Pierre Schaeffer, 1953: Towards an Experimental Music

Abstract

BY CARLOS PALOMBINI M. Pierret:-Can we go as far as saying that, if you wrote today either la Coquille a planetes or Orphee, then you'd show more care for the oeuvre, you'd no longer be the victim of your own experiments ... P. Schaeffer:-Certainly not! We always commit the same mistakes again, and je ne regrette rien'! I tell you: I prefer an experiment, even aborted, to a successful oeuvre. IN ANOTHER ARTICLE2, I have drawn a distinction between four phases of Pierre Schaeffer's work from 1948 to 1966: research into noises (1948-9), concrete music (1949-58), experimental music (1953-9) and musical research (1958-). In the present article I am examining the first stage in the transition from concrete music to musical research: the step whereby the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrete rallied concrete music, electronic music, tape music and exotic music under the banner of experimental music. In 1951, Radiodiffusion-Television Frangaise offered the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrete, which at the time consisted of Pierre Schaeffer, the sound engineer Jacques Poullin and the composer Pierre Henry, the first ever purposebuilt electroacoustic3 studio. The collaboration between Schaeffer and Poullin, then in its fourth year, had resulted in the creation of the keyboard phonogene, the slide phonogene (also known as chromatic and continuous phonogenes), a three-track tape recorder and the spatialization desk.4 The studio attracted diverse and important composers: between 1951 and 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen created concrete pieces there. In 1953 the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrete de la Radiodiffusion-Television Fran;aise, presided over by Schaeffer, organized the First International Decade of Experimental Music, which took place at UNESCO in Paris between 8 and 18 June. 'Vers une musique experimentale', a special issue of the Revue musicale edited by Schaeffer and devoted entirely to the event, was announced. The final proof, revised and approved by the authors and Albert Richard, editor of the periodical, was ready on 10 July 1953. Richard nevertheless decided to postpone its publication. Four years later, this issue was finally printed, with the addition of Richard's explanations and excuses ('Quatre ans apres.. .')5 and an introduction by Schaeffer, his 'Lettre a Albert Marc Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer, Paris, 1969, p. 105. 2 Carlos Palombini, 'Pierre Schaeffer: from Research into Noises to Musical Research', Computer MusicJournal, xvii (1993). 3I am employing the term 'electroacoustic' in its wider sense; see Pierret, op. cit., p. 52. 4 For a description of the equipment available in the studio, see Peter Manning, 'Paris and Musique concrete', Electronic and Computer Music, Oxford, 1987, pp. 27-28. Manning refers to a five-track tape recorder: 'In addi tion to a set of conventionally equipped recorders, including one capable of registering five independent tracks of sound, three special versions were installed'. A three-track tape recorder instea...

L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects and the phenomenological reduction

“…Carlos Palombini (1997) has convincingly argued for the explicit connection between Heidegger's and Schaeffer's views on technology. In particular, both Heidegger and Schaeffer conceive of the technological domain as distinct from its cultural and social manifestations.…”

Free music and the discipline of sound

“…Cage also extended the percussion sounds of the piano with his first 'prepared piano' piece, Bacchanale, in 1939. Schaeffer, in his (1950) 'Vers une musique experimentale', appreciates this 'transitional' instrument, 'the prepared piano helped us through some difficult moments, providing transitional works to appease the public, the administration and ourselves' (Palombini 1998).…”

“…Many of these instruments invented over the course of the first half of the twentieth century (Telharmonium or 'Dynamophone', Theremin, Ondes-Martenot, and Grainger's 'Free Music' machines) filled in the pitch continuum and extended the pitch range of traditional instruments while providing expanded, but still limited capacity for timbral expression. As expressed by Pierre Schaeffer in 1957, 'Instead of destroying notes, the last stronghold of traditional music, they put in some more' (Palombini 1998).…”

“Things begin to speak by themselves”: Pierre Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell and the epistemology of sound

“…Such a desire is also behind ontological reflections in the phenomenology of art, as in the late work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007).11 At this point in Schaeffer's writings the specific compositional method of musique concrète is largely supplanted by a syncretic research program concerning musique expérimentale. SeePalombini (1993a) for an illuminating interpretation and contextualisation of this essay.…”