“Musique Concrète Revisited”

Musique Concrète Revisited* Carlos Palombini Between 1945 and 1953, writes Carl Mitcham (1994), technology took the world stage in defiance of the human mind that fostered it up: USA A-bomb (1945), Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (1946), USSR A-bomb (1949), kidney transplant (1950), USA H-bomb (1951), USSR H-bomb (1952), DNA (1953). Between 1954 and 1962 the new powers were put to use within traditional frameworks, with increasingly conflictive results: USS Nautilus (1954), commercial electricity from nuclear power (1955), birth control pill (1955), Sputnik I (1957), radioactivity accidents in Western and Eastern Europe (1957), integrated circuit (1959), LASER (1960), Vostok I (1961), Mariner 2 (1962). Then came a period of trying to adapt or alter those frameworks, punctuated by more technological disasters. The period comprised between 1963 and 1972 was one of the most creative in the history of science and technology policies. Human, political and economic frameworks were adapted or altered, initiatives in assessment and control were taken: limited nuclear test ban treaty (1963), USS Thresher sinks (1963), Vostok 6 (1963), Harvard University Programme on Technology and Society (1964), New York City power failure (1965), B-52 carrying four H-bombs crashes in Spain (1966), Torry Canyon spills 30 million gallons of crude oil onto UK beaches (1967), Humanæ vitæ rejects artificial contraception (1968), USS Scorpion sinks (1968), Apollo 11 (1969), Environmental Protection Agency (1969), oil well blow-out in Santa Barbara (1969), Greenpeace (1969), Earth Day (1970), Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Committee on the Social Implications of Technology (1972), DDT banned (1972), United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972), The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome (1972). Pierre Schaeffer was born in Nancy on 15 August 1910. His father was a violinist, his mother a singer. Schaeffer studied the cello at the Nancy conservatoire. In the late 1910s Oswald “Spengler saw in the downfall of the West the promise of a golden age of engineers” (Adorno 1951). In 1928 Robert Beyer stated that the music to come should no longer be expected to follow from compositional practice; Paul Valéry claimed that changes in the old business of the beautiful had been such as to bear upon the notion itself of art. Schaeffer attended the École Polytechnique from 1929 to 1931 and went on to study electricity and telecommunications. In 1932 Roman Jakobson (1932a) remarked that European and African musical systems were not * This article has been written for Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook, edited by Larry Sitsky, from the Canberra School of Music (Australian National University), for Greenwood Press (Westport and London, 2002). It was prepublished on the Electronic Musicological Review in 1999 by kind permission of Greenwood Press. An illustrated and revised edition appeared in 2002 in the same journal. The present version takes all these revisions into account. reducible to one another; and he argued for the shift from silent screen to sound film (Jakobson 1932b). In 1934 Schaeffer was appointed to the Strasbourg telecommunications service. In 1935 [433] Martin Heidegger asserted that violence had long been done to the thingly element of things, and that thought had played a part in that violence. In 1936 Walter Benjamin affirmed that, in the age of mechanized reproduction, art could take on a political function; Schaeffer was transferred to the Paris radio service. In 1938 Theodor Adorno bemoaned the decay of hearing brought about by modern technology; Schaeffer (1938b) committed to paper lessons and exercises for the mixing-desk musician and took up discussion on “ordinary binaural listening and radio listening” in the Revue musicale (Schaeffer 1938a). In 1941 he subsumed cinema and radio under the notion of relay-arts, likening their media to an instrument whose dual role was “to retransmit in a certain manner what we used to see or hear directly and to express in a certain manner what we used not to see or hear” (Schaeffer 1941b): at ease in the abstract domain, ill at ease in the concrete domain, writing yearned for concretion; at ease in the concrete domain, ill at ease in the abstract domain, the relay-arts yearned for abstraction (Schaeffer 1941a). With the metteur en scène Jacques Copeau in 1942, Schaeffer organized the Beaune workshops on radio acting, to “exploit the new margin of nuances offered by the blind listener's sharpness of hearing”. In the same year, he set up a laboratory for experiments in radio production, the Studio d'Essai of the Radiodiffusion Nationale. In 1943 Copeau set forth a poetics of microphone diction. From 1943 to 1944 Schaeffer created the experimental radio series La coquille à planètes and, on 22 August 1944, 10:30 p.m. (Schaeffer 1990), he was responsible for the first broadcasts in an almost liberated Paris. In 1946 Schaeffer (1946a) published on the non-visual component of cinema. On Thursday, 18 December 1947, Francis Ponge (1961) mused: “Perhaps I am not very intelligent; in any case, ideas are not my forte. I have always been disappointed in them.” In January 1948 Schaeffer started research into noises, which led to the five Études de bruits (Bayle ed. 1990) that set musique concrète afoot. The Études were broadcast by the French Radio in a concert de bruits 5 October 1948. Their genesis and manufacture were narrated in “Introduction à la musique concrète” (Schaeffer 1950). Working in a modified radio studio, Schaeffer employed a disk-cutting lathe, four turntables, a four-channel mixer, filters, an echo chamber and a mobile recording unit. Techniques at play involved variation of recording and reproduction speeds, sampling and editing by manipulation of the pickup, locking of recorded grooves, backwards playing of disks, loudness modulation, fade-in and fadeout. Sound-producing bodies sampled included, on the same footing, stokers on six locomotives with personal voices and buffers conducted by Schaeffer at the Gare des Batignolles (later combined with library samples of rolling wagon wheels); an amateur orchestra at Salle Érard tuning up to a clarinet call thus embellished with fioriture (later combined with Jean-Jacques Grunenwald's piano improvisations live at the studio); Pierre Boulez on the piano in classic, romantic, impressionist and atonal harmonizations of a given theme (later cut, reversed and spliced). Closing the set, an 2 ad libitum mix of objets trouvés gathered Balinese music, North American harmonica and French barge round Sacha Guitry's voice — which the continuity-girl's coughing had interrupted — in a “virtuoso performance at four potentiometers and eight ignition keys” (Schaeffer 1950) by a techno DJ half a century ahead of the times (see Riddell 1996 and Henry in interview to Khazam 1997). Being mentally conceived, notated in symbols and performed by instrumentalists, traditional music moved from musical abstraction to sonic concretion. [434] Discovering sound-producing bodies and manners of putting them into vibration, recording the sounds obtained, manipulating such recordings, listening to them and trying out structurations, musique concrète would move from the sonic concrete to musical abstraction. Schaeffer advocated a cross-fertilization of procedures. À la recherche d'une musique concrète (Schaeffer 1952) expanded the narrative, advanced new theorizations and sketched an operational lexicon. To establish a new sonic domain on the edge of music or to engraft new sounds upon old musical forms? Olivier Messiaen, Henri Michaux and Claude Lévi-Strauss urged Schaeffer to break with the past. In 1951 the French Radio presented the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, which at the time consisted of Pierre Schaeffer,1 the engineer Jacques Poullin and the composer-percussionist Pierre Henry, with the first purpose-built electroacoustic music studio ever. The collaboration between Schaeffer and Poullin, in its fourth year, was resulting in a three-track tape recorder, a machine with ten playback heads to replay tape loops in echo (the morphophone), a keyboard controlled machine to replay tape loops at twenty-four pre-set speeds (the keyboard, chromatic or Tolana phonogène), a slide-controlled machine to replay tape loops at a continuously variable range of speeds (the handle, continuous or Sareg phonogène) and the potentiomètre d'espace, a device to distribute live an encoded track across four loudspeakers, including one hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Output from 1951 to 1953 comprised Étude I (1951) and Étude II (1951) by Pierre Boulez, Timbres-durées (1952) by Olivier Messiaen, Étude aux mille collants (1952) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Le microphone bien tempéré (1952) and La voile d'Orphée (1953) by Pierre Henry, Étude I (1953) by Michel Philippot, Étude (1953) by jean Barraqué, the mixed pieces Toute la lyre (1951) and Orphée 53 (1953) by Schaeffer/Henry, and the film music Masquerage (1952) by Schaeffer and Astrologie (1953) by Henry. In 1954 Édgard Varèse and Darius Milhaud visited to work on the tape parts of Déserts and La rivière endormie. 1 “Engineer by necessity, writer by vocation, composer by chance” (Bayle ed. 1990)... “Neither researcher, nor composer, nor writer” (Le Monde 1995, cited by Chion 1997)... “Writer by inclination, musician by heredity, ex-student of the École polytechnique by constraint, innovator by complexion”... “Author of literary texts marked with the concern of style” (Pierret 1969)... 3 In 1953 the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète of the RadiodiffusionTélévision Française rallied elektronische Musik, tape music and “exotic music” under the banner of experimental music to compare methods and establish complementary research programmes (Palombini 1993). Written in 1953 and published in 1957, “Vers une musique expérimentale” minimized frictions. Considering that tonal relations were inherent in the construction and technique of Western instruments, Schaeffer in principle objected to serial methods as applied to traditional instruments, but he observed that, in practice, the listening to such pieces could be validated by a certain technique of hearing. Considering that when applied to sound qualities other than pitch the series would lose its negative character and open to new sounds the domains of tradition, Schaeffer in principle accepted the application of serial methods to complex sounds, but he observed that, in practice, such sounds had little to gain from systematic recourse to serial techniques. The awaited methodological syncretion failed to materialize. In Paris and in Cologne, manipulated samples and [435] electronically-produced sounds amalgamated into Pierre Henry's Haut voltage and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge in 1956. In 1957 Schaeffer (1957) outlined the method of research after musique concrète. Étude aux allures (1958), Étude aux sons animés (1958) and Étude aux objets (1959) illustrated that method. In 1958 the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concréte was transformed into Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1959 Tolana advertised the phonogène Universel, which dissociated downward and upward shifts in tessitura (spectral transposition) from distension and contraction of dynamic shapes (temporal transposition). In 1954 Martin Heidegger (1954b) stated that humans were delivered over to technology in the worst possible way when they regarded it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which they particularly liked to do homage, made them utterly blind to the essence of technology.2 Because the essence of technology was nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it ought to happen in a realm that were, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm was art. But only if the arts were not conceived as deriving from the artistic, if art works were not enjoyed aesthetically, if art were not a sector of cultural activity. Art demanded to be reconducted to the golden age of Greek techne. In 1958 Gilbert Simondon saw culture as unbalanced because it enshrined the aesthetic object in the world of significations while driving the technical object back into the structureless world of what had no signification but a use. Simondon sought to integrate the machine into the family of human things as a component of a global rebirth of culture (Hart 1989). The gap which separated the occidental man from the work of his hands demanded to 2 Tod Machover (1984) introduces Musical Thought at IRCAM ascribing the diversity of musical outlook there “also to the neutrality of technology, which offers powerful tools for exploration and creation but does not orient the composer in any particular musical direction.” 4 be bridged. And the activities of the craftsman, simultaneously ancient and modern, provided a model of understanding, employment and humanization of the machine. Schaeffer delivered Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines in 1966 after fifteen years of labour. The work was dedicated to the memory of his father, whose precept — “practise your instrument” — the author passed on. Traité follows a zigzag course in seven jumps named books. “Book One” links the genesis of music to the birth of the musical instrument, defined as the causal permanence that engenders an organization of sound characters (and hence timbre), out of which variations of musical values (paradigmatically, pitch) appear. “Book Two” postulates four functions of listening. Ouïr (to hear) is to posit iconic (i.e. similarity based) relations between representamen and object (or signifier and signified): on the verge of semiosis, creaks lay dormant in the background noise. Écouter (to listen) is to posit indexical (i.e. causal) relations between representamen and object: creaks stand for ungreased hinges. Comprendre (to comprehend) is to establish symbolic (i.e. consensual) relations between representamen and object: creaks stand for tempered pitches agreeable to a metrics of successive divisional operations. And because hearing, listening, understanding and comprehending all are lexicalized acceptations of entendre — by semantic deri-[436]vation from the etymological sense, “to turn one's attention to” — the French language allows Schaeffer to construe entendre as to hear, listen, understand and comprehend in mindfulness of one's intention.3 Thus sounds open themselves up to iconism, indexicality and symbolism with intent. Reduced listening follows thence as a bracketing of symbolic and indexical relationships such as references to the traditional solfège and to source or causality might afford, whereby the sonic object unveils itself as an aggregate of shape and matter qualities. As ouïr ebbs entendre flows, as entendre ebbs ouïr flows, and as such movements alternate, sonic things disclose themselves as sonic objects whose intrinsic qualities bespeak details of the sound-producing event and novel abstractive possibilities.4 “Book Three” shows the distinct natures of, on the one side, the physical measurements of frequency, time, amplitude and spectrum, and, on the other, the subjective perceptions of pitch, duration, intensity and timbre, thus highlighting the perceptual frailty of the soundest parametric construction. “Book Four” appropriates Edmund Husserl, Gestalt Psychology, Roman Jakobson, Claude LéviStrauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ferdinand de Saussure in the interest of musical research. “Book Five” sets forward criteria to single out sound units from sound continua (identificatory typology) and to select sonic objects where musicalness dwells in posse (classificatory typology). “Book Six” expounds the method of musical 3 Schaeffer exhumes the oppositions ouïr/écouter, where ouïr signifies the physiological phenomenon, écouter the psychological act; entendre/écouter, where entendre signifies the physiological phenomenon, écouter the psychological act; and ouïr/entendre, where ouïr signifies the physiological phenomenon, entendre the psychological act (cf. Littré 1877 and Barthes 1977). 4 Notwithstanding this, Schafer (1977) notes that, unlike Schaeffer's sonic object, the soundscape cannot dispense with causality and meaning. 5 research and outlines the seven criteria of the morphology of the potentially musical object that are likely to emerge as musical values in the context of structurations: mass, dynamics, harmonic timbre, melodic profile, mass profile, grain and allure. Enlarged for the 1977 reprint, “Book Seven” comes to the conclusion that no universal polymorphous musicalness has arisen from the systematic analysis of sonic objects. 4. COMPRENDRE 1. ÉCOUTER (TO COMPREHEND) (TO LISTEN) – for me: signs – for me: indices – in front of me: values (senselanguage) – in front of me: external events (agent-instrument) Emergence of a sound content and reference to, comparison with extra-sonorous notions Emission of sound 3. ENTENDRE 2. OUÏR (TO LISTEN OUT FOR) (TO HEAR) – for me: qualified perceptions – in front of me: qualified sonic object Selection of particular aspects of sound 3 and 4: abstract – for me: raw perceptions, sketches of the object – in front of me: raw sonic object 1 and 4: objective 2 and 3: subjective Reception of sound 1 and 2: concrete The four functions of listening: listening, hearing, listening out for and comprehending (Schaeffer 1966: 116) The Solfège of the Sonic Object purports to take, from the practice of soundproducing bodies, to a universal musicalness through a technique of hearing. It comprises a preliminary stage, four operations and an epilogue. In the preliminary stage, heterogeneous sound-producing bodies are put into vibration by various processes and the resulting sounds are recorded. In the first operation — Typology — sonic objects are singled out from sound continua and selected or discarded according 6 to a musicianly penchant.5 In the second operation — Morphology — the objects selected are compared, perceptual criteria that make them up are named and the objects are classed as tokens of such criteria.6 In the third operation — Characterology — interactions of criteria within a given object are identified and referred to a soundproducing event.7 In the fourth operation — Analysis — objects evincing a particular criterion are set against the perceptual fields of pitch, duration and intensity so as to establish cardinal (absolute) or ordinal (relative) scales of criteria. In the epilogue — or Synthesis — new musics are expected to arise, based on reference structures that should play, for each of the seven morphological criteria, a role similar to that played by interval relations and the games of tonality and modality.8 The nexus of Schaeffer's research becomes transparent when some avatars of the question concerning the instrument speak their names: “relay-arts” (Scaheffer 1941a, 1941b, [437] 1946b), or analogue techniques of sound and image reproduction as instruments of new art-forms; “noise piano” (Schaeffer 1950), or organizing heterogeneous sound-producing bodies into new musical instruments; “turntable piano” (Schaeffer 1950), or analogue techniques of sound reproduction as applied to the conception of a most generic musical instrument; “cut bell” and “locked groove” (Schaeffer 1950), or analogue sound manipulations as instrumental in the disclosure of the sonic reality; “pseudo-instrument” (Schaeffer 1952), or organizing sonic objects into virtual musical instruments; “piano law” (Schaeffer 1960, 1966, Schaeffer and Reibel 1967), or the inverse relation between spectral richness of resonance and incisiveness of attack across the piano tessitura (i.e. the lower the tone, the richer the spectrum and the less incisive the attack; the higher the tone, the poorer the spectrum and the more incisive the attack); “characterology” (Schaeffer 1952, 1966), or the systematic investigation of such laws as a means to retrieve the sound-producing event in sonic matters and shapes; “translation (from symbols) into sound” and “translation from sound (into a simulacrum on the analogue medium)” (Schaeffer 1966, Schaeffer and Reibel 1967), or the traditional composer's and the sound recordist's divergent technologies of listening; “acousmatic listening” (Schaeffer 5 Typology establishes that the level of complexity of a sonic object is contingent upon the listener's dissective or integrative intention. Nonetheless, Schafer (1977) picks out Schaeffer's term for the smallest autonomous component of a soundscape (but see note 4 above) and Cadoz (1984) “broadens” the concept by applying the term to complex sounds: “in Schaeffer's book, the notion of an object is associated with elementary sounds.” 6 Smalley (1986) slices typo-morphology into pieces, splices them into “spectro-morphology” — “a preferable term” — and pronounces spectro-morphological thinking “the rightful heir of Western musical tradition”. 7 Risset's 1966 discovery — by digital analysis and synthesis — that the brassy character of trumpet tones ensues from a linkage between amplitude increase and upper partials boost fits into the Characterology project. 8 Lerdahl (1987) purports to lay the foundations of “an authentic syntax of timbre”, likewise modelled on tonality. 7 1966), or sound recording as an instrument to resurrect the poiesis of pre-Socratic techne. In 1936 Walter Benjamin expounded the decline of that unique appearance of a remote reality, however near, the “aura” of artworks and nature, as a result of the proliferation of technical reproduction. In 1954 Martin Heidegger (1954a) evoked the flow of distanceless uniformity where all things were carried away and mixed up; by plane, the radio, the film, television and the H-bomb. The bomb and its explosion were the mere final emission of what had long since taken place: the estrangement of Western thought from the thingness of the thing. Also in 1954, he (Heidegger 1954b) depicted the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve under the rule of Ge-stell, the essence of modern technology, according to which everything, including man himself, had become material for a process of self-assertive imposition of human will on things, regardless of their own essential natures (Hofstadter 1971). Schaeffer's relay-arts instrument pertains to the history of technical reproducibility, and there is a close resemblance between the two manifestations of technical reproduction as expounded by Benjamin — “artwork reproduction and the art of film” — and the double role of the relay-arts instrument as expounded by Schaeffer: “to retransmit in a certain manner what we used to see or hear directly and to express in a certain manner what we used not to see or hear” (Palombini 1997, 1998). In the history of technical reproducibility, the relay-arts instrument materializes the shift from “older handwork technology” to that technology which, in the words of Heidegger, “unlocks, transforms, stores up, distributes and switches about” the energies of nature, and whose essence Heidegger terms Ge-stell. The “decline of the aura” — a feat of technical reproducibility — is intersected by “the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve” — a feat of Ge-stell — but while the former paves the way for art as political praxis, the latter elicits from Heidegger an invitation to a return to the golden age of Greek techne. Is this not praxis too? [438] Pythagoras (see Kirk and Raven 1957) professed cyclic recurrence of events, metempsychosis and kinship of humans with all living things. Yet he “carried out scientific investigation more than anyone else” (Heraclitus in Kirk and Raven 1957) and “was not the lesser of Greek sages” (Herodotus, ibid.). Upon Pythagoras' death, his followers split into Acousmatics (practitioners of the mystic doctrine) and Mathematics (remarkable scientists). For Schaeffer (1966), music had not sprung from the numeric proportions of intervals. Larousse presented the Acousmatics as disciples of Pythagoras who, for five years, listened to the master speak from behind a veil, observing the strictest silence. Schaeffer metaphorized the analogue medium into that veil to unveil a hearing to which we have grown accustomed today: listening — on the telephone, tape, the radio — to sounds whose original source remains unseen. “Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light” (Heidegger 1954b). 8 The musical note, a notable assortment of pitch, duration and intensity, has borne sway over European tradition and laid claim to universality. Owing to a notational system, the composer sings in silence, plays in silence, sight-reads in silence. The score prefigures the work, which is one and the same with the symbols of writing: “Beethoven's quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar” (Heidegger 1935–36). The composer does not hear but reads, “pre-listens”. Schaeffer likens his demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from one's mother tongue into a foreign language. The performer translates symbols and notions into sound, and an implicit, readable work, becomes explicit, audible to laymen. Still, there is something sonorous in a musical composition. “The thingly element is so irremovably present in the art work that we are compelled rather to say conversely that the musical composition is in sound” (ibid.). The sound recordist does not read but listens. Comparing the sound image generated by the electroacoustic chain with the original sound phenomenon, which originates from real instruments and unfolds in real magnitude over the acoustic field, he translates from sound. Schaeffer likens this demarche to the scholastic exercise of translating a text from a foreign language into one's mother tongue. In the first century Plutarch (n.d.) expostulated with youth about the exertion of speech to the detriment of listening: to listen extempore is ill-advised! “He who plays the ball simultaneously learns to throw it and to catch it, but when it comes to speech, on the contrary, reception takes precedence of deliverance, just as conception and pregnancy precede birth.” In 1931 Oswald Spengler showed vision as the Nordic predator's sense par excellence, hearing as the prey's. In 1953 Roland Barthes traversed the geometry of the writer's space: horizontally, the language, a consensual corpus common to all writers of a period; vertically, style, a repertoire of gestures — imagery, delivery, vocabulary — springing from the writer's past; obliquely, écriture, an act of historical solidarity binding the writer's utterance to the vast History of the Others. Schaeffer set sail from Literature in avoidance of the commitment of écriture for which writing pleaded. Bound for music, his commitment was all too clear: to reconcile technology to nature. Substituting perception for expression as the locus of such a commitment, he raised écriture to the second power; substituting hearing for seeing, he cubed it. Notwithstanding, three fallacies — “Schaeffer is a composer”, “écriture is writing” and “written [439] note and written word are the selfsame sign” — have compacted into a petitio principii: “Schaeffer is the antithet to the écriture composer”. When a boy communicates he collects his thoughts, makes silence; he awaits something from Himself or his Visitor; he waits upon some Thing to increase the feeling of His presence to It and of Its presence to Him. “Bereft of words, prior to any intention, adoration is attention, a summons to consciousness” (Schaeffer 1969). Listening reducedly, we receive a sonic thing whose image starts forming in our 9 consciousness. The flow of distanceless uniformity where all things are carried away and mixed up is halted thereby. “That the thingness of the thing is particularly difficult to express and only seldom expressible is infallibly documented by the history of its interpretation” (Heidegger 1935–36): a bearer of traits (i.e. the sonic object as qualified by the seven morphological criteria); the unity of a manifold of sensations (i.e. the raw sonic object and the transcendental sonic object); formed matter (i.e. the shape/matter pair that underpins morphology). That remoteness, however near, is the sonic thing itself. From the objectlessness of the standing reserve Schaeffer elicits a sonic object that relapses into there as musicalness reservoir. There is in the sonic object “the impetus of a break and the impetus of a coming to power, there is the very shape of every revolutionary situation, the fundamental ambiguity of which is that Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess” (Barthes 1953). For all that, the sonic object is not an aesthetic product but a signifying practice, not a structure but a structuration, not an object but a work and a game (Ponge's objeu), not a group of closed signs but a volume of traces in displacement, not signification but the signifier, not the old musical work but the Text of Life (cf. Barthes 1974).9 In 1942 Francis Ponge observed that kings never touched doors: “They do not know this happiness: to push before oneself, sweetly or harshly, one of those great familiar panels, to turn towards it to put it back in place — to hold a door in one's arms.” In 1951 Theodor Adorno deplored the loss of the human ability to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly: “Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them.” In 1979 Italo Calvino enlarged upon Ponge's describing simple objects outside any worn-out perceptual habit: Then something indifferent and almost amorphous such as a door reveals an unexpected richness; suddenly, we get happy to find ourselves in a world full of doors to open and close. And this not for any reason alien to the fact in itself (such as a symbolic, an ideological, or an æstheticizing reason might be), but simply because we re-establish a relationship with things as things, with the diversity between one thing and another, and with the diversity of any thing from us. Pierre Henry was born in Paris on 9 December 1927. He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger, harmony with Olivier Messiaen and percussion with [440] Félix Passerone. In 1949 he took his percussions to a studio at the French Radio to improvise, in the sight of the images, the music for Voir l'invisible, a television documentary on slow-motion and the big close-up as devices to disclose natural phenomena. Henry went to Schaeffer disk in hand. Schaeffer was fed up with hitting 9 In 1975 Gino Stefani opened the proceedings of the First International Congress on Musical Semiotics avouching that the object of musical semiotics was the score, since no theory of the musical Text existed yet, and Schaeffer's sonic object would not be reckoned with. 10 boxes and grating sound-producing bodies: “I said to myself: after all, the conservatoire trains good percussionists, and it was at that point, I think, that someone mentioned Pierre Henry” (Chion 1980). “When Schaeffer heard my recording he said that it was similar to what he was doing and he showed me how to speed it up, slow it down, reverse it and record sounds on locked grooves” (Henry interviewed by Khazam 1997). In July 1962 Henry took his Tolana tape recorder to a farmhouse near Carcassone. Microphones were installed at the pigsty, poultry yard and streams across the meadow. Incoming signals were fed to a mixing desk in the ground floor. The farm was auscultated. Henry made the pigs go without food for the sake of their squeals, chased the chickens to make the most of their cackling, built weirs in the streams to take full advantage of the flowing water. He practised the barn door daily. A Neumann U-47 bore witness to his performance: “now with tiny wrist movements, now shaking it like a madman, bestriding it, making it yell” (Chion 1980). The door flew off the handle but did not come off its hinges. Henry did obeisance to its law: the faster the movement, the higher the tone and the smoother the grain; the slower the movement, the lower the tone and the craggier the grain. On a huge wooden table in Paris, the door was cut and the cuts were classed, numbered and named. Experiments of association were made. Takes underwent minute slicing and splicing. Manipulations were kept to a minimum: echo chamber, panning, multi-tracking. In June 1963 the barn door from Vic unbosomed its secrets from inside the confessionals of the magnificently reverberating church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris. In the fourth century BC Lieh-Tzu (732) asseverated: “The perfect discourse is wordless, the perfect act is not to act.” In 1857 Charles Baudelaire limned the Orient of the Occident, the China of Europe, an Occidental China, where Nature had been recast by dream. In 1881 Nietzsche argued: “You say that food, place, air and society determine you and transform you? All the more so do your opinions, for they determine you as to your choice of food, place, air and society.” In 1925 Antonin Artaud avowed: “I suffer from the translation Mind or from the Mind-thatintimidates-things so as to make them enter into the Mind.” In 1947 Francis Ponge (1961) italicized: “the variety of things is in reality what makes me up.” In 1974 Roland Barthes uphold: “We must above all aim at fissuring the meaning system itself: we must emerge from the Occidental enclosure”. In 1995 Eliot Handelman averred: “To alter our way of perceiving is to alter who we are, to alter the structure of knowledge and the process of knowing itself. Similarly, alterations in knowledge and the process of knowing are impossible without corresponding changes in perception.” With musique concrète Schaeffer has brought the technical object's concres[441]cence (see Simondon 1958) to bear upon the “problematics” of Western composition. With acousmatic listening he has brought the tape machine into play as a component of a global rebirth of culture. With the sonic object he has brought 11 listening to recorded sounds into the world of significations. With reduced listening he has brought hearkening to sonic things up to date with the poetics of Edgar Varèse, Giacinto Scelsi, Francis Ponge, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Italo Calvino. Schaeffer died on 19 August 1995. “My essential role is to communicate a manner of comprehending, feeling, and acting that may seem, from the outside, terribly personal. In fact, I am but a relay myself” (Brunet 1969). Repertoire10 bm: ballet music; dc: dramatic cantata; ds: décor sonore; fm: film music; iw: music for installation work; mm: music for mime show; mt: music for a text; oc: opéra concret; pl: pantomime lyrique; rp: music for a radio production; tm: music for the theatre [442] Schaeffer 1948 Études de bruits, Concertino diapason 1949 Variations sur une flûte mexicaine, Suite pour quatorze instruments 1950 L'oiseau RAI 1952 Les paroles dégelées (rp), Masquerage (fm) 1958 Étude aux allures, Étude aux sons animés 1959 Simultané camerounais, Étude aux objets, Musique de scène pour Phèdre (tm), Nocturne aux chemins de fer (mm) 1979 Bilude Schaeffer/Henry 1950 Bidule en ut, Symphonie pour un homme seul 1951 Orphée 51 or Toute la lyre (pl) 1953 Orphée 53 (oc) 1957 Sahara d'aujourd'hui (fm) Schaeffer/Rollin 1952 Scènes de Don Juan (tm) 10 For details of the various versions of each piece, the grouping of isolated pieces into a series (e.g., Henry's Microphone bien tempéré), the transformation of a piece from a particular series into an independent piece (e.g., Schaeffer's Concertino diapason) etc, see Bayle ed. 1980. 12 Schaeffer/Ferrari 1958 Continuo Schaeffer/Arrieu 1962 L'aura d'Olga (rp) Schaeffer/Dürr 1975 Le trièdre fertile Henry (1950–57) 1950 Fantasia, Bidule en mi, Concerto des ambiguïtés, Aube (fm), Musique sans titre, Batterie fugace, Tam tam I, II, III and IV, La grande et la petite manœuvre (tm), La course au kilocycle (rp), La fille de Londres (rp) [443] 1951 Tabou clairon, Micro rouge I and II, Mouvement perpétuel, Dimanche noir I and II, Sonatine, Étude noire, Étude à Chopin, Le microphone bien tempéré, Antiphonie 1952 Vocalises 1953 Astrologie (fm), Léonard de Vinci (fm), Les fils de l'eau (fm), Art précolombien (fm), La voile d'Orphée (dc) 1954 L'art populaire mexicain (fm) 1955 L'amour des quatre colonels (tm), Rose rouge (tm), Spatiodynamisme (iw), Arcane (bm), Imagerie Saint Michel (bm), Le Musée d'Or de Bogota (fm) 1956 Haut voltage (bm), Le cercle (bm), Au seuil de la nuit (mt, rp) 1957 Le mariage de la feuille et du cliché (ds), L'an 56 (mt), L'occident est bleu (mt) References As a rule, the date provided immediately after the author's or editor's name is that of first known publication. In those cases where the publication consulted has not been the first, the date of publication of the text consulted appears immediately after the publisher's name (occasionally, two dates will appear in this position, representing, the first, a publication known to the present author, and, the second, the publication he is actually remitting himself to). Such cases comprise Copeau's title, written in1943; Nietzsche's Nachgelassene Fragmente; the two excerpts on the relay-arts, by Schaeffer; his notes on radiophonic expression; and his article on experimental music. For Heidegger's “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”, the date given is that of its writing. For Schaeffer's La coquille à planètes, the date given is that of the piece conclusion and first broadcast: the edition cited (1990) couples the original 12-hour text of 1944 (with indications of the parts elided in the second version) with the 1946 recording of the 8-hour second version. 13 Adorno, Theodor W. 1951. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. In Gesammelte Schriften IV. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. ———. 1938. “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens”. Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt. In Gesammelte Schriften XIV. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990 (iii), pp 14–50. Artaud, Antonin. 1925. L'ombilic des limbes. In Œuvres complètes I. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Écoute”. In Œuvres complètes III. Paris: Seuil, 1995, pp 727–36. ———. 1974. “L'aventure sémiologique”. In Œuvres complètes III. Paris: Seuil, 1995: 36–40. ———. 1953. Le degré zéro de l'écriture. In Œuvres complètes I. Paris: Seuil, 1993, pp 137–87. Baudelaire, Charles. 1857. “L'invitation au voyage”. Le spleen de Paris. In Œuvres complètes I. Paris: Gallimard, 1975, 1983, pp 301–3 (text) e 1322–24 (notes). Bayle, François (ed.). 1990. Pierre Schaeffer: l'œuvre musicale. 4 CDs and text. Paris: INA-GRM/Séguier, distr. Adda. ———. 1980. Répertoire acousmatique 1948–1980. Paris: INA-GRM. Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”. In Gesammelte Schriften I.2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990 (iii), pp 431–508. Beyer, Robert. 1928. “Das Problem der ‘kommenden Musik’”. Die Musik 9: 4 (861– 66). French trans. by Martin Kaltenecker: <www.arssonora.org/html/numeros/numero03/03f.htm>. Brunet, Sophie. 1969. Pierre Schaeffer. Paris: Richard-Masse. ——— (ed.). 1977. Revue musicale 303–5 (Pierre Schaeffer: de la musique concrète à la musique même). Rev. ed. Pierre Schaeffer. 2002. De la musique concrète à la musique même. Paris: Mémoire du Livre, 2002. Cadoz, Claude, Annie Luciani and Jean-Loup Florens. 1984. “Responsive Input Devices and Sound Synthesis by Simulation of Instrumental Mechanisms: the Cordis System”. Computer Music Journal 8 (3): 60–73. Calvino, Italo. 1979. “Felice tra le cose”. Corriere della Sera, 29 July. Reprinted as: “Francis Ponge”. Perché leggere i classici. Milano: Mondadori, 1991, 1995 (enlarged), pp 253–58. [444] Chion, Michel. 1997. “Une réaction de Michel Chion”. Ars sonora 5. Online: <audiolabo.free.fr/revue1999/content/asr5_05.html> and <www.arssonora.org/html/numeros/numero05/ASno05_0497.rtf>. 14 ———. 1980. Pierre Henry. Paris: Fayard/SACEM, 2003 (rev. and expanded). Copeau, Jacques. 1943. “Écrit en 1943”. In Schaeffer 1989: 79–81. Dallet, Sylvie with Sophie Brunet. 1996. Itinéraires d'un chercheur: bibliographie commentée de l'œuvre éditée de Pierre Schaeffer — A Career in Research: Pierre Schaeffer, a Commented Bibliography of Published Works. Montreuil: Centre d'Études et de Recherche Pierre Schaeffer (CERPS). Davis, Watson, Jane Stafford, Marjorie Van de Water, Sam Matthews and Wadsworth Likely (“Science Service Inc.”). 1950. Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc. Online: <foody.org/atomic/atomic00.html>. Emmerson, Simon (ed.). 1986. The Language of Electroacoustic Music. London: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1912. “Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung”. In Gesammelte Werke VIII. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990 (viii), pp 375–87. Handelman, Eliot. 1995. “Cybersemiosis: 2nd Worlds — 2nd Perception”. Formerly online: <http://www.generation.net/~eliot/cybersem-1.html>. Hart, John. 1989. “Préface”. In Simondon 1958: i–xii. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1954a. “Das Ding”. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1967 (iii), v. 2, pp 37–59. ———. 1954b. “Die Frage nach der Technik”. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1967 (iii), v. 1, pp 5–36. ———. 1935–36. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”. Holzwege. In Gesamtausgabe V. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977, pp 1–74. Hofstadter, Albert. 1971. “Introduction”. In Heidegger 1971: ix–xxii. Jakobson, Roman. 1932a. “Musikwissenschaft und Linguistik”. In Selected Writings II: Word and Language. Den Haag: Mouton, 1971, pp 57–59. ———. 1932b. “Úpadek filmu?”. Listy pro umĕní a kritiku 1: 45–49. Engl. trans.: “Is the Film in Decline?”. In Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry. Den Haag: Mouton, 1981, pp 732–39. Khazam, Rahma. 1997. “Electroacoustic Alchemist”. The Wire 160: 37–40. Kirk, Geoffrey S. and John E. Raven. 1957. The Presocratic Philosophers: a Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966 (vi). Lacan, Jacques. 1966. “L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud”. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, pp 493–528. 15 Lerdahl, Fred. 1987. “Timbral Hierarchies”. Contemporary Music Review 2 (1): 135– 60. Lieh-Tzu. 742. Ch'ung-hsu chen-ching. French trans.: Le Vrai classique du vide parfait. In Philosophes taoïstes. Paris: Gallimard, 1980, pp 359–609 (text) and 681–702 (notes). Littré, Paul-Émile. 1877. Dictionnaire de la langue française. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1978, 4 vv. Machover, Tod (ed.). 1984. Contemporary Music Review 1 (1): Musical Thought at IRCAM. Mitcham, Carl. 1994. Thinking Through Technology: the Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich-Wilhelm. 1881. “Frühjahr — Herbst 1881”. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1880–1882. In Sämtliche Werke: kritische Studienausgabe herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari IX. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988, pp 441–572. Palombini, Carlos. 1998. “Technology and Pierre Schaeffer: Walter Benjamin's technische Reproduzierbarkeit, Martin Heidegger's Ge-stell and Pierre Schaeffer's Arts-Relais”. Organised Sound 3 (1): 35–43. ———. 1997. “Technology and Pierre Schaeffer”. Mikropolyphonie 4.01, <pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-arch/2000/H2000-Sep1/http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/mikropol/volume4/palombini-c/palombiniab.html>. ———. 1993. “Pierre Schaeffer, 1953: towards an Experimental Music”. Music and Letters 74 (4): 542–57. Online in the Electronic Musicological Review 3, <www.rem.ufpr.br/REMv3.1/vol3/Schaefferi.html>. Pierret, Marc. 1969. Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer. Paris: Belfond. Plutarch. n.d. Peri tou akouein — De recta ratione audiendi. Ital. trans.: L'arte di ascoltare. Milano: Modadori, 1995. Ponge, Francis. 1961. Méthodes. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1942. Le parti pris des choses. Paris: Gallimard. [445] Riddell, Alistair. 1996. “Ecstasy Solfège”. Sounds Australian, v. 14, n. 47, pp 6–8. Online: <hdl.handle.net/1885/41958> and <www.alistairriddell.com/publications/ES.html>. Risset, Jean-Claude. 1966. Computer Study of Trumpet Tones. Murray Hill: Bell Laboratories. Schaeffer, Pierre. 1990. Propos sur la Coquille. Arles: Phonurgia Nova. 16 ———. 1989. Dix ans d'essais radiophoniques: du Studio au Club d'Essai, 1942– 1952. (Orig. ed. 1955). 4 CDs and text. Arles: Phonurgia-Nova/INA-GRM. ———. 1969. Réflexions de Pierre Schaeffer. In Brunet 1969: 107–215. ———. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux: essai interdisciplines. Paris: Seuil, 1977 (enlarged reprint). ———. 1960. “Note on Time Relationships”. Gravesaner Blätter 17: 41–77. ———. 1957. “Lettre à Albert Richard”. In Schaeffer ed. 1957: iii–xvi. ———. 1953. “Vers une musique expérimentale”. In Schaeffer ed. 1957: 11–27. ———. 1952. À la recherche d'une musique concrète. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1950. “Introduction à la musique concrète”. Polyphonie 6 (La musique mecanisée): 30–52. ———. 1946a. “L'élément non visuel au cinéma: (I) Analyse de la bande ‘son’; (II) Conception de la musique; (III) Psychologie du rapport vision-audition”. Revue du cinéma 1 (1–3): 45–48, 62–65 and 51–54. ———. 1946b. “Notes sur l'expression radiophonique”. Machines à communiquer: 1. Genèse des simulacres. Paris: Seuil, 1970, pp 89–118. ———. 1944. La coquille à planètes: suite fantastique pour une voix et douze monstres. 4 CDs (reduced version) and text (complete). Paris: distr. Adès, 1990. ———. 1941a. “Esthétique et technique des arts-relais”. In Brunet ed. 1977: 19–23. ———. 1941b. “Technique et esthétique des arts-relais”. In Pierret 1969: 91–92. ———. 1938a. “Verités premières”. Revue musicale 184: 414–15. Also in Brunet ed. 1977: 16–17. ———. 1938b. “Vingt leçons et travaux pratiques destinés aux musiciens mélangeurs”. Paris: Radio Française (internal publication). Schaeffer, Pierre (ed.). 1957. Revue musicale 236 (Vers une musique expérimentale). Schaeffer, Pierre and François-Bernard Mâche (eds). 1959. Revue musicale 244 (Expériences musicales: musiques concrète, électronique, exotique). Schaeffer, Pierre and Guy Reibel. 1967. Solfège de l'objet sonore. Paris: Seuil/GRM. 3 LPs and text. Schafer, Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf. Simondon, Gilbert. 1958. Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier, 1989 (iii). Smalley, Denis. 1986. “Spectro-morphology and Structuring Processes”. In Emmerson ed. 1986: 61–95 (text) and 220 (notes). 17 Spengler, Oswald. 1931. Der Mensch und die Technik: Beiträge zu einer Philosophie des Lebens. München: Beck'sche. ———. 1918–22. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. München: Beck'sche, 2 vv. Stefani, Gino (ed.). 1975. Actes du Premier Congrès Internacional de Sémiotique Musicale. Pesaro: Centro de Iniziativa Culturale. Valéry, Paul. 1928. “La conquête de l'ubiquité”. In Œuvres II. Paris: Gallimard, pp 1284–87 (text) and 1580 (notes), 1960. 18