Pierre Schaeffer
Real music....
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.…
-Pierre Schaeffer
This week, we’ll take one more walk in the field before we return to the canoe and head back down that Big River called Jazz.
Almost 80 years ago, on August 24, 1944, Pierre Schaeffer shouted over the radio, “Parisians rejoice! We have come on the air to give you the news of our deliverance. The LeClerc Division has entered Paris. We are mad with happiness!” In a further show of emotion, he read a moving and relevant stanza from Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments (The Punishments):
Awake! Be done with shame!
Become again great France!
Become again great Paris!
Then over the air he played La Marseillaise. As it played in hundreds of thousands of homes, Parisians together flung open their windows and cranked up their radios to full volume. Barely had La Marseillaise finished when Schaeffer spoke again, “Tell all the parish priests who can hear me, all the priests who can be alerted to ring their church bells to announce the arrival of the Allies in Paris!”
Since the German occupation four years earlier, the bells in Paris had been silent. Not once did the bells call Parisians to Mass nor ring for any of the usual occasions. Notre Dame’s 14-ton bell rang out first. And then the 19-ton Savoyarde, the biggest bell in France, rang out from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the hill in Montmartre. One by one, from one end of the city to the other, church bells in Paris joined them. Soon, they all rang out together.
It was Pierre Schaeffer, one of the pivotal figures in postwar experimental music, who announced the liberation of Paris. A few years later, he announced the liberation of music, and the repercussions of his work are still felt today.
The possibilities of electronic instruments came to the US in the early 1930s, with the theremin and Ondes Martenot, two very strange instruments and tricky to play. Perhaps for that reason they enjoyed a certain vogue during their time. However, the real breakthrough came with the invention of high-fidelity magnetic tape recorders during WWII. With this invention, you could record whatever interested you and then transform the sounds any way you wanted. The first person to manipulate tape in this manner was Pierre Schaeffer in 1948.
Schaeffer was born in Nancy, France on August 15th, 1910. His father was a violinist and his mother a singer; however, they sent him to engineering school. He attended the École Polytechnique in Paris. After receiving a degree in radio broadcasting in 1936, he worked as an engineer at France’s public broadcaster Radiodiffusion française (RDF). However, when WWII started, he was drafted.
After the fall of Paris in June 1940, Vichy France was formed. In an attempt to preserve social harmony in young children, the Vichy regime formed several youth groups. Schaeffer was then demobilized and joined a movement of Catholic intellectuals and artists to organize educational activities for young people explicitly focused on music. All of these groups were supported by Radio-Jeunesse (Youth Radio), founded in August 1940 with the motto: la jeunesse a le droit a chanter (the young have the right to sing).
In 1941, in a cunning attempt to thwart the increasingly hard-lined ideological Vichy government of that time, Schaeffer founded an association called La Jeune France (Young France). Its goal was through youth-oriented artistic events to achieve cultural renewal. Here is a photo of a performance to celebrate Joan of Arc directed by Schaeffer and performed at Gerland stadium in Lyon on May 11, 1941:
In March 1942, La Jeune France broadcasted a hymn evoking the tragedies of the war. The hymn was written by Schaeffer in response to Maréchal Pétain's October 20, 1940 message on Radio-Jeunesse encouraging all young people in France to support the Armistice with Germany. As a result, in March 1942, La Jeune France was dissolved.
In January 1943, along with Jacques Copeau, who radically changed French theater in the 1920s, Schaeffer organized a training session in Beaune, France. Together, they pursued a dream of a new radiophonic art form.
From mid-September to mid-October 1942, Schaeffer and Copeau co-directed a course to train young actors on the use of microphones to prepare them for this emerging radiophonic arts. Schaeffer saw this as a way to cultivate a new generation of technicians and actors trained in the “mechanical arts” and used the program as a model for successful symbiosis between art and craft, between research and creativity.
They auditioned and selected a group of trainees based on their multi-disciplinary aptitude - they had to be actors, singers, musicians, and technicians. Some twenty young trainees were invited to take up residence at the Hôtel des Ducs de Bourgogne, a 14th century building at the center of the France’s Burgundy wine region:
Here is a picture of the Hôtel des Ducs de Bourgogne’s courtyard with trainees performing early radiophonic sound experiments:
After the training session in Beaune concluded in November 1942, Schaeffer moved to Paris and founded Studio d’Essai. This was his first recording studio and vocational training center.
Studio d’Essai specialized in new musical ideas, broadcasting pieces which tested experimental sounds. It was here that Schaeffer also trained his team for secret activities for the French Resistance. From this studio in 1944 French Resistance Radio first broadcasted the liberation of Paris. Schaeffer prepared hundreds of hours of programs to be used at the time of liberation, including a recording of his poem Marseillaise of Liberation and Paul Eluard’s recording of his poem Liberté. These episodes were broadcasted during the time leading up to August 24, 1944.
Here is the 1944 French language original four 78rpm record set released on Disc Records consisting of some of these French Resistance Radio broadcasts:
Schaeffer’s recordings were later edited with English narration by Orson Welles for another release on the Asch Record label:
From this collection, after Orson Welles’ short introduction, Pierre Schaeffer reads his "Marseillaise of Liberation".
Using all his experiences with radio and sound recording during the war and liberation of Paris, Schaeffer now set his sights on the liberation of music.
In 1948, under the title Cinq études de bruits (A Concert of Noises), Schaeffer broadcast a set of études he had composed entirely from recordings of train whistles, spinning tops, pots and pans, canal boats, percussion instruments, and a lone piano. In contrast with traditional music built on notation, instrumentation, performance, and concert halls, Schaeffer developed musique concrète—music built from the sounds of the world and assembled directly by the hands of the composer via the manipulation of phonograph discs or the splicing of magnetic tape. In this way, Schaeffer abandoned the concert hall, celebrating a new sound experience.
In 1966, in Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) Schaeffer wrote:
When in 1948 I suggested the term musique concrète, I intended, by this adjective, to express a reversal of the way musical work is done. Instead of notating musical ideas using the symbols of music theory, and leaving it to known instruments to realize them, the aim was to gather concrete sound, wherever it came from, and to abstract the musical values it potentially contained.
Toward that end, in 1951, he founded the GRMC (Groupe de recherche de musique concrète). That same year, Schaeffer lectured at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music (Darmstädter Ferienkurse), where his Symphonie pour un homme seul was enthusiastically received by the German musicians present there, namely Stockhausen. As the Darmstadt Festival gained traction in the early 1950s, Schaeffer became skeptical of the emerging synthesisers and electro-generated sounds, which were against his philosophy of natural sound recording. In a 1986 interview with Tim Hodgkinson, Schaeffer famously reflected, “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. We had liberated ourselves politically, but music was still under an occupying foreign power, the music of the Vienna school.”
Much to Schaeffer’s chagrin, by 1954 a new concept of tape music emerged at the official German broadcasting studio in Köln, where experimenters preferred to deny themselves the natural sounds of musique concrète, concentrating instead on synthetic sounds produced by various types of tone generators. This put him at odds with the methods employed by the serial composers like Stockhausen, Varèse, and Boulez, who became the dominant forces in the 1950s.
This was the beginning of a shift away from France’s post-WWII influence and back to Germany’s influence in contemporary music. As a result, Schaeffer’s position in contemporary music soon faded. He drifted into research and academia, becoming in the late 1960s an associate professor at the Conservatoire de Paris.
On the other hand, Stockhausen’s electronic music breakaway was cemented in 1953 when he put together what is commonly known as the first purely electronic composition, Studie I.
By 1954, the cat was now out of the bag. During the following decade, Stockhausen’s music had a big impact on 1960s popular music.
It would be many years before I realized that one of my favorite Beatles songs Tomorrow Never Knows was actually emulating an established musical genre pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer and then pushed further by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who is pictured on the cover of their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
Paul McCartney was heavily influenced by the music of Schaeffer and Stockhausen. During the recording of their 1966 Revolver album he started to push that influence on the other Beatles. You can clearly hear that influence listening to Tomorrow Never Knows:
At the time Revolver was released, Stockhausen held a residency at the University of California in Davis. By his own admission, Stockhausen recalls that members of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane attended his lectures while he was in California. You can hear his influence in Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You, Shortly:
Again, on the later part of The Grateful Dead’s 1968 song That’s It For The Other One - go to the 5:00 minute mark - you can start to clearly hear his influence through the end of the song:
Stockhausen was also quoted in 1980 saying: “Lennon often used to phone me. He was particularly fond of my Gesang der Jünglinge and Hymnen and got many things from them.”
By the end on 1968, Schaeffer’s musique concrète had been fully hijacked by the avant-garde. For example, just listen to The Beatles Revolution 9, released in November 1968 on their White Album:
When you hear this, the obvious questions are: What is it? Is it music at all or just an abstract sound collage? And finally, does it even matter?
One last thing about Pierre Schaeffer that I think is very important to share. While he was developing musique concrète, he was also very involved with radio in Africa. He feared for the future of vulnerable African musical cultures lacking in notation, recording, cataloging, and even documentation of the unique instruments used to play it. He thought it would all soon be lost. So in 1955, Schaeffer founded the Société de radiodiffusion de la France d’outre-mer (SORAFOM) as a cooperative venture to train radio engineers in African national broadcasting services and to also record and preserve African rural soundscapes. In 1962, SORAFOM became the Office de coopération radiophonique (OCORA), which then released many of these priceless African field recordings on the Ocora label.
Pierre Schaeffer’s music theories influenced not only his contemporaries Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez, his influence stretched far beyond them all the way into many of today’s recorded music genres.
As one of his former students Jean-Michel Jarre stated, “Back in the 1940s, Schaeffer invented the sample, the locked groove - in other words, the loop… It was Schaeffer who experimented with distorting sounds, playing them backwards, speeding them up and slowing them down. He was the one who invented the entire way music is made these days.”
For this we say thanks to Pierre Schaeffer - let freedom ring!
Next week, we’re back on that Big River called Jazz. We’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of the late Jaimie Branch.
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Until then, keep on walking….
This was a particularly great one!!! I never knew the history of musiaue concrete!
Great piece. I’m filing it away for future reference. I love Schaeffer, Stockhausen, the Beatles, and the Schoenberg circle. It’s all great as far as I’m concerned.