Pierre Schaeffer

GRM team in the studio 54 at Bourdan centre, 1972. Photo: Laszlo Ruszka. [1]

With Marshall McLuhan, 1972. [2]

Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995) was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician. His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime.

Films

• Films and videos with or related to Schaeffer at Artsonores

Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, 1966.

Publications

(in French unless noted)

• À la recherche d'une musique concrète, Paris: Seuil, 1952.
  • In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack, University of California Press, 2012, 225 pp. (in English)
• Traité des objets musicaux, Paris: Seuil, 1966; 2nd ed., 1977.
  • Tradato de los objetos musicales, trans. Araceli Cabezon de Diego, Madrid: Alianza, 1988, 337 pp; 2003. Trans. of an abridged version. (in Spanish)
  • Includes the essay "Acousmatics"; trans. Daniel W. Smith, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Bloomsbury, 2004, pp 76-81. (in English). Trained as a radio engineer and announcer, Schaeffer was fascinated by the fact that radio and recording made possible a new experience of sound--what he called "reduced listening" or "acousmatic listening"--that disclosed a new domain of sounds--objets sonores or sonorous objects, the objects of "acousmatic listening".
• "Sound and the Century: a Socio-Aesthetic Treatise", trans. & intro. Donna Zapf, Vanguard (Feb 1980), pp 6-12. (in English)
• Essai sur la radio et le cinéma, Paris: Allia, 2010, 128 pp. [3]
• Polychrome Portraits, Paris: Institut national de l'audiovisuel, 2009. Contents.

Literature

• Pierre Schaeffer: L'œuvre musicale, Paris: Ina, c1990; new ed., 2010. CD booklet. (in French/English) [4]
• Brian Kane, "Vestigial Schaeffer", in Schaeffer, Polychrome Portraits, Paris: Institut national de l'audiovisuel, 2009, pp 13-17. (in English)
• Brian Kane, "Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction", in Kane, Brian - Sound Unseen. Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp 15-41, n230-235. (in English)
• Pierre Schaeffer: A Survey of the Literature, compiled by Carlos Palombini.

Links

• Photographs of Schaeffer at Ina.fr