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Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (born August 14, 1910, died August 19, 1995) was a French composer, noted as the inventor of musique concrète. He is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape.Schaeffer was born in Nancy. His parents were both engineers, and at first it seemed that Pierre would also take this as a career. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique and after a stint as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg from 1934, he found a job in 1936 at Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) in Paris. 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. His first completed piece as a result of these experimentation was the Étude aux chemins de fer (1948) which was made from recordings of trains.
By that time, Schaeffer had founded the Jeune France group, which had interests in theatre and visual art as well as music. In 1942, he co-founded the Studio d'Essai (later known as the Club d'Essai), which played an role in the activities of the French resistance during World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough, and became a centre of musical activity afterwards.
In 1949, Schaeffer met Pierre Henry , and the two founded the Group de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) which received official recognition from ORTF in 1951. They gave him a new studio, which included a tape recorderIn general, a tape recorder tape deck or tape machine is any device that records a fluctuating signal by moving a strip of magnetic tape across a tape head, which is a strong electromagnet. Current flowing in the coils of the electromagnet cause the magne. 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 FerrariLuc Ferrari (born February 5, 1929) is a French composer, particularly noted for his tape music. Ferrari was born in Paris and studied the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first and François-Bernard MâcheFrancois-Bernard Mache (born 1935) is a French composer of contemporary music. He has composed electroacoustic, orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal and piano works. He has been a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts since 2002 and occupies the chair of th 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. One of his last pieces came in 1959, the Etudes aux Objets. In his new post, he continued to conduct his research into the sonic properties of objects, publishing an important work on the subject, Traité des objets musicaux, in 1966. In it, he attempts to classify all sound producing objects by dividing their characteristics into seven categories, which he called mass; dynamic; harmonic timbreIn music, timbre is the quality of a musical note which distinguishes different types of musical instrument. See also: formant of speech, singing, and musical instruments. This is why, with a little practice, you can pick out the saxophone from the trumpe; melodic profile; mass profile; gain; and inflection. Up to now no English translation of this massive work has appeared.
Schaeffer took a number of teaching posts, including an associate professorship at the Paris Conservatoire from 1968 where he taught electronic composition. Towards the end of his life, he suffered from Alzheimer's diseaseAlzheimer's disease AD or senile dementia of Alzheimer's type is a neurodegenerative disease which results in a loss of mental functions due to the deterioration of brain tissue. Its exact etiology (cause) is still unknown, but environmental as well as ge. He died in Aix-en-Provence.
