étude aux allures (1958)
Étude aux sons animées (1958)
Étude aux objets (1959)
The Etude aux objets uses a very limited number of “sound objects”. Its
influence was enormous in a great number of composers of electroacoustic music.
Two other pieces were composed after the three periods mentioned above: Le tièdre
fertile (1975), the only piece he composed using electronic-generated sounds and
Bilude (1979).
2. Historical Background
The origins of the concepts of musique concrète can be traced back to the
dawn of the twentieth century. Its consolidation as a different new genre is a
consequence of two factors: the first one, was an increasing concern with the role
of timbre and sound in music that led to a more frequent use of non-pitched
instruments (notably percussion instruments), the invention of new instruments,
and the development of techniques to extend the timbral possibilities of the existing
instruments. The second factor was the technological development that brought the
wire recorder, a device that allowed external sounds to be recorded on disks (used
by Schaeffer in 1948), and the tape recorder (ca.1950).
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The important role of Pierre Schaeffer in the creation and development of
this genre, is directly related to his ideological motivations in creating a musical
genre that was completely liberated from German/Austrian elements. As he once
stated in an interview:
(...) After the war, in the ‘45 to ‘48 period, we had driven back the German invasion but we hadn’t driven back the invasion of Austrian music, 12-tone music.
(...) I was involved in music; I was working with turntables (then with tape recorders); I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, ‘Maybe I can find something different...maybe salvation, liberation is possible’.Seeing that no-one knew what to do anymore with DoReMi, maybe we had to look outside that(...)2
I will focus later on the more-than-important contributions that this
composer made in the development of this genre that influenced to an enormous
extent the music composed after 1945. First, I will survey the most relevant facts
and persons that in the first half of this century were direct or indirectly related to
the emergence of Musique Concrète.
2.1. Luigi Russolo and the Futurists
The Italian Futurist movement may seem an unexpected starting point for a history of post-war music. Yet it was in Milan, between 1909 and 1914, and in the midst of the cultural upheaval initiated by Marinetti, Boccioni, Balla and Severini that a radically new music was initiated: a music composed primarily of timbres rather than of conventional harmonies, melodies or rhythms.3
The Futurist aesthetic glorified machinery, noise and speed, and advocated
the destruction of classical monuments, including the flooding of museums and
libraries as an extremely aggressive posture against conservatism in art.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), a Futurist composer/painter and instrument
designer, was one of the most prominent figures of the Futurist movement. In his
book Arte dei Rumori (1913), he called for a methodical investigation of the
different categories of noise, ranging from bangs, thunderclaps and explosions to 2 Pierre Schaeffer, “Pierre Schaeffer Interview”, Interview with Tim Hodgkinson, trans. Tim Hodgkinson (1987), n. pag., Online, World Wide Web, 15 June 1996.3 Roger Sutherland, New Perspectives in Music (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1994) 7
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buzzing, crackling and friction sounds.
He complained about the lack of timbral variety of the orchestras of that
period, and envisioned new instruments capable of emulating the infinite variety of
sounds to be heard in nature and industrial technology. He saw the destruction of
the harmonic system as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary development,
and regarded the growing complexity of polyphony, harmony and timbre in
nineteenth century music as the forerunner of “musical noise”4 .
Russolo eventually designed new instruments, the “Intonarumori”, in
collaboration with the percussionist Ugo Piatti that were able produce an entirely
new palette of sounds that included sounds of the nature — such as the sound of
the wind or croaking of frogs — and industrial sounds (the drone of engines,
sounds of sirens) writing several pieces for these instruments.
Russolo was also the first composer to explore sounds of extremely long
duration with a dense and slowing change in harmonic spectrum.
2.2. The Search for New Sound Sources
The first electronic instruments were in development as early as the 1900s.
The Telharmonium devised by Thaddeus Cahill around the turn of the century was
housed in 1906 in the ‘Telharmonic Hall’ in New York City5.
From 1920 to 1940, experiments with electronic instruments began to take
place by some composers leading to the development of several electronic
instruments. Two of the most popular of these new electronic instruments were the
Theremin and the Ondes Martenot. The Theremin, created in 1923 by Leon
Theremin was performed by moving one’s hands in its vicinity, allowing to create
pitches and glissandi between pitches. The Ondes Martenot devised by Maurice
Martenot around 1928, looked like a clavichord and it followed the same basic
principles of the Theremin. The pitch was controlled by a lateral movement of the
finger ring attached to a metal ribbon. Many composers, such as Messiaen, Varèse,
4 Sutherland 85 David Cope, New Directions in Music, 5th. ed. (Dubuque, IA: WM. C. Brown Publishers,1989) 211
5
Milhaud and Honegger have effectively used the Ondes Martenot in their works6.
The percussion instruments family was fairly enlarged in its use by the
orchestra at the beginning of this century. It was also during the first half of this
century that pieces were composed exclusively for percussion:
Edgard Varèse in such pieces as Ionisation (1931) and John Cage in First construction in Metal (1939) had already exploited the percussion ensemble and show how fascinating music could be when written without reliance on pitched sounds and the harmonies that go with them.7
Edgard Varèse also did a classification of the timbres of the percussion
instruments used to play Ionisation. He classified them in two families: The non-
tempered family which embodied the “Woods”, “Drums” and “Metals” and the
ambiguous temperament family (the tubular bells , the cowbells and Timpani)8.
The search for new timbres in the ordinary instruments also increased in the
pre-Second War period. Regarding the string instruments, Brindle mentions that
before 1945 “(...) Bartók and Webern had already explored [string instruments’]
resources so thoroughly that there has seemed little else to discover”9. In the
keyboard instruments, its extended techniques started being exploited since the mid-
1920s — Cowell was using techniques such as plucking and striking strings inside
the piano in his piece The Banshee (1925), and Cage “invented” the prepared piano
in the 1930s.
2.3. Edgard Varèse (1883-1965)
Edgard Varèse was a sort of a visionary of musique concrète, or at least, of
the music produced by electronic means, foreseeing the advantages that this
medium could bring to music making. As early as 1916 Varèse argued that music
could only advance with the use of electrical technology. In 1936 he said “I am sure
that the time will come when the composer after he has graphically realized his
6 Cope 2157 Reginald Smith Brindle, The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 68 Pierre Schaeffer, La musique concrète, Que Sais-je?, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1973) 639 Brindle 155
6
score, will see this score automatically put on a machine that will faithfully transmit
the musical content to the listener(...)”10 . He also made a series of unsuccessful
attempts to obtain financial support for a laboratory of musical research. The
frustrations concerning the physical limitations of his time eventually led Varèse to
abandon musical composition for almost two decades. After this period Varèse
composed Déserts (1954) and Poème Electronique (1958), both employing
electronic media. Déserts was a piece for orchestra and tape and Poème
Electronique was for tape only and it was one of the first pieces done in multi-
channel stereo.
Varèse’s peculiar musical characteristics, his choice for the instruments to
use as well their employment were rather innovative at his time. Having a special
preference for “louder” instruments (Brass and Percussion), Varèse developed
techniques on his orchestral music that prefigured those used in electroacoustic
music.11 Effects like timbral shifts in a single note, or complex attacks created by
pitched and non-pitched instruments simultaneously were used, as well as a very
special concern with dynamics that could be compared to the techniques of
amplitude envelope shaping in electroacoustic music. He also used effects in the
brass section such as rapid crescendos with accentuations in the end (sforzandi),
creating a similar effect that is obtained on tape by playing backwards a sound with
a strong attack. He was also concerned with the use of instruments as components
of sound masses of varying color and density. This is analogous to the use in
electroacoustic music of superimposition to create complex timbres12 .
Varèse was one of the first composers to theorize the concept of “organized
sound”, that served as the basis for electronic music and musique concrète.13
2.4. John Cage (1912-1992)
10 Qtd. in Cope 215-1611 Schaeffer, Musique concrète 6312 Sutherland 3913 However, Sutherland mentions that “[a]ltough it was Varèse who coined the phrase ‘organized sound’, the concept was already elaborated by Russolo in both theory and practice” (13)
7
I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electronic instruments ... (1937)14
Cage’s second period, in the mid-to-late 1930s, was characterized by a
concentration on wide varieties of timbral resources and the aesthetics of noise.
This is the period of the First Construction (in Metal), 1939, and of the first piece
for prepared piano (Bachanale, 1938).
Cage was also one of the first composers that experiment with turntables15 .
According to David Cope, “[Cage’s works from this period] are all characteristic of
Cage’s imaginative leap into new sonic realms16 .”
2.5. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
Olivier Messiaen is acknowledged by Pierre Schaeffer as being one of the
composers who first called to the attention of listening to the sounds of nature, as a
means of finding new ways of expression for the music of this century. Schaeffer
considered the attitude of Messiaen similar to that of the musique concrète even
though they had different technical approaches17 .
3.Musique Concrète and Electronic Music: Two Revolutionary Events of Opposite
Signs
In the span of two years, two revolutionary events, that one could classify of opposite signs, were produced inside the studios of radio broadcast 18
These “events of opposite signs” were the musique concrète created by
Schaeffer in Paris at the RTF studio in 1948, and the electronic music created at the
NWDR in Germany in 1950 by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert.
Musique concrète envisioned a different type of musical approach utilizing 14 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 1961)15 Imaginary Landscape No.1, 193916 Cope 17317 The aim of Messiaen was to express the “sounds of the nature” through the traditional instruments, while musique concrète utilized recordings the “sounds of nature”. (Schaeffer, Musique concrète 65).18 Schaeffer, Musique concrète 10
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exclusively the sounds from the environment. The electronic music consisted in the
use of sounds generated by electroacoustic means recorded on tape, and envisioned
a greater control over the sound parameters (pitch, timbre, dynamics and duration)
in order to overcome the difficulties that the increasing complexity in written music
presented to the performers. Thus, while electronic music considered itself as an
extension of the traditional music, having straight connections with it, musique
concrète envisioned a completely different approach to music composition.
4. Pierre Schaeffer and Musique Concrète
Pierre Schaeffer was a radio engineer working at the French Radio by the
time the wire turntable was invented. He had also come from a family of musicians
and had a musical training. As mentioned above, he had strong ideological
motivations that compelled him to start doing experiments with noises to create a
music that was completely different.
Musique concrète is music composed or “constructed” exclusively utilizing
recordings of preexisting sounds, either “musical sounds” or “noises”19 . To
Schaeffer, the fact of creating a new music that consisted in the use of sound per se,
meant a return to the sources necessary for the evolution of the musical language as
it would certainly provide new insights on the comprehension of sound20 .
The term “musique concrète,” created by Schaeffer, became publicly known
in 1949 in an article that he wrote for the periodical Polyphonie21 as consequence of
the interest generated by the broadcast of the Cinq études de bruits in 1948.
More than the simple use of recorded sounds as the musical material,
musique concrète represents, according to Schaeffer, an inversion of the processes
used in the traditional musical approach.
In traditional music, which Schaeffer calls abstract music, the composer
follows a path from the abstract to the concrete. Its phases comprise: (1) mental
19 Schaeffer called “musical sounds” to the sound produced by musical instruments and “noises” to the sounds of the environment20 Schaeffer, Musique concrète 1721 Schaeffer, “Introduction à la musique concrète” Polyphonie 6.La musique mecanisée (1949): 30-52
9
conception (abstract); (2) notation; (3) instrumental performance (concrete). In
musique concrète (the new music) the composer follows a path from the concrete to
the abstract. Since the sound material is already preexistent, one can do no better
than chose and manipulate the material creating “musical objects.” Subsequently,
one experiments with the created objects and finally puts them together as a
compositional aim that emerges from the experimentation with these materials.
These techniques do not need the help (as it becomes useless) of traditional
notation.
Schaeffer didn’t see these two approaches as being incompatible. He rather
saw them as being complementary and envisioned that in the future an exchanging
movement could be produced between the traditional and modern approaches22:
1
abstract music musique concrète
2
Fig.1. The cycle of exchange between traditional music and musique concrète as
envisioned by Schaeffer
The importance in the creation of this cycle of exchange would cause the
traditional musical notions to be renewed, leading the concept of musical note to
evolve to the concept of musical object.23
The contributions the “father of musique concrète” gave to the development
of the genre are extremely important and may have no parallel in music history. In
contrast to the small musical output of Pierre Schaeffer, the amount of written
documents he left — that range from the journals he wrote since the moment he
started experimenting with noises in 1948, to the definition and refining of concepts
pertaining musique concrète (1952, 1966 and afterwards), electroacoustic music,
and music in general, including the definition of the methodology for musique
22 Schaeffer, “Introduction à la musique concrète” 51. See also Schaeffer, A la Recherche d’une musique concrète (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952) 35 and La musique concrète 15-1723 Schaeffer, La musique concrète 63
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concrète — are of unquestionable value and had been of great influence to a
considerable amount of composers including myself.
Schaeffer considered himself as being more of a good researcher than of a
good composer.24 This posture might have led him, from the very beginning, to
start documenting the research he was doing with noises by keeping a research log
of the progresses and difficulties he encountered. These research journals were also
fertile in speculations about the function of sound in music, the notion of musical
instrument, the notion of sound object, new approaches to listening, the
relationship between the listener and electroacoustic music, the approach to
composition through musique concrète, and finally, a solfège of musique concrète.
5. Fundamental Concepts
In this section I will present the fundamental concepts and methodology
defined by Pierre Schaeffer for the approach to musique concrète.
5.1. The Sound Object
To Schaeffer, sound object is any sonic event that is heard through a
perceptive effort that detaches the event from the source that produces it, and from a
context other than the sound per se:
The sound object must be distinguished from the sound body or from the device that creates it.25
(...) The sound object exists once I accomplished a reduction (...) more accurate than the acousmatic reduction: I retain, not only, to the pieces of information provided by my ear (...) but these pieces of information don’t concern to anything else than to the sound itself (...)26
This perceptive effort that disengages the sound from its cause or context is
called reduced listening.27
The qualities of the sound objects that emerge from the reduced listening were first
24 Schaeffer, “Pierre Schaeffer Interview”25 Schaeffer, La musique concrète 3626 Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966) 26827 Schaeffer, Traité 270-72
11
pointed out in the first journal of musique concrète28 , when Pierre Schaeffer
reported his first research with noises that preceded the Concert de bruits:
To distinguish an element (to hear it in itself, for the sake of its texture, its matter, its color).To repeat it. Repeat the same sonic fragment: there is not an event any more, there is music.29
Schaeffer also analyzed extensively the act of listening as a perceptual
quality, distinguishing several levels of “listening” in his Traité des objets
musicaux30 .
5.2. The Musical Object
For Schaeffer, musical objects are sound objects that bear musical value.
This rather complex notion arose to Schaeffer by realizing that the sounds of the
environment could be classified and compared by the same parameters (i.e.
duration, pitch and timbre) of the musical sounds.
5.3. Distinction between Sound Object and Musical Object
The musical object is a type of sound object. The musical object, is
perceived through a musical listening, which specializes the reduced listening and
aims to put the object in a musical context. It is through this type of listening that
one is able to choose the acceptable objects.31
The acceptable objects should then observe certain criteria32 :
— Be simple, original, “memorizable” and have a suitable duration (i.e.
they shouldn’t be either too short or too long); therefore they should be “balanced”
28 Schaeffer, Recherche 11-7629 Schaeffer, Recherche 11-76. Trans. by Carlos Palombini in “Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer — From Research Into Noises to Experimental Music”, Computer Music Journal. 17:3 (1993) 1530 Schaeffer, Traité 112-12831 Schaeffer, Traité 34832 Translated from Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores – Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (Paris: INA-GRM, Buchet-Chastel, 1983) 97-98
12
in a “typological sense.”33
— They should yield easily to the reduced listening by not being too
anecdotal or imbued of a strong affective meaning.
— They should be susceptible of being combined with other similar sound
objects, in order to provide a predominant and identifiable emergence of a musical
value.
It is also possible to have a set of acceptable objects that are only
“acceptable” as a group, should they provide the existence of a musical value34 .
5.4. Objects and Structures
Schaeffer acknowledged that the sound objects possessed Gestalt qualities.
Thus, a sound object constitutes a structure itself composed by other sound objects
at more elementary levels, or a sound object could be considered as being part of a
composed structure (other objects at a higher level of complexity).35
5.5. Acousmatic(s)
Acousmatic is an ancient word derived from the Greek, meaning a sound
that one listens without seeing where it is produced. Pythagoras designated by
“acousmatic” the situation of lecturing behind a curtain in the absolute darkness and
silence as it would enhance his disciples’ focus on the lectures.36 This word was
applied by Schaeffer to address the present days’ experience of listening to sounds
whose sources are not visible (the sounds that we listen on the telephone, radio,
cassette player, etc.). In 1974, François Bayle designated by acousmatic music the
music that is developed in a studio with the purpose of being “projected” in a room
like a movie37 .
33 “Typology” is an operation of identification and classification of the sound objects, and was the first stage of Schaeffer’s “program for musical research” that envisioned a thorough classification of all the sound objects. 34 Chion 9735 Schaeffer, La musique concrète 37. See also Schaeffer, Traité 272-78 36 François Bayle Musique Acousmatique: Propositions...Positions (Paris: INA, Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1993) 18037 Bayle, Musique acousmatique 181
13
Acousmatic listening is opposed to direct listening. In direct listening, the
sources that produce the sound are visible. Michel Chion says that, according to
Schaeffer, the acousmatic situation renovates the act of listening, by isolating sound
from the “audiovisual” environment favoring the reduced listening, which leads to
the perception of the sound object38 .
The acousmatic situation changes the way of listening and causes certain
characteristic perceptual effects to happen39 :
a) The suppression of the support given by vision in order to identify the
sound sources. “We find that most of what we believe to listen to is, in fact, seen
and explained by the context”40
b) The dissociation between visual and aural perception as a means of better
perceiving the sound objects. “The sound object as a perception of the sound per
se”41
c) To put in evidence, through repeated listenings of the same sonic
fragment, the various aspects of that sonic fragment.
5.5.1. The Acousmatic Experience
To Schaeffer the acousmatic experience leads to a new stage of aural
perception as it provides the path to the musical object, and the tape recorder plays
the role of the “Pythagoras’ curtain” in sound research, as it creates new
phenomena to be analyzed and new ways of observation.
5.6. The Postulates of Experimental Music
Between 1951 and 1953, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz
Stockhausen were among the composers invited to work at the studio of the Groupe
de Recherches de Musique Concrète. A “serial” tendency then started to develop
within Groupe de Recherches, fact that caused some displeasure to Schaeffer as he
38 Chion 1839 Transl. from Chion 18-1940 Schaeffer, qtd. in Chion 1841 Schaeffer, qtd. in Chion 19
14
saw no point in applying the serial method to “concrete” material: “the complexity
of concrete sounds could in itself efface tonal relations.” 42
Musique concrète had been assimilated by electronic music in Darmstadt and
the Groupe de Recherches organized the First Decade of Experimental Music in
Paris, 1953, as an attempt to bridge the gap between the two opposing tendencies in
the approach to the music produced by electroacoustic means, trying to put musique
concrète, the German electronic music, and the American tape music, under the
banner of Experimental Music43 .
This workshop led to “Vers une musique experimentale”, an article written
by Schaeffer in 1953, only published in 1957 in the Revue Musicale, where he
defines the postulates of experimental music, which according to him, had a
“concrete” inspiration44:
First postulate: supremacy of the ear. The potential for evolution and the
limits of the new music have to rely on the resources of the ear.
Second postulate: preference for the real acoustic sources, the ones that our
ears are accostumed for a long time, and a refuse to use exclusively electronic-
generated sounds
Third postulate: research of a language. The new musical structures must
assure a communication between the composer and the audience.
According to Schaeffer, these postulates are valid as any attempt to renovate
the musical domain, despite the techniques used to achieve it.
As a practical conclusion of these postulates, he also defined a research
method after musique concrète consisting of five rules:
First rule: To learn a new solfège through the systematic listening of sound
objects of any kind.
Second rule: To create diverse and original sound objects as opposed to
writing using the traditional music notation.
Third rule: To learn how to “shape” the musical objects utilizing the “sound-42 Palombini 1843 Palombini 18. See also Schaeffer, Musique concrète 28-3044 Schaeffer, “Vers une Musique Experimentale”, 1953, La Revue Musicale 236 (1957): 11-27. See also Musique concrète 28-30
15
manipulating devices”, i.e., tape recorders, microphones, filters, etc.
Fourth rule: Before conceiving a piece, one should compose etudes, like the
“school exercises” of the traditional music, for they will constrain the debutant to
the choice of the better resources at disposal. Moreover, they will help to find the
possible combinations of the sonic material towards the final composition.
Fifth rule: To allow the experience and time to perform the true assimilation
of these procedures.
In the year that succeeded the publication of “Vers une musique
experimentale” (1958), Schaeffer withdrew the term “musique concrète” and the
Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète changed its name to Groupe de
Recherches Musicales (GRM).45
6. The Influence of Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer was one of the forerunners of the music produced by
electronic means and, being at the same time a composer, researcher, and
philosopher/aesthetician, his legacy — his music, and especially his several
theoretical writings — were of great influence in the course of the music of the
post-war period. Musique concrète is perhaps the most important aspect of the
nowadays-called electroacoustic music, which blends both electronic music and
musique concrète, since it calls for a radically different approach to music
composition. Masterpieces of electroacoustic music such as Simphonie pour un
homme seul (by P. Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, 1949-50), Timbres-Durées (Olivier
Messiaen, 1952), Gesange der Jünglinge (Stockhausen, 1956), Ommagio a Joyce
(Luciano Berio, 1958), Etude aux objets (Schaeffer, 1958), Déserts (Edgard
Varèse, 1959), Variations pour une porte et un soupir (Pierre Henry, 1963), were
directly or indirectly influenced by the concepts of Schaeffer and musique concrète.
Some of these pieces were even created at the studios of the GRM in Paris.
The Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète, founded in 1951 by
Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, and Jacques Poullin, renamed Groupe de
Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958, was the first studio dedicated exclusively to
45 Palombini 19
16
electroacoustic music production. Most of the great European composers of the
post-war period such as Pierre Henry, Messiaen, Boulez, Xenakis and
Stockhausen, worked in these studios producing electroacoustic music pieces, and
did research utilizing the studios’ resources.
The GRM has also promoted, since its foundation, workshops on the
techniques of electroacoustic music, and helped creating courses of electroacoustic
music at the Conservatoire de Paris (1969) and Conservatoire de Lyon (1980).
François Bayle (b.1932), who is now the director of the GRM, “abandoned
Messiaen’s class to follow the workshops at the GRM, and quits, after two years,
studying with Stockhausen in order to study with Schaeffer.”46 Bayle is perhaps
the first composer who is a “genuine product” of the GRM and Schaeffer’s
concepts. Other important composers who followed the GRM workshops — and
did research at the studios — helped consolidating what became known as the
“School of Paris:” Luc Ferrari (b. 1929), François Bernard-Mâche (b. 1935),
Bernard Parmegiani (b. 1927), and Guy Reibel (b.1936) .
This research group has a very peculiar characteristic that is kept since its
foundation: the composers who are invited to work with the group, develop their
research or pieces in collaboration with technicians and through discussions with
other composers working there. The research results and music compositions
emerge from this interaction created within the group.47
The GRM is still today one of the most important research groups
worldwide, devoted exclusively to the electroacoustic music production and
research. In their facilities — still located at the building of the Radio-Télévision
Française — they have four studios with state-of-the-art equipment, an auditorium
especially designed to the “projection” of electroacoustic music, and an archive, the
“Acousmathèque”, that counts more than 2000 titles of original electroacoustic
46 Schaeffer, Musique concrète 113-114.47 I had recently (Paris, July 31, 1996) an informal conversation with Daniel Teruggi, the coordinator for creative research at the GRM, who kindly explained to me how the work was developed at their facilities.
17
music pieces.48
Their research is now centered in the development of computer programs.
GRM Tools, a program for digital signal processing in the Apple Macintosh, and
MIDI Formers, a “plug-in” for Max, by Opcode (a program also for the
Macintosh), are products are available commercially and reflect part of the research
that has been done lately by this group.
48 Information available through pamphlets issued by the GRM (Paris: INA-GRM). The GRM also has a web site where this information can be accessed. Address: http://www.ina.fr/INA/GRM/ index.fr.html. Accessed 20 June 1996
18
Works Cited
Bayle, François. Musique Acousmatique: Propositions...Positions. Paris: INA-
GRM, Buchet-Chastel, 1993
- - -, ed. Pierre Schaeffer: L’œuvre musicale — Textes et documents inédits réunis
par François Bayle. Paris: INA-GRM, 1990
Brindle, Reginald Smith. The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945. 2nd Ed.
New York: Oxford UP, 1987
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1961
Chion, Michel. Guide des objets sonores – Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche
musicale. Paris: INA-GRM, Buchet-Chastel, 1983
Cope, David. New Directions in Music. 5th. Ed. Dubuque, IA: WM. C. Brown
Publishers,1989
Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Online. World Wide Web. 20 June 1996.
Available http://www.ina.fr/INA/GRM/ index.fr.html. Accessed 20 June
1996
- - - .INA.GRM. Paris: INA-GRM, n.d.
- - - . Les studios. Paris: INA-GRM, n.d.
- - - . Recherche en Sciences de la musique. Paris: INA-GRM, n.d.
- - - . Rechereche sur les outils de creation. Paris: INA-GRM, n.d.
Palombini, Carlos. “Machine Songs V: Pierre Schaeffer — From Research Into
Noises to Experimental Music”. Computer Music Journal. 17:3 (1993) 14-
19
Reed, H. Owen, and Joel Leach. Scoring for Percussion and the Instruments of the
Percussion Section. Miami, FL: Belwin Mills, 1978
Schaeffer, Pierre. A la Recherche d’une Musique Concrète. Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1952
- - -. “Introduction à la musique concrète” Polyphonie 6.La musique mecanisée
(1949):30-52
- - - . La Musique Concrète. Que Sais-je?. 2nd Ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. 1973
19
- - -. “Pierre Schaeffer Interview”. Interview with Tim Hodgkinson. Trans. Tim
Hodgkinson (1987). n. pag. Online. World Wide Web. 15 June 1996.
Available http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/~tissue/schaeffer.html
- - - . Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966
- - - . “Vers une Musique Experimentale”. 1953. La Revue Musicale 236 (1957):
11-27
Sutherland, Roger. New Perspectives in Music. London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1994
