Pierre Schaeffer and the Ethics of Experimental Music Research
The first monograph in English to offer a comprehensive account of Pierre Schaeffer’s music philosophy including his varied career as a writer, broadcaster, philosopher and musician
- Examines the origin of experimental music research in a francophone perspective highlighting the troubled, incomplete processes of globalisation and decolonisation
- Shows how Pierre Schaeffer’s music and broadcasting philosophies responded to the wider French reception of phenomenology and interacted with academic philosophers, especially on questions of ethics and morality
- Relates Pierre Schaeffer’s musical and institutional inventions to his broadcasting, literary, political and religious work
- Highlights Schaeffer’s role in the planning of Cold war media networks
- Surveys and develops new terms of engagement for a wide range of post-Schaefferian thinking in French and English
What should musicians and their audiences do with evolving broadcast and recording technologies? This is the question that occupied French writer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer from his first radio job in 1936 until his retirement as Director of the Research Service of the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) in 1974, and then for another 20 years as founding figurehead of the pioneering music research institution he had founded in the meantime, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM). This book illuminates the varied literary, philosophical, political and religious investments that informed Schaeffer’s quest for an ethical system of experimental music research as he traversed this turbulent period in French cultural and intellectual history. Readers interested in the philosophy behind Schaeffer’s well-known musical inventions will find a surprising and original account of an adventurous thinker at the intersection of war, technoscience, decolonisation, phenomenology, New Age spirituality and countercultural rebellion.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: For the Listener of the Future
1. Dialogue with Monsters, 1936-1956
2. Deconditioning, 1953-1966
3. Russian Dolls: Power and Communication, 1966-1971
4. Transductions, 1968-1980
Conclusion: The Closed Loop
Bibliography
Index
A generation of UK electroacoustic composers was brought up feeling that it owed a debt to the work and ideas of Pierre Schaeffer. Valiquet’s patient study offers forgiveness, and a hugely expanded context for understanding his contribution. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in musique concrète’s relationship with modernism, and with French cultural and political life.
This pathbreaking book cuts through the myths that surround musique concrète and the history of post-war experimental music. Valiquet’s holistic rethinking of Schaeffer exposes the limits of familiar narratives of rupture and liberation, and demands our engagement with the conservative, mystical, and moralizing tendencies that also drove the experimental project.
