Pierre Schaeffer

Schaeffer worked between 1910 and 1995 across composer, radio personality, engineer, musicologist and music educator and 6 further recorded occupations. The registers place that work in musique concrète. This article rests on 47 catalogued compositions, 30 published texts, 12 issued recordings and 23 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Pierre Schaeffer studied at École polytechnique, Supélec and Lycee Notre-Dame Saint-Sigisbert. Gilles Racot, Bertrand Dubedout and Éliane Radigue are recorded as having studied under Pierre Schaeffer. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are musique concrète. Employment is recorded with Conservatoire de Paris. Positions recorded include chief officer. Work by Pierre Schaeffer is recorded in the collections of Liemers Museum. Distinctions recorded are Qwartz Electronic Music Awards and Prix Sainte-Beuve.

• Name — Pierre Schaeffer • Birth Name — Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer • Born — 14 August 1910 • Birthplace — Nancy, Lorraine, France • Died — 19 August 1995 • Place of death — Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France • Occupation — Composer, musician, writer, engineer, professor, broadcaster, acoustician, musicologist, record producer, inventor, entrepreneur, cultural critic • Years Active — 1942–1990 • Label Name — * GRMC/GRM • INA • Phonurgia Nova, Philips • Disques Adès • EMF • Prospective 21e Siècle

Schaeffer was born in Nancy in 1910. His parents were both musicians (his father was a violinist; his mother, a singer), and at first it seemed that Pierre would also take on music as a career. However, his parents discouraged his musical pursuits from childhood and had him educated in engineering. He studied at several universities in this inclination, the first of which was Lycée Saint-Sigisbert, located in his hometown of Nancy. Afterwards he moved westwards in 1929 to the École Polytechnique in Paris and finally completed his education in the capital at the École supérieure d'électricité, in 1934. Schaeffer received a diploma in radio broadcasting from the École Polytechnique. He may have also received a similar qualification from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications, although it is not verifiable as to whether or not he ever actually attended this university.

Later in 1934 Schaeffer entered his first employment as an engineer, briefly working in telecommunications for the Postes et Télécommunications in Strasbourg. In 1935 he began a relationship with a woman named Elisabeth Schmitt, and later in the year married her and with her had his first child, Marie-Claire Schaeffer. He and his new family then officially relocated to Paris in 1936 where began his work in radio broadcasting and presentation. It was there that he began to move away from his initial interests in telecommunications and to pursue music instead, combining his abilities as an engineer with his passion for sound. In his work at the station, Schaeffer experimented with records and an assortment of other devices—the sounds they made and the applications of those sounds—after convincing the radio station's management to allow him to use their equipment. This period of experimentation was significant for Schaeffer's development, bringing forward many fundamental questions he had on the limits of modern musical expression. • Illustration — Pierre Schaeffer presenting the Acousmonium (1974) that consisted of 80 loudspeakers for tape playback at GRM In these experiments, Pierre 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. He had begun working with new contemporaries whom he had met through RTF, and as such his experimentation deepened. Schaeffer's work gradually became more avant-garde, as he challenged traditional musical style with the use of various devices and practices. Eventually, a unique variety of electronic instruments—ones which Schaeffer and his colleagues created, using their own engineering skills—came into play in his work, like the chromatic, sliding and universal phonogenes, François Bayle's Acousmonium and a host of other devices such as gramaphones and some of the earliest tape recorders.

In 1938 Schaeffer began his career as a writer, penning various articles and essays for the Revue Musicale, a French journal of music. His first column, Basic Truths, provided a critical examination of musical aspects of the time. An ardent Catholic, Schaeffer began to write religiously based pieces, and in the same year as his Basic Truths he published his first novel: Chlothar Nicole — a short Christian novel.

The Studio d'Essai, later Club d'Essai, was founded in 1942 by Pierre Schaeffer at the Radiodiffusion Nationale (France). It played a role in the activities of the French resistance during World War II, and later became a center of musical activity.

In 1949, Schaeffer met the percussionist-composer Pierre Henry, with whom he collaborated on many compositions, and 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 phonographs and 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 À la Recherche d'une Musique Concrète (French; the English title is: In Search of a Concrete Music) in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point. His only opera, Orphée 53 ("Orpheus 53"), premiered in 1953. Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953 and reformed the group in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherche Musicale[s] (GRM) (at first without "s", then with "s"). In 1954 Schaeffer founded traditional music label Ocora ("Office de Coopération Radiophonique") alongside composer, pianist, and musicologist Charles Duvelle, with a worldwide coverage in order to preserve African rural soundscapes. Ocora also served as a facility to train technicians in African national broadcasting services. Over the years, Schaeffer mentored a number of students who went on to have successful careers, including Éliane Radigue and the young Jean Michel Jarre, who called his mentor the first disc jockey. His last "étude" (study) came in 1959: the "Study of Objects" (Études 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." Schaeffer suffered from Alzheimer's disease later in his life, and died from the condition in Aix-en-Provence in 1995. He was 85 years old. He is buried in Delincourt in the green Vexin region (55 minutes from Paris) where he used to have his countryside property. Schaeffer was thereafter remembered by many of his colleagues with the title, "Musician of Sounds".

• Illustration — Schaeffer often created his "concrete music" with real-world sounds. The notable Railroad Study (French: "Étude aux chemins de fer"), for instance, featured recordings of the noises made by trains running along railroad tracks. The term musique concrète (French for "real music", literally "concrete music"), was coined by Schaeffer in 1948. Schaeffer believed traditionally classical (or as he called it, "serious") music begins as an abstraction (musical notation) that is later produced as audible music. Musique concrète, by contrast, strives to start with the "concrete" sounds that emanate from base phenomena and then abstracts them into a composition. The term musique concrète is then, in essence, the breaking down of the structured production of traditional instruments, harmony, rhythm, and even music theory itself, in an attempt to reconstruct music from the bottom up. From the contemporary point of view, the importance of Schaeffer's musique concrète is threefold. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the vocabulary of music. 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 musicians to manipulate recorded sound for the purpose of using it in conjunction with other sounds in order to compose a musical piece. Techniques such as tape looping and tape splicing were used in his research, often comparing to sound collage. The advent of Schaeffer's manipulation of recorded sound became possible only with technologies that were developed after World War II had ended in Europe. His work is recognized today as an essential precursor to contemporary sampling practices. Schaeffer was among the first to use recording technology in a creative and specifically musical way, harnessing the power of electronic and experimental instruments in a manner similar to Luigi Russolo, whom he admired and from whose work he drew inspiration. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of "playing" (in his term, 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, and reflects on freely improvised sound, or perhaps more specifically electroacoustic improvisation, from the standpoint of Schaeffer's work and research.

Commercial release of Schaeffer's work was limited at best; Schaeffer released his work to the public primarily to disseminate a new and avant-garde form of music. The original production of his marketed work was done by the "Groupe de Recherches Musicales" (a.k.a. GRM; now owned and operated by INA or the Institut national de l'audiovisuel), the company which he initially had formed around his creations. Other music was broadcast live (Pierre himself being notable on French radio at the time). Some individual tracks found their way into the use of other artists, with Pierre's work being fronted in mime performances and ballets. Now after his death, various musical production companies, such as Disques Adès and Phonurgia Nova have been granted rights to distribute his work. Below is a list of Schaeffer's musical works, showing his compositions and the year(s) they were recorded. • Concertino-Diapason (1948; collaboration with J.-J. Grunenwald) • Cinq études de bruits (1948) • Suite pour 14 instruments (1949) • Variations sur une flûte mexicaine (1949) • Bidule en ut (1950; collaboration with Pierre Henry) • La course au kilocycle (1950; radio score, collaboration with Pierre Henry) • L'oiseau r.a.i. (1950) • Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950; collaboration with Pierre Henry; revised versions in 1953, 1955, and 1966 (Henry)) • Toute la lyre (1951; pantomime, collaboration with Pierre Henry. Also known as Orphée 51) • Masquerage (1952; film score) • Les paroles dégelées (1952; music for a radio production) • Scènes de Don Juan (1952; incidental music, collaboration with Monique Rollin) • Orphée 53 (1953; opera) • Sahara d'aujourd'hui (1957; film score, collaboration with Pierre Henry) • Continuo (1958; collaboration with Luc Ferrari) • Étude aux sons animés (1958) • Étude aux allures (1958) • Exposition française à Londres (1958; collaboration with Luc Ferrari) • Étude aux objets (1959) • Nocturne aux chemins de fer (1959; incidental music) • Phèdre (1959; incidental music) • Simultané camerounais (1959) • Phèdre (1961) • L'aura d'Olga (1962; music for a radio production, collaboration with Claude Arrieu) • Le trièdre fertile (1975; collaboration with Bernard Durr) • Bilude (1979)

Apart from his published and publicized music, Schaeffer conducted several musical (and specifically musique concrète-related) presentations via French radio. Although these broadcasts contained musical pieces by Schaeffer they cannot be adequately described as part of his main line of musical output. This is because the radio "essays", as they were appropriately named, were mainly narration on Schaeffer's musical theories philosophies rather than compositions in and of themselves. Schaeffer's radio narratives include the following: • The Shell Filled With Planets (1944) • Cantata to Alsace (1945) • An Hour of the World (1946) • From Claudel to Brangues (1953) • Ten Years of Radiophonic Experiments from the 'Studio' to the 'Club' d'Essai: 1942–1952 (1955)

• The Guardian of The Volcano (1969) • Prelude, Chorale and Fugue (1981)

• Tobie (1939) • Secular Games (1946)

• Clotaire Nicole (1934) • America, We Ignore You (1946) • The Non-Visual Element of Films (1946) • In Search of a Concrete Music (1952) • Traité des objets musicaux (1966) • Solfège de l'objet sonore (1967) • Music and Acoustics (1967)

Pierre Schaeffer was recorded at birth as Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer. The authorities additionally record the heading Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer. His recorded language was French. His recorded confession was Catholicism. He married Jacqueline Schaeffer. One child is recorded: Justine Schaeffer.

Pierre Schaeffer is recorded with the occupation radio personality. Recorded with the occupation music educator. Recorded as having studied at École polytechnique, Supélec and Lycee Notre-Dame Saint-Sigisbert.