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An Interview with Pierre Schaeffer
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
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An Interview with Pierre SchaeVer Introduction: What Is Musique Concrète? Musique concrète is music made of raw sounds: thunderstorms, steam-engines, waterfalls, steel foundries. The sounds are not produced by traditional acoustic musical instruments; they are captured on tape (originally, before tape, on disk) and manipulated to form sound-structures. The work method is therefore empirical. It starts from the concrete sounds and moves toward a structure. In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed. Musique concrète emerged in Paris in 1948 at the rtf (Radio Television Français). Its originator, leading researcher, and articulate spokesman was Pierre SchaeVer—at that time working as an electroacoustic engineer with the rtf. Almost immediately, musique concrète found itself locked in mortal combat not only with its opponents within traditionally notated music but also with electronic music, which emerged in Cologne in 1950 at the nwdr (Nord West Deutscher Rundfunk). Electronic music involved the use of precisely controllable electronic equipment to generate the sound material—for example , the oscillator, which can produce any desired wave-form, which can then be shaped, modulated, etc. At the time, the antagonism between musique concrète and electronic music seemed to revolve largely around the diVerence in sound material. Over the decades, this diVerence has become less important, so that what we now call “electroacoustic music” is less concerned with the origin of the sound material than with what is done with it afterward. On the other hand it would be facile to allow the category of electroacoustic music to absorb everything just on the basis of shared technology. For there are underlying choices to be made about the nature of the whole project. The hands-on listening-based approach of concrète—its curiousity about the actual nature of listening—suggests that the way forward in aesthetic terms will [ 34 ] tim hodgkinson ⢇ be a process of thoughtful but direct engagement with sound materials rather than the usual ritual of submission to the technical possibilities. We have to admit that today this is still a radical idea. In other words, concr ète is still here to remind us of the project of actually making music, as opposed to demonstrating equipment or putting systems through their paces. The new musicians are not only not in the conservatory; they are not in the laboratories of ircam (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/ musique) or at Sony either. Tim Hodgkinson: You are a writer, a thinker, and a radio sound-engineer. This makes you, from the point of view of “Music” with a capital “M”— something of an outsider. Do you think that, in moments of crisis, the nonspecialist has a particular and important role to play? I don’t know whether this is entirely correct, but I sense that, at the moment when you came into music, around 1948, you were a nonspecialist of this kind. Pierre SchaeVer: Yes. But chance alone doesn’t explain why a nonspecialist gets involved in an area he doesn’t know about. In my case there were double circumstances. First of all, I’m not completely unknowledgeable about music, because I come from a family of musicians: my father was a violinist and my mother was a singer. I did study well—theory, piano, cello, etcetera , so I’m not completely untrained. Secondly, I was an electroacoustic engineer working for the French radio, so I was led to study sound and what’s called “high fidelity” in sound. Thirdly, 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, twelve-tone music. We had liberated ourselves politically, but music was still under an occupying foreign power, the music of the Vienna school. So these were the three circumstances that compelled me to experiment in music: I was involved in music; I was working with turntables (then with tape-recorders); I was horrified by modern twelve-tone music. I said to myself , “Maybe I can find something diVerent; maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.” Seeing that no one knew what to do anymore with DoReMi, maybe we had to look outside that. Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi. In other words, I wasted my life. Hodgkinson: We’ll certainly have to come back to...