Composer, born in Nancy, NE France. Concrete music was created from his compositions for magnetic tape in 1948. A Polytechnicien, he worked at la Radio Diffusion Française. Influenced by Gurdjieff, he founded Jeune France in 1941 and took part in the Studio d'Essai of Jacques Copeau. He created with Pierre Henry Symphonie pour un homme seul (performed 18 Mar 1950), the first concert of concrete music. He worked to make the GRMC official, and reorganized it in 1958 into the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), of which Bayle (1966) and then D Terruggi (1977) became directors. He was associate professor at the Conservatoire for Electronic Compositions, where an electro-acoustic class was founded in 1968. His works include Etudes and an opera Orphée, both using tape recordings. His Traite des Objets Musicaux was published in 1966.
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (August 14, 1910–August 19, 1995) was a French composer, noted as the inventor of musique concrète. The term is often misunderstood as referring to simply making music out of "real world" sounds, or sounds other than those made by musical instruments. Traditionally, (classical / serious) music starts as an abstraction, musical notation on paper or other medium, which is then produced into audible music. Musique concrète strives to start at the "concrete" sounds, experiment with them, and abstract them into a musical composition. He developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the musical vocabulary. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound. He was among the first to manipulate recorded sound in the way that it could be used in conjuction with other such sounds in the making of a musical piece. Schaeffer's idea of jeu comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. It was there that he began to experiment with recorded sounds, convincing the radio station's management to let him use their equipment. He tried playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up and juxtaposing them with other sounds, all techniques which were virtually unknown at that time.
By that time, Schaeffer had founded the Jeune France group, which had interests in theatre and visual art as well as music.
In 1949, Schaeffer met Pierre Henry, and the two founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) which received official recognition from ORTF in 1951. This was a significant development for Schaeffer, who had previously had to work with turntables to produce his music. His continued experimentation led him to publish A la recherche d'une musique concrète (The Search for a Concrete Music) in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point.
Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953, but reformed it in 1958 with Luc Ferrari and François-Bernard Mâche as the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM).
With the founding of the Service de Recherche de l'ORTF in 1960, of which he was made director, Schaeffer began to wind down his compositional activities in favour of sound research and teaching. In it, he attempts to classify all sound objects (objets sonores, sounds perceived as entities;
Schaeffer took a number of teaching posts, including an associate professorship at the Paris Conservatoire from 1968 where he taught electronic composition.
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