Everything about Pierre Schaeffer totally explained
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (
August 14,
1910–
August 19,
1995) was a
French composer, noted as the inventor of
musique concrète.==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's posted in 1936 at
Radiodiffusion Française in
Paris. It was there that he began to experiment, in 1948, with records because he's 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.
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's 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.
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