Photography made by Radio France
Pierre Schaeffer is a French engineer, researcher, theorist, composer and writer born on August 14, 1910 in Nancy, he died on August 19, 1995 in Aix-en-Provence, France. He is considered as the pioneer of experimental electronic music in France and around the world with Hugh le Caine, whose Musique Concrète, electroacoustic music and acousmatic music he fathered.
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Pierre Schaeffer was a student at the École de Polytechnique, Lycée Saint Sigisbert Saint-Léopold in Nancy, where he went on to become a telecommunications engineer. He was also heavily involved in Catholic scouting, where he became the founder of the Rois Mages Scout road clan at Polytechnique.
With a passion for radio and music, he joined Radiodiffusion Française (the forerunner of today's ORTF: Organisme de Radio et Télévision Française), where he hosted Radio Jeunesse, before becoming head of Jeune France under the aegis of the Vichy government's Ministry of Youth.
It wasn't until 1940 that Pierre experimented with recording and manipulating sounds on disc, creating the Musique Concrête genre - music created from natural or artificial sounds, by cutting, superimposing and transforming them. This genre was pioneered by his work "Étude aux chemins de fer", which is music created from recordings of trains that are reworked to create real music.
FR : Lorsqu'en 1948, j'ai proposé le terme de musique concrète, j'entendais, par cet adjectif, marquer une inversion dans le sens du travail musical. Au lieu de noter des idées musicales par les symboles du solfège, et de confier la réalisation concrète à des instrumentistes connus, il s'agissait de recueillir le concret sonore, d'où qu'il vienne, et d'en abstraire les valeurs musicales qu'il contenait en puissance.
EN : When, in 1948, I proposed the term musique concrète (concrete music), I intended to use this adjective to mark an inversion in the direction of musical work. Instead of noting down musical ideas using the symbols of solfeggio, and entrusting their concrete realization to well-known instrumentalists, the idea was to collect the concrete sound, wherever it came from, and abstract from it the musical values it potentially contained.
Pierre Schaeffer.
In 1951, Pierre Schaeffer founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRCP) with Pierre Henry, and later the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), which was to become a major research center for electroacoustic music.
Although Pierre was a musician and an engineer, he was also a rigorous theorist: he published many major works, such as Traités des objets musicaux (1966), in which he explored sound perception and the role of “object sound”, and laid the foundations for a new musicology centered on listening.
Although one of the pioneers of experimental electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer was also interested in television, politics and spirituality.