Even today, nearly 70 years later, his music can feels challenging, disorienting, even threatening. Their music could exist solely as recordings, without need for players or instruments to actualize them. The phonogène was a machine capable of modifying sound structure significantly and it provided composers with a means to adapt sound to meet specific compositional contexts. He was the one who invented the entire way music is made these days.”Schaeffer’s influence stretched far beyond his contemporaries (Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez all drew inspiration from his theories), and today it’s hard to find recorded music in any genre, on any continent, that his ideas and methods haven’t touched. There’s less mud and opacity, less gray; the colors are purer and more defined. Pierre Schaeffer, De la musique concrète à la musique même, Québec, Mémoire du Livre, 2002 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux , Paris, Seuil, 2/1976 Pierre Schaeffer, Vers une musique expérimentale , Paris, Richard-Masse, 1957 This creates several problems of translation affecting key terms. His ideas turned conventional music theory on its head. Schaeffer created a new collective, called GRM was one of several theoretical and experimental groups working under the umbrella of the Schaeffer-led Service de la Recherche at ORTF (1960–74). Together with the GRM, three other groups existed: the Groupe de Recherches Image GRI, the Groupe de Recherches Technologiques GRT and the Groupe de Recherches Langage which became the Groupe d'Etudes Critiques (Schaeffer kept up a practice established with the GRMC of delegating the functions (though not the title) of Group Director to colleagues.

In ‘Etude aux chemins de fer’, the very first musique concrète composition, we hear the composer wrestling with this concept, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.An afternoon spent recording six train engines at Batignolles station in Paris secured a varied sample of noises: the jangling cadence of trains on the track, bird-like whistles, the pant of exhausts. It also needed to include all the major functions of a The Coupigny synthesiser also served as the model for a smaller, portable unit, which has been used down to the present day (As of 2010, the Acousmonium was still performing, with 64 speakers, 35 amplifiers, and 2 consoles ("[A] problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic, with a readiness to see material for study in terms of highly abstract dualisms and correlations, which on occasion does not sit easily with the perhaps more pragmatic English language. The four loops controlled the four speakers, and while all four were giving off sounds all the time, the distance of the unit from the loops determined the volume of sound sent out from each. There’s more room for each individual sample to breathe. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the word Originally conceived as a score to a visual short by artist Raymond Hains, its prodding minimalism is a suitable fit with Hains’ undulating geometric graphics.The details of this imagined landscape are fleshed out by Schaeffer’s clever manipulation of the acoustic field: sounds attack with aggression but linger with persistent fades, constantly moving in and out of focus like film dissolves.As we move into Schaeffer’s later works, the first thing you’ll notice is an improvement in fidelity owing to Schaeffer’s switch from acetate discs to magnetic tape. Traditionally, composition moved from the abstract to the concrete — from concept and written notes to actual sounds. Whether the result of compromise or just a carefree last hurrah, ‘Strette’ shows Schaeffer, a man nearing the end of his career, exploring new territory – musique concrète be damned.One of Schaeffer’s last works, ‘Bilude’ is a synthesis of piano and tape which quotes Bach’s ‘Prelude in C Minor’ and then subjects it to a series of playful edits.

Though a certain energy and naive charm is lacking in ‘Etude aux objects’ compared to earlier collections like ‘Études de bruits’, there’s no denying that Schaeffer’s techniques are otherwise improved in nearly every way. INART 55.

Find Musique Concrète Albums, Artists and Songs, and Hand-Picked Top Musique Concrète Music on AllMusic Pierre Henry had used oscillators to produce sounds as early as 1955.

Amongst the vast range of works and projects he undertook, Schaeffer is most widely and currently recognized for his accomplishments in Schaeffer's writings (which include written and radio-narrated essays, biographies, short novels, a number of musical Today, Schaeffer is considered one of the most influential experimental, electroacoustic and subsequently Schaeffer received a diploma in radio broadcasting from the École Polytechnique.Later in 1934 Schaeffer entered his first employment as an engineer, briefly working in In these experiments, Pierre tried playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up and juxtaposing them with other sounds,In 1938 Schaeffer began his career as a writer, penning various articles and essays for the Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953 and reformed the group in 1958 as the Schaeffer was thereafter remembered by many of his colleagues with the title, "Musician of Sounds".From the contemporary point of view, the importance of Schaeffer's musique concrète is threefold. History of Electroacoustic Music. The resulting music is a portrait of some strange mechanical wilderness, the machines communicating back and forth like newly awakened fauna, alienating and inviting in equal measure.While most traces of the trains themselves were done away with, Schaeffer couldn’t help but envision an ideal scenario where the trains’ footprint was completely erased. Computer Music Diario 17, no. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the vocabulary of music.