What the GRM brought to music: from musique concre`te to ...

What the GRM brought to music: frommusique concrète to acousmatic musicMARC BATTIERMINT, Maison de la recherche, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 28, rue Serpente, F-75006 ParisE-mail: marc.battier@paris-sorbonne.frSixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the singlehandedefforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did thefirst experiments become a School and produce so many richworks? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses variousaspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years ofmusical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughtsbehind the advent and the development of the music createdand theoretised at the Paris School formed by theSchaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to theearly twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds andhow poets, artists and musicians were expressing their questfor, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds newsounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture,processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughlyrevisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what isknown as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such asTeruggi’s, give readers insight into the technical environmentsand innovations that took place at the GRM. This presentarticle focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. Thisunity has existed alongside sixty years of activity anddialogue with researchers of other fields and constantattention to the latter-day scientific, technological andphilosophical ideas which have had a strong influence inshaping the development of GRM over the course of itshistory.To oppose noises, my own noise. This noise will thenrepel all the others, those that are now, those that werethen, those of the day, collecting them through anunprecedented wonder of nature.Henri Michaux, 1950, ‘Composing’, Passages1. INTRODUCTIONElectroacoustic music has marked a decisive stage in therelationship between musician and composition. Itfound its place in its first era at the heart of publicradiophonic studios, university-based or at any ratelodged in private organisations. We know how itblossomed out and succeeded in mastering someindustries’ technologies that were at first reluctant totake it on; and at last, after many misadventures,established a dialogue with the instrumental tradition.Today, it knows how to harness the unimaginablypowerful techniques of musical computing. Moreover,the tradition established by Pierre Schaeffer at the endof the 1940s, which was called the Paris School, is stillalive and the musical creations that it brings about havethe imprint that is their very own.An approach to composition would evolve thatwould be impregnated by a specific thought. Differingfrom what was taking place in other great studios, theParis School advanced above all through concepts. Itwas this wish to adhere to constantly reinforced theorythat gave the movement its unique character. That said,electroacoustic composition, which was the basis of theParis School, followed the contours of historicalcontingencies: technological evolution, relations to thepublic, co-operation with the leading institutions; andwe must not forget the individual paths which tended tobranch off in unexpected ways influencing the flow ofartistic thinking.If Pierre Schaeffer, in inventing musique concrète, didhis best to give a conceptual status to the sound object,other musicians, through their practice as much asthrough their thinking, set out on new tracks or inventednew concepts, and from this also made theory-basedwork: we can name as typical (in a list of composers thatmust be incomplete) Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, GuyReibel, Bernard Parmegiani, Ivo Malec, Michel Chion,Alain Savouret, François Bayle, above all, thenChristian Zanési and Daniel Teruggi. All have takenon the thinking and some of them have forged newconcepts as well. I will try here to describe the vision ofthe Paris School whilst presenting the break-up in termsof its rapport with the music of the first half of thetwentieth century.2. A SYMPHONY OF NOISESAs the Canadian composer Murray Shafer has shown, 1noises belong to the outside world, that of spaces, oftowns, of external acoustic spaces, just as the place ofmusic is indoors. It seeks for its best protection fromnoises. The solution to this dilemma has been putforward since the beginning of the twentieth century.The Italian Futurists (first Ballila Pratella, then LuigiRussolo) advanced the suggestion that new music couldbe based on turning the noises of the world into music.1Raymond Murray Schafer. 1976.The Tuning of the World. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf.Organised Sound 12(3): 189–202 ß 2007 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom.doi: 10.1017/S1355771807001902

190 Marc BattierThe idea of a symphony of everyday noises was alsoexpressed again and again in the first half of the lastcentury. Perhaps Schaeffer, a well-read man, wasfamiliar with the lines that Apollinaire had devoted inhis fiction Le Roi-Lune to a novel transductiontechnique which King Ludwig II of Bavaria hadinvented using multiple microphones?[The Moon-King] was seated in front of a keyboard, onekey of which he was applying with a weary air; and itremained stuck, so that there came from one of thepavilions a murmur both strange and continual. At first Iwas unable to discern its meaning. The well-developedmicrophones which the king had at his disposal wereregulated in such a manner as to bring into the cellarnoises of life on earth from the most far away places. …Now it is murmurs from the Japanese countryside 2 …Then, from another depressed key, we are transported inmid-morning, the king hails the socialist hard work inNew Zealand, I can hear the whistling of geysers …Doum, doum, boum, doum, doum, boum, doum, doum,boum, it is Peking, the gongs and drums of the patrols …The king’s fingers run over the keys, haphazardly, raisingthem up, in some fashion simultaneously, all themurmurs of the world have just been made for us, aswe remain stationary, a tour by ear. 3Apollinaire called this group of living and naturalsounds from diverse sources a ‘symphony made by theworld’. 4The meteoric development of cities and industrialisationstruck artists’ and musicians’ imaginations veryforcibly at the turn of the twentieth century, precipitatinga waterfall of movements (the ‘isms’) which tookhold of them. With this, sounds from the world becamepresent in and part of composition: the sounds ofmachinery which led Luigi Russolo to his famousclassification, 5 the birds which inspired Messiaen, thezoomusicology of Francois-Bernard Mâche, the sirensand sound masses of Varèse – the examples arenumerous and very varied. And for Jean-EtienneMarie, Schaeffer was defined as a ‘naturalist withnature’s sounds’. 6 All these approaches share in theirvery different ways a holistic vision of the creativeimagination.This interest in the sounds of the world is the pivot onwhich concrète invention turns, and beyond that, also agreat part of electroacoustic music, even if a significant2In an earlier version Apollinaire had written ‘tous les chants’ (‘allthe songs’) before changing it to ‘toutes les rumeurs’ (‘all therumours/murmurs’).3Guillaume Apollinaire. 1977. ‘Le Roi-Lune’ (1908–1916). InMichel Décaudin (ed.) Oeuvres en prose completes, volume 1.Paris: Gallimard, pp. 313–16.4Ibid., p. 316.5Luigi Russolo. 1913. L’Art des bruits. The edition edited byMaurice Lemaître and published by Richard-Massé (1954) is ofinterest for its famous (and unjustified) attack on Schaeffer by theessayist; the classification appears on p. 37. One may profitablyconsult the critical edition edited by Giovanni Lista, 2001, Paris:L’âge d’homme.6Jean-Etienne Marie. 1976. L’homme musical. Paris: Arthaud, p. 19.proportion of it is based on composition from syntheticsounds. We need not concern ourselves here with soundlandscapes, which would be simplistic and more thanthat, false, but chiefly with what Schaeffer himselfdescribed thus: ‘The sound object, which may be anypossible audible sound, is that which ranges fromnatural sounds to the noises of civilisation, from animalcries to human words’. 7 That is to say, one takes externalsounds, and harnesses them to ensure their transduction.The instruments adapted to this effect are: themicrophone, or, more widely, the membrane that issensitive to acoustic vibrations and reconstitutes them,through conversion, into another shape – mechanicalfor the first gramophones, electric thereafter; and therecording and playback machine. Each of these stepshas contributed to modify our perception of sounds,and where the need arises, to transform the soundsthemselves. For that, one must first become a ‘phonographistartist’.3. THE PHONOGRAPHIST MUSICIANApollinaire was the first to declare that the gramophonecould become the instrument through which he wouldcreate a ‘vertical’ poetry, not declamatory but withsimultaneous action. He then proclaimed himself to be a‘phonographist poet’. 8 The gramophone, an apparatusconceived for recording and reproduction, is intriguing,and one finds a considerable amount of people whocame upon the idea that it should be used as aninstrument for creation. In 1931, Boris de Schloezerexpressed the opinion that one could write for thegramophone or for the wireless just as one can for thepiano or the violin. 9 The music critic André Coeuroy, inhis 1928 Panorama of Contemporary Music, wrote‘perhaps the time is not far off when a composer will beable to represent through recording, music specificallycomposed for the gramophone’. 10 For Henry Cowell,referring to the projects of Nikolai Loptatnikoff, therewas no doubt that ‘there was a wide field open for thecomposition of music for phonographic discs’. 11 EvenIgor Stravinsky, who never created an electroacousticwork, declared in 1930 in the revue Kultur undSchalplatte ‘There will be a greater interest in creating7Pierre Schaeffer. 1976. ‘La musique par exemple’. Cahiersrecherche/musique no, 2, Le Traité des objets musicaux 10 ansaprès, p. 58.8Guillaume Apollinaire. 1991. ‘A propos de la poésie nouvelle’, Paris-Journal, 29 juin 1914. In Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin(eds) Oeuvres en prose complètes volume 2. Paris: Gallimard, p. 982.9‘Can we compose special music for the phonograph and the radioand thus create a new art? As long as we consider the record onlyas a ‘‘photograph’’, we compare it to the original and condemn itwhen it varies there from. But even these differences can acquirean aesthetic value.’’ Boris de Schloezer. 1931. ‘Man, music and themachine’, Modern music, 8 (3): 9.10André Coeuroy. 1928. Panorama de la musique Contemporaine,édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Kra, p. 162.11Henry Cowell. 1931. ‘Music of and for the records’, Modern music8 (3): 34.

What the GRM brought to music 191music in a way that will be peculiar to the gramophonerecord’. Lastly, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt discerned afundamental aspect of phonography, that it could existas music without having been created by an instrument;‘Music impressed directly on to a disc is produced withan ideal precision and without individual interpretation’.12 This was the method by which the status of‘authentic discs’ was made to appear. Stuckenschmidt,however, was one of the first to underline an essentialdifficulty, even though it is not completely an aporia.According to him, there did not exist any specific systemadapted to such instruments as the gramophone.Perhaps it would be necessary to create a graphicalphabet which would allow sound to be impressed inthe form of signs engraved on the surface of the disc, anidea that had already been expressed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1923 in an article for Der Sturm. 13Finally, the symphony of the world has beenconnected with phonography through the visionexpressed by the composer Carol-Bérard in a passagewhich evokes in a striking fashion the reflections thatPierre Schaeffer would publish twenty years afterwards:Why, and I have been asking this for fifteen years, arephonograph records not taken of noises such as those ofa city at work, at play, even asleep? Of forests, whoseutterance varies according to their trees – a grove of pinesin the Mediterranean mistral has a murmur unlike therustlle of poplars in a breeze from the Loire? Of thetumult of the crowd, a factory in action, a moving train, arailway terminal, engines, showers, cries, rumblings?’ 14Carol-Bérard was one of the first to dream of how thisquestion of sound which is both varied and shapeless,this assemblage of differentiated noises, would come toexert its influence on them in their musical creations.Experience with the microphone, or more generallywith sound recording, has sent those who discovered itdown a new route. In December 1913 Apollinaire, alongwith other poets, visited the Archives of the Voice at theSorbonne and recorded three poems there. 15 The poetsaid of this experience ‘After the recording, they playedmy poems back to me on the apparatus, and I did notrecognise my voice in the slightest’. 16 Butitwashisfriend André Salmon who gave the better description ofthis blind listening:12H.H. Stuckenschmidt. 1927. ‘Machines – a vision of the future’,Modern music, 4 (3): 10.13Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. 1923. ‘Neue Gestaltung in der Musik.Möglichkeiten des Grammophons’, Der Sturm 7. Reprinted inUrsula Block and Michael Glasmeier (eds) Broken Music. Berlin:Daadgalerie, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD et gelbeMusik, 1989, pp. 55–6.14Carol-Bérard. 1929. ‘Recorded noises — Tomorrow’s instrumentation’,Modern Music 6 (2): 28.15Apollinaire recording ‘Le Voyageur’, ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’,‘Marie’.16Guillaume Apollinaire. 1977. ‘Les Archives de la parole’, La vieanecdotique, 1st July 1914. In P. Caizergues and M. Décaudin(eds) OEuvres en prose completes. Paris: Gallimard, p. 213.He listens to himself, not without stupefaction. Hisfriends find his presence there, but he does not recognisehimself! Really, our profound organs of aural perceptionexperience enjoyment thanks to the gramophone … whenit sends back to us this voice of its own which stifles,when we speak, the said profound and very delicateperceptions. The interior voices, Victor Hugo calledthem, he who loved Professor Brunot’s invention. 17 Thusat the second hearing we heard ourselves, to summarise,for the first time, and this gave us a lively surprise. AfterGuillaume Apollinaire, we too knew this emotion, thistroubling, in listening to the singing of our double. 18Apropos this session, here follows another evocativeremark by Apollinaire much before the one inspired bylistening to this recorded sound. It was on the occasionof poems recited by René Ghil ‘the real great success ofthis session’. 19 He remarked: ‘One would say that thesoundofAeolianharpsvibratinginanItaliangarden…and more than anything the hymn of telegraphy isrepresented by the wires and poles that cease to markthe trunk roads.’ In this way, the voice of the poet RenéGhil takes on, by its phonographic recording, the toneof an ‘aerial music’. 20The technique of recording and of montage, which isassociated with cinematographic practice, came to serveas the substrate of musique concrète. 21 For the cinéasteJean Epstein, sound recording revealed what washidden in the act of simple acoustic listening:the microphone and the loudspeaker transmit accentswith an unsupportable shamelessness, where all isrevealed: the naïvety of false pride, the sharp bitternessthat comes from success denied, the disquiet thatunderlies self-assurance and laughter, all the feeblenessesand all the slyness of a character who was thought of asupright, sturdy, in control of himself. They are not many,the priestly confessors who have been able to see and hearas far into the soul as this glassy gaze and this all-listeningphoto-electric cell! 22This phenomenon of an epiphanic being that appearsthrough the transduction of sound became the pedestalof Schaeffer’s thinking named reduced listening.According to Epstein, this was because of the way thatrecorded sound distanced itself from the individual: ‘Butthe ghost also speaks, and with a voice that the living, inall sincerity, does not recognise, which one cannot17Ferdinand Brunot, founder in 1911 of the Archives de la parole.The laboratory was installed at the Sorbonne. Émile Pathéprovided a phonographic recorder with a technician to work themachine. On his first visit in 1911, Apollinaire made an evocativecommentary in a chronicle called ‘La Sorbonne est ébranlée’.18André Salmon, ‘Plus de livres … des disques !’, Gil Blas, 25December 1913.19Apollinaire, op. cit., p. 214.20Ibid.21For the role of radiophonics in Schaeffer’s thinking, see JohnDack, 1994, ‘Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of RadiophonicArt’, Conetmporary Music Review 10 (2): 3–11.22Jean Epstein, 1946. L’Intelligence d’une machine. Ed. JacquesMelot. Paris.

192 Marc Battierrecognise, because it has never been heard from theoutside, carried by a breath that is not one’s own.’ 23Schaeffer explicitly cited Jean Epstein at the time of thefoundation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, 24with reference to his use of extra-musical sounds. Thefilmmaker, one can say, had already imagined that‘through the transposition of natural sounds, it becomespossible to create chords and dissonances, melodies andsymphonies of noise, which are a new and specificallycinematographic music’. 254. THE ORCHESTRATION OF NOISESTwenty years before musique concrète, the composerCarol-Bérard wrote:If noises were registered [sic], they could be grouped,associated and carefully combined as are the timbres ofthe instruments in an orchestra, although with a differenttechnique. We would then create symphonies of noisethat would be grateful to the ear. There are plenty ofsymphonies today which are anything but agreeable,while there are at large and unregistered, a myriad ofdelightful sounds – the voices of the waves and trees, themoving cry of a sailing vessel’s rigging, an airplanegliding down, the natural choruses of frogs around apool. 26If the holistic vision leads one to consider the noises ofthe world, the vision of musicians will converge veryshortly with the question of how noises are orchestrated.Recording, one knows, provides the sonic material fromwhich the musician creates his work. To those ongramophone records, Schaeffer gave the name, ‘fragments’.For Marina Scriabine, it was a question of‘documents’; 27 these, says Scriabine, are then manipulatedbefore one has the power to structure them. But thedetermining factor for Schaeffer was to make evidentthecreativerolerelatedtotheperceptionofsounds,once these had passed through the tube of themicrophone. Musique concrète was to be founded onthe hypothesis that there exists a domain ‘beyond thesounds’: 28 it is by recording ‘the noises of things’, andthen by the operation of capturing sounds through amicrophone, that we can attain it. The sound signalcollected by the microphone and reconstructed by theloudspeaker crosses space without preserving the imageof the original sounding object. Listening is thenfavoured by the absence of visual stimuli; it is23Ibid.24The Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) was founded in1958.25Quoted by Pierre Schaeffer, 1959, ‘Images et mouvement’, Larevue musicale no. 244, Expériences musicales, p. 66.26Carol-Bérard. 1929. ‘Recorded noises – Tomorrow’s instrumentation’,Modern Music 6 (2): 28.27Marina Scriabine. 1963. Le langage musical. Paris: Les éditions deMinuit, p. 204.28Pierre Schaeffer. 1970. ‘Notes sur l’expression radiophonique’(1946). In Machines àcommuniquer, volume 1, Genèse dessimulacres. Paris: Seuil, p. 109.concentrated, and perception converges – better thanthat, it is reduced to that pure listening. Concerning themicrophone, Schaeffer asserted that ‘without changingthe sound, it transforms the experience of listening’. 29The microphone ‘tells strange things,’ said Luc Ferrari,‘it gathers a straw from the eye of its neighbour andmakes a beam from it.’ 30Schaeffer was supremely fascinated by the mystery ofrecording, for it operates within a remarkable differentiationbetween what is conceived (the soundingbody) and what is perceived – what he called theseparator power, but one that is also sensitive tomanipulation. In his text of 1946 he discusses thequestion of the transformation of time perceivedthrough recording. In this way he invokes the simpleways that alteration in chronological time is used incinema. However, his inquisitive mind led him todenounce the limits of slowing and reversing the film.This observation demonstrates a clear knowledge of thetechniques of manipulation, which he would himselfexploit two years later. 31 But Schaeffer had had alsobenefited from an experience that was rare, at least atthat time. The development of his thinking hadprimarily been formed by encountering the voice ofactors and the microphone. Before him, RudolfArnheim had fully noted the effects of microphonicrecording in his 1936 essay Radio,inwhichtheideaofacreative role for this medium was introduced. ‘Therediscovery of the musicality of sound in noise and inlanguage, and the reunification of music, noise andlanguage in order to obtain a unity of material: that isoneofthechiefartistictasksofradio.’ 32The mastery of noises turned out to be more delicatethan had been foreseen when it was first thought of. 33The noises of the world are at the outset presented to ourperception as signals, manifestations of somethingstrange to which we should lend our attention. Theyare decoded within the instant with the intention ofascertaining their cause: isolated, selected and identified,their origin important to us because they can besignificant agents of our environment. Schaeffer, in hisfirst statements, gave priority to the masking of thecause by the effect of the transduction. However, noisescan be resistant to this operation. As Schaeffer observedin the preface of his five first studies in June 1948, 34 thereis no doubt that certain of them could eventually29See Pierre Schaeffer, 1994, Notes sur l’expression radiophonique(1946), reprinted in Dix ans d’essais radiophoniques, du Studio auClub d’Essai, 1942/1952, Arles: Phonurgia nova, p. 88.30Luc Ferrari. 1959. ‘Les étapes de la production’, La revue musicaleno. 244, Expériences musicales, p. 54.31See Pierre Schaeffer, op. cit, p. 95.32Rudolf Arnheim, Radio (1936), translated into French from theGerman by Martin Kaltenecker, Paris: Van Fieren, 2005, p. 57.33For a presentation of noise in musical composition during thetwentieth century see Pierre-Albert Castanet, Tout est bruit pourqui a peur, Michel de Maule, 1999, passim.34Pierre Schaeffer, Présentation du ‘Concert de bruits’, Sunday 20June 1948, Clubd’Essai, p. 3.

What the GRM brought to music 193become a sound object because their anecdotal charactercan be masked; others, in contrast, keep their‘dramatic character’ and it is not possible, at leastthrough the technology available to the Clubd’Essai, to erase recognition of their cause completely.Later, Schaeffer would assert that there wasno difference, only nuances, between musical soundand noise. 35The concrète approach is not without recall of thetheoretical protocol of the Russian Constructivists, andin particular their insistence on the idea of faktura. 36Alexei Gan, following the example of other artists ofthis movement, distinguished three disciplines in theartistic practice of Constructivism: the tectonic, suggestinga theoretical framework which determines thedirection for artistic activity; the faktura, which defineshow one approaches the material which allows one toproceed to the construction, that is to say the putting intoshape. The aspect that leads to the concrète approach isfaktura, which Gan further defined as work on thematerial in its entirety, and not just on its surface. Tomake this real, one must apply a particular technique,which allows one to increase the possibilities oftransformation of the material with which one begins.The faktura is therefore defined as ‘a material knowinglychosen and rationally deployed’. Schaeffer’s thinkingled him to define the process of concrète compositionwhich consists of extracting from the materialregarded as a sound object the possibility of updatingthose properties which would serve to mould themusical object. This was through a process comparableto the faktura of Constructivism, whichSchaeffer implemented to turn the sound event, stillimpressed with its dramatic stamp, into the musicalobject, material that was pure sound. Furthermore,with Pierre Henry, a composer of this new music,there came a detachment from the power ofpredetermined sounds in order to be able to shapea new material:musique concrète was not a study of timbre, it is focusedon envelopes, forms. It must be presented by means ofnon-traditional characteristics, you see … one might saythat the origin of this music is also found in the interest in‘plastifying’ music, of rendering it plastic like sculpture …musique concrète, in my opinion, has led to a manner ofcomposing, indeed, a new mental framework of composing.3735Pierre Schaeffer: intervention at the session of 27 February 1971,Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, no. 3, July–September 1971, p. 108.36Alexei Gan, Konstruktivismus (Tver, 1922).37Interview of Pierre Henry with Richard S. James, cited in‘Expansion of sound resources in France, 1913–1940, and itsrelationship to electronic music’, doctoral thesis, University ofMichigan, 1981, note 91, p. 79.5. PROVIDING A FRAMEWORK TO MUSICALRESEARCHThe life of Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) has been fullydocumented. 38 His studies at the École Polytechnique,his passion as much for the violin as for literature, hisever increasing responsibilities at the heart of theinstitution of radio – all that is as well- known as arethe aspects of his complex and at times disturbingcharacter. It came about that musique concrète wouldbe invented by a man of many gifts but who neither hadnor claimed to have the status of composer. In thecourse of the 1950s, when his professional role ofresponsibility for radio led him to make prolonged staysabroad, Schaeffer would pursue his ideas, developingsince 1948. As one often finds in his writings, hissuggestions are worked out in the form of lists, layingdown what he found appropriate as a stance, andrejecting what appeared to him to fall outside itsdomain.Having made its first appearance without a predefinedstatus, musique concrète received an institutionalembodiment from the beginning of October 1951, withthe creation of the Groupe de recherches de musiqueconcrète within the Radio-Télévison française. It wasthus that the two first historic studios were createdsimultaneously, for it was also in October 1951 that thestudio of the NWDR was founded in Cologne!The international influence of musique concrète wasas swift as it was incontestable. The first example of thespread of the approach can be found without doubt inJapan. The composer Mayuzumi Toshirô, 39 who hadundertaken his studies in Paris, happened to hear aconcert of works of musique concrète in May 1952,following which he visited the studio of the Groupe demusique concrète. On his return to Japan, with thecollaboration of the radio JOKR of TõkyõBroadcasting System, he created a work in threemovements directly inspired by this experience,Musique concrète for X Y Z. 40 Even if this was not thefirst Japanese electroacoustic work, for it was precededby the Études by Akiyama Kuniharu, it bore, throughits title, the sign of a strong relationship with the ParisSchool. It is interesting to note that its method ofcomposition, in contrast, is highly personal and does notfollow the Schaefferian dicta of that period.Promoting the confrontation of ideas about musicand the technological environment, the firstInternational Decade of Experimental Music was38See especially the well-documented works by Martial Robertpublished by Harmattan: Pierre Schaeffer: des transmissions àOrphée (1999); Pierre Schaeffer de Mac Luhan au fantôme deGutenberg (2000); Pierre Schaeffer: d’ Orphée à Mac Luhan:communication et musique en France entre 1936 et 1986 (2002).39Born in 1929, Mayuzumi Toshirô had been a pupil of Tony Aubinduring his studies at the Conservatoire in 1951–52.40Mayuzumi’s work, myujikku konkureto no tame no sakuhin XYZ wasfirst performed in 1953 at the Tõkyõ Summer Festival.

194 Marc Battierorganised by the Groupe de recherches de musiqueconcrète. 41 Here we find the pioneers who were essentialfor the history of electroacoustic music. VladimirUssachevsky, the delegate of the BMI, 42 presentedthere, having already undertaken some preliminarytrials in New York (since 1952) with Otto Luening,before founding the electronic music studio at ColumbiaUniversity in 1955, the same year as the studio ofmusical phonology by RAI in Milan. There too weencounter Hermann Scherchen, who would establish astudio at Gravesano in Switzerland in 1954; PierreBoulez; and Herbert Eimert, one of the co-founders ofthe studio of the radio station NWDR in Cologne, whohad just organised its inaugural, concert.As for the Paris studio, it attracted composers from avariety of backgrounds who would experiment with thetechnical capabilities of the studio. In 1951, Schaefferorganised the first musique concrète workshop, in whichPierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Yvette Grimaud, AndréHodeir and Monique Rollin came to study. OlivierMessiaen, as a guest, was assisted by Pierre Henry tocreate ‘a rhythmical work’, Timbres-durées, of arespectable fifteen minutes length. Put together from arepertory limited to repercussive and brief sounds, thework was withdrawn from the catalogue. Be that as itmay, Messiaen gained a great respect for whatelectroacoustic music could achieve, and one must notregard his experience as having no effect at all. He wasfollowed by other composers of the same generation,such as Darius Milhaud, whose La rivière endormie(1954) evokes more the manner of the Hörspiel thanthat of musique concrète through its sung passages,spoken words and slightly altered instrumental music.Edgard Varèse made the first of the three version ofDéserts (1954) and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati producedAmen de verre (1957), a study, in which theobjects are slowly transformed according to the profilesof the glissandi created by means of the slidingphonogène. Such glissandi also appear in HenriSauguet’s work, Aspect Sentimental (1957), but thesewere recorded with a sliding flute; the author, whohad already produced two concrète works (includinghis Six pièces en un acte of 1955), loved to work witha restricted palette made up of resonant sounds with‘in delta’ 43 profiles, and endowed with an allure ofdry or wet percussive textures as well as with humanbreath.With so many composers whose reputations werealready established, one could foresee that theSchaefferian doctrine would not be followed to theletter. For example, Jazz et jazz by André Hodeir,a result of the early years of musique concrète, is a41The ‘Première décade internationale de musique expérimentale’was held in Paris from 8 to 18 June 1953.42The American society for the rights of authors, Broadcast Music,Inc., was founded in 1939.43See infra.mixed-media work written for piano and three-trackmagnetic tape. 44 Certain others had already made theircompositional choices, such as Pierre Boulez, whorealised two études where he adapted concrète processesto the serial method. In the first étude, undertaken in1951, 45 Boulez chose to use the sound from only onesource, an African sanza, a ‘thumb piano’ with metalslats fixed on a small resonating case. Using thekeyboard of a C chromatic phonogène, the composerbrought about changes of playback speed, whichproduced transpositions in pitch and alterations induration simultaneously. He worked on the idea ofcreating a ‘scale’ of durations so that serial operationscould be applied. The second étude, undertaken a fewmonths later, followed his thinking about rhythmstarting with six types of highly varied sounds. 46Another concrète work was destined for the experimentalfilm by Jean Mitry, Symphonie mécanique(1955).6. THE RESEARCH PHASEThe development of electroacoustic music that wasfounded on the Schaefferian legacy needs to beconsidered in quite distinct stages. These can bearranged by the production modes of the works, whichare there to underline the composer’s discourse.Schaeffer’s diary well illustrates how the imaginationis ceaselessly up against the restrictions of experimentation.Attempts multiply and happy accidents areregularly produced. It is through the ear thattechniques are selected, later to become methods withthe capacity to astonish. In this way a repertory oftechniques evolved, many of which had not beenestablished in the radiophonic studio. The techniquesthat are the most appropriate for the creation ofmusique concrète are remarkably few. They consist ofusing the radiophonic studio technologies in specialways. One may distinguish three classes of suchtechniques. First, the alteration and transformation oftime; here the techniques are derived from the use of aturntable, including segmentation (removal), acceleration,slowing down, reproduction of sound back-tofront,application of a dynamic envelope using a levelpotentiometer, and repetition of a fragment (theclosed groove or loop).44See Marc Battier, 2006, ‘André Hodeir et la réalisation de Jazz etjazz’, Les Cahiers du jazz, no. 3, p. 54–9.45See the description given by the author in the letter to John Cage(n.d., c. December 1951, in Pierre Boulez, John Cage.Correspondance et documents, J.-J. Nattiez (ed.), Mainz: Schott;letter 35 in the original edition of 1990, letter 36 in the revisededition, 2000); see also Pierre Boulez, 1966, ‘Eventuellement’, inRelevé d’apprenti, Paris: Seuil, p. 177 seq.46See Pascal Decroupet, 1994, ‘Timbre diversification in serial tapemusic and its consequence on form’, Contemporary Music Review,10 (2): 12–23.

What the GRM brought to music 195After that comes transformation of texture andtimbre. Few techniques were applied during the earlyyears, and it was necessary to invent a number of devicesto support the process. In reality, perception of timbre ismodified by temporal operations, and thus to cut theattack of a sound so that only the resonance or thesustain fragment can be heard leads to the masking ofthe original timbre. With the arrival of phonogènes,treatments that work upon the timbre were to be theresult of speed variations, and the consequent transpositionsin time and pitch. These effects combined to workupon the perception of the spectrum of sound. The useof filtering as a form of treatment developed slowly aswas the case with other electronic devices for soundmanipulation, such as ring modulators or amplitudemodulators. These devices were only progressivelyinstalled during the early years of the GRM. For onething, industry produced only a few of these devices,and in addition they were seen as electronic objectswhich worked against the philosophy of musiqueconcrète. As other studios abroad began to employthem fully (Cologne, Milan), the GRM was tobecome sensitive to these means of transformingsounds.Finally, musique concrète came up with a thirdcategory, or at least found a means to experimentthrough practice: spatialisation, that is, multi-channeldiffusion. In 1951 Jacques Poullin invented a ‘musicstand for spatial application’, which was used in aconcert shortly afterwards. Here one heard spatialisedworks by Schaeffer and Henry (Symphonie pour unhomme seul, Orphée 51), 47 and, by using a three-trackand six-spools tape recorder, a work by Messiaen,diffused by Pierre Henry with three fixed channels and a‘cinematic’ one, and by Hodeir with piano. After hisvisit to Darmstadt during the summer of 1951, Schaefferpublished a statement on musique concrète, and it isamusing to note that he inserted this under the title ‘DieKlangwelt der elektronischen Musik’. It was in relationto this episode that he stated his position vis-a-vis theapproach of the German studio: ‘I found we had manycommon ideas with my German colleagues (we sharedthe same curiosity), but I did not believe in theirelektronische Musik, all entirely turned, in my sense,towards a means of execution which would have smallchance of renewing musical ideas.’ 48 It is convenient tomention here that the electronic music which made soscant an impression on Schaeffer was not that withwhich the Cologne studio is the most frequentlyidentified. In fact, during the studio’s early years, thesources were not yet those of frequency generators, butinstead keyboard instruments: Harald Bode’s melachordand the Elektronische Monochord conceived by47At the Théâtre de l’Empire, 6 July 1951.48Pierre Schaeffer. 1952. A la recherche d’une musique concrète,Paris: Seuil, p. 113. See also p. 15 in the same work.Freidrich Trautwein. It was chiefly with the aid of thesekeyboard instruments that the greater part of the firstétudes by Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer were made.But then, Schaeffer shared with Henry little enthusiasmfor electronic instruments. One can find in this littleknown historical event the origin of Schaeffer’s lack ofinterest for the German electronic music.7. THE RELAYED GESTURE IThe first act of ‘relaying’ by the concrète musician isrelated to the machine. It suggests, by virtue of itsarrangement and its functions, possibilities of actionsrelated to a given real-world sound, such as is itsrecording. But – and here one goes back to the intuitionsof precursors such as Carol-Bérard, the artist convertsthese machines of reproduction into instruments ofreproduction. It is here that we interpose the idea ofreinvention: throughout the twentieth century the artisthas shown how he can transform the machine into abasis for creation. When the gramophone changed itsstatus from being an apparatus for reproduction to aninstrument of production, an artist has, by thought ordeed, reinvented the apparatus.This machine, in the Club d’Essai’s studio, was aboveall represented by the turntable, but it was also thepotentiometer of the mixing desk. In Schaefer’s hands,the turntable in effect became the generator for unheardbehaviours of sound. They were thoroughly exploredand classified, and became the vehicle for the researchwhich led Schaeffer towards the conception of musiqueconcrète: closed groove (made into a loop), speedvariation (transposition of pitch and tempo), reversal,removal. Using the mixing desk’s potentiometers, one’saction leads to a new dynamic outline, which, in somecases were able to mask the identification of the source:the sound sheds its envelope and becomes disembodied.The use of the turntable and its technical capabilitiesis the mark of the first works of musique concrète, asmuch with Schaeffer as with Pierre Henry. Thistechnology would be the one used up to Schaeffer’sand Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul. Infact,itwas during the work on this ambitious piece that thefirst tape recorder arrived in the studio.8. A QUESTION OF NAMINGAt least Schaeffer hesitated over the choice of anexpression to describe what he had just invented: whatto call this ‘new music’, this ‘anti-music’. If hedefinitively adopted the term concrète, which hejustified elsewhere, it was because it evoked othermeanings, with reference to the association of ideas heestablishes between painting and music. His deliberationsdrove him to establish a parallel between theevolution of painting since the beginning of the twentiethcentury, which led from the figurative to the abstract. It

196 Marc Battierwas the idea of the ductile quality of sounds which ledSchaeffer to this rapprochement between his discoveryand the visual arts. Seeing that it was ‘comfortable toestablish links between musique concrète and abstractpainting, that these were tangible and real, for all thatdescriptive music is as illusory as musical painting’. 49 Itwould ever after be possible ‘to compose a concrètemusic that expresses the equivalents of matter and formfrom the standpoint of abstract painting’. 50 This is whyhe wondered whether he should not have chosen theexpressions ‘musique plastique’ or even ‘plastiquesonore’ (plastic sound). 51It was the poet Jérôme Peignot who suggested toPierre Schaeffer an alternative name: ‘acousmaticmusic’. This is what Peignot said:To try and finish in good time with the expression‘musique concrète’, why not use the word ‘acousmatic’,taken from the Greek word akousma, which means ‘theobject of hearing’. In French, the word ‘acousmatique’already describes those disciples of Pythagoras who,during five years, only heard his lessons hidden behind acurtain, without seeing him, and keeping a rigid silence.Pythagoras was of the view that a simple look at his facecould distract his pupils from the teachings that he wasgiving them. If one gives the word an adjectival form,acousmatic, it would indicate a sound that one hearswithout being able to identify its origin. 52This idea was relaunched by François Bayle fifteenyears later, when he applied it to the music of ParisSchool.This term, henceforth used in reference to the musicalwork of the GRM, has to be extended through thenotion of ‘acousmate’, which gave a mystical dimensionto the phenomenon of hidden sound. Sound technologieshave increasingly reinforced the idea of acousmateas a number of great mystics have given witness,supporting our listening to voices without bodies.Voices without bodies: this addresses itself to the ideathat with sound technology one can transport orreproduce sound without its being associated with thematerial that produced it. Historically, the idea of‘acousmate’ is linked to mysticism. Here is what theDictionary of the Académie française says in its fifthedition of 1798: ‘ACOUSMATE. Noun singular. Noiseof human voices or instruments that one imagines onehears in the air.’ 53 In his comments on the Académie’sDictionary, Antoine-Augustin Renouard wroteBiographers have written that St Cecilia, ready for hermartyrdom, heard within herself the songs of angels,49Ibid., p. 114.50Ibid., p. 115.51For a development of this question, see Jean-Yves Bosseur, 2001,‘Musique concrète/peinture abstraite’, in Sylvie Dallet et AnneVeitl (eds) Du sonore au musical, Paris: L’Harmattan, p. 261–77.52Jérôme Peignot. 1960. ‘Musique concrète’, Esprit, no. 280,January, p. 116.53Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, cinquième édition, Paris,1789.from which derives her title as the patron saint of music.If this historical point is correct, St Cecilia was in a stateof acousmate, or of enchantment, for these two words inthe language of learned metaphysicians, are essentiallysynonymous. Both designate a mental condition, whichfew physiologists know how to distinguish. The conditionis rarely morbid, sometimes endemic; but those whosuffer from it, when they are not saints, have oftenimputed it to witchcraft. 54This definition by the Académie can be found copiedexactly in the notebooks of the young Apollinaire. Thepoet gave this title of acousmate to two of his poems.The first is a poem included in the Stavelot anthology,and probably dates from 1899:I sometimes hear the quiet voice of the absent 55In the second poem, also titled ‘Acousmate’, anddating certainly to same period, Apollinaire wrote theselines:Shepherds used to listen to the speech of angels /Shepherds used to understand all they thought theyheard 56This is the role now played by phonography, to makevoices without bodies or sounds without their causalsource heard: writers, researchers and poets all makethis attribution. The gramophone holds onto thephysical inscription. In giving it back, it leaves to thelistener the care of reconstituting the sound image whichtraces the sound of origin. It is in these two tendencies,restitution and recreation, that one finds the sources ofthe creation of phonographic sound.The occasion of the great turning-point that was thecreation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1958produced a change in the adjective of qualification:henceforward one would speak of experimental music.It was called musique concrète, electronic music, electroacousticmusic, music for tape, these synonyms whichinitially designated, in principle, the same thing, indicatedat the same time certain tendencies – not aesthetic, for Itake the word tendencies in the sense of the signifierswhich were consecrated to it. In taking as signifier ‘musicfor tape’, one takes on the medium, one emphasises theorigin, on the instrument: the generator, the synthesiser,and so on. In calling that music, musique concrète, Iwould emphasise, according to my way of thinking, onthe approach. In terming it electroacoustic music one mayfind a synthetic term where the concrete sources (that is,the microphones) and the synthetic sources are mingled,as manipulations so often mix them. 5754Antoine-Augustin Renouard. 1807. ‘Remarques morales, philosophiqueset grammaticales’, in Dictionnaire de l’Académiefrançaise, Paris.55Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Acousmate’ (j’entends parfois une voixquiète d’absente), Le guetteur mélancolique, ‘Stavelot’, ca. 1899.56Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Acousmate’ (Paix sur terre aux hommesde bonne volonté), Lacerba no. 9, 8 May 1915.57Pierre Schaeffer, interview with Michel Chion, reproduced inCahiers recherche/musique no. 4, 1977, p. 122.

What the GRM brought to music 1979. CABIN OR STUDIO? THE GESTURE OR THEMACHINE?In their development, the activities of the studio had theeffect of opening up new questions that the composerhad to confront. Schaeffer had well foreseen this whenin the first pages of his diary 58 he wondered whether itwas necessary to choose between the analogue soundwhere one could find the electroacoustic equipment, andthe recording studio, a temple where the microphonecaptured the resonances of the sound-producingobjects. Placing gesture as the primary considerationin compositional practice was the decisive factor for theParis School: in order for the music in process ofgestation to find its sound shape, the composer drawsfrom a repertory of actions, controls, manipulations,synchronisations and so on. He disentangles twodistinct routes: that of the recording studio, and thatof the analogue sound.And it was the latter that was Schaeffer’s choice.There he found himself ‘among the turntables, themixer, the potentiometers’ and he could work ‘throughinterposed items’. By contrast, it was the recordingstudio that above all tempted the young Pierre Henry,who thus created a new route for concrète practice. Forhim, electroacoustic music was an affair of gesture andinvention, and he would remain faithful to thesefeelings. In 1970 he wrote ‘Anyone who practicesElectroacoustic music invents his music, makes it,makes it real, with his fingers.’ 59Schaefer’s preference was hence for the analoguestudio. He imagined a control device made from abattery of turntables which he could steer at will. Theresult of this technique was that the method ofcomposition made itself apparent by a process ofcollage, where the items were superimposed upon eachother or followed one another without much effort ofarticulation or transition. With the maturation ofthought, the question of finding means to combineand articulate objects became a focus of the techniquesof montage. For that, it was possible to evokecomfortably a procedure of electroacoustic writing,where the musician proceeds without graphic inscriptionbut instead with a vocabulary of styles of gesturesand actions. It was thus that the idea was formed,advanced and developed by Guy Reibel, concentratingon sound producing objects and mechanisms. The routeexplored by Reibel consisted of making an inventory ofthe actions comprising the ways of playing, acting upona sound body, whether this was acoustic, according tothe concrète tradition, or electronic, ignoring, in thiscase, the means of recording or adapted interfaces. Thus58See Pierre Schaeffer, 1952, A la recherche d’une musique concrète,Paris: Seuil.59Pierre Henry, ‘Le voyage intérieur’, Les lettres françaises, 8May1970, reprinted in Martine Cadieu, 1992, A l’écoute descompositeurs, Paris: Minerve, p. 220.the idea of the instrument, not in a conventional sense,was apt for the purpose of playing and exploringgestures. Reibel asserted that the approach, undertakensoon after his arrival at the GRM, conformed withSchaefferian thought. 60 In fact, one can see a sort ofstruggle between the composer’s musical idea and thesound-producing object that puts flesh on it – even if thisis an electroacoustic device. An electronic machine, ineffect, is not a tool given to the musician withoutencumbrances. Beginning with its own particular waysof functioning, it has its range of possibilities as well asits limitations, and can easily be resistant to thecomposer’s wishes. The imprint of this compositionalstrategy can be found in the work in six movementsVariations en étoile (1966).The basic question posed to the concrète musician is:ought one to act and understand later-on? To state it inanother way, can the gesture – on the sound body, onthe potentiometer, on the machine – work by itself tomake a musical character appear? Or rather, must it incontrast apply a strategy aimed at unveiling the initialintention through the gesture?10. THE RELAYED GESTURE IIIn order to explore the transformations of recordedobjects more elaborately, Schaeffer thought aboutadapting the tape recorder, with which the studio hadonly just equipped itself. Several machines were thoughtof and produced by Jacques Poullin. There was thekeyboard phonogène, made by the Tolana company,which would allow a magnetic tape in the form of a loopto be played according to a selection from twelveplayback speeds. There was the sliding phonogène,whoseeffectonecanhearinOrphée ou toute la lyre bySchaeffer and Henry (1951). This was furnished with alever which assured a gradual change in the speed,resulting in a sort of spectral and temporal glissando.This was constructed by the Sareg company. Themorphophone would read a loop of magnetic tape withthe aid of ten heads which one could place along theloop and be regulated at will: one might thereby producerepetition according to a chosen rhythm. Finally, theuniversal phonogène, created in 1961, was an adaptationof the principle of the machine developed inGermany by Axel Springer, the Springer Tempophon. 61Its principle allowed one to work independently onspeed variation, resulting in an acceleration or a slowingdown, as well as the transposition of pitch. Itsmanipulation was, however, very delicate.Several works mark the phase that opened with thefounding of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Withthese works a new way of electroacoustic composition60See Guy Reibel, 2000, L’homme musicien. Musique fondamentaleet création musicale, La Calade: Édisud.61One can hear this in the work for tape by Herbert Eimert made inCologne, Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1960–62).

198 Marc Battierbegan characterised by an effort to create a unity of thematerial by inserting it into a formal, coherentdiscourse. Schaeffer created two études which had astheir point of departure the desire to make a workexploring a limited collection of objects, assuring a formintegration in the most musical way possible: the Étudeaux allures (1958), first, put into play a number of sortsof processing. One can clearly distinguish the action ofthe keyboard phonogène, whose playing produced akind of melody of resonances, of bandpass filters, whichcuts off the spectra of resonant rich sounds, apparentlycoming from metallic plates crashing into one another,just as from constructions of hybrid objects tied two bytwo though editing, according to an outline of expansion/contraction:these are the sounds in delta, anamegiven based on the shape of the Greek letter, whichbecame an electroacoustic pattern commonly used atthe Paris School. With the Étude aux allures (1958)Schaeffer inclined towards a property of sound that hecharacterised as its allure, which one might conciselydescribe as a periodic or quasi-periodic movementanimating a sound, and which often depicts itself as asort of tremolo applied to different parameters ofsound. For the Etude aux objets, Schaeffer chose about ahundred sound objects for which the puzzle – thechallenge – was to use them only in the crudest possibleway, relinquishing electronic treatment.11. THE THEORETICAL EFFORTIn Paris the man of science who very soon attachedhimself to the studio was Abraham Moles. Hiscontribution was essential. It can be noted in 1952 inan appendix to a work of Schaeffer’s, Alarecherched’une musique concrète, with the chapter called ‘Esquissed’un solfège concret’ (‘Sketch for a solfège concret’).Gradually, Schaeffer forged what Hugues Dufourt callsa philosophy of the sounding. 62 To be a philosopher is tocreate concepts, and this was exactly the purpose of histheoretical work.In 1966 he published his treatise, the Traité des objetsmusicaux, which Schaeffer said had taken him fifteenyears to write. He emphasised that it ‘is not above all atreatise on musique concrète, it addresses itself to musicas such, but it is also an interdisciplinary essay’. 63Running to 672 pages, the Traité develops his thoughtin seven great books, themselves subdivided intochapters. Oddly lacking an index, its imposing sizemaking it difficult to consult, it was left to Michel Chionto draw up a Guide des objets sonores, 64 aworkwhich62Hugues Dufourt. 1999. ‘Pierre Schaeffer. Le son commephénomène de civilisation’, Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendreaprès Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, pp. 69–82.63Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Un nouvel humanisme est l’affaire d’aventuriers’,Les lettresfrançaises, 20 October 1966, reprinted in MartineCadieu, A l’écoute des compositeurs, Paris: Minerve, 1992, p. 120.64Michel Chion. 1983. Guide des objets sonores. Paris: Buchet-Chastel et Bry-sur-Marne, Institut national de l’audivisuel.allowedmanycomposersinFranceandabroadtograspSchaefferian concepts and integrate them into their ownapproach.The way one perceives the captured and recordedobject is the engine that drives concrète invention.Schaeffer gives this its name, reduced listening. Thisexpression evokes the attitude consistent with how oneregroups Schaeffer’s indices, under the condition thatthe composer’s perception is concentrated on thisactivity. Reduced listening allows one to disengage themusical properties of the fixed object. In the Traité,Schaeffer introduced the term acoulogy to designate theact of isolating and of defining the musical characteristicsof recorded sounds. Thus defined, acoulogy wasintended to become the science of reduced sound.Several years later, Michel Chion proposed to enlargethe field of acoulogy and to present it as ‘the science ofhearing in all its aspects (when with Schaeffer, it onlyconcerned itself with the dimension of sound related toreduced listening)’. 65 Chion proposed that the acoulogythat he was advancing ‘ought not to aim directlytowards a musical result, or a cinematic one, but insteadtowards a more general, artistic goal. Its objective isknowledge.’ The science thus defined would be, in thegeometric image that Chion gave as an example,nourished by musical experience, rather than directlyserving it. Thus detached from the contingency ofartistic production, acoulogy would come to enlighten‘all our listening’. It would appear from this that thevision of a science of listening, extended as Chionsuggested, is derived from Schaeffer’s suggestions abouthow the concrète musician, since before 1952, couldbenefit from the particular technique of capture andrecording of sound. If all Schaefferian theory is directedpurposely towards musical practice – that of radiophonicart as well as that of composition – what Chionteaches us is that what Schaeffer opened up can becomethe most general one, paraphrasing a well-knownreflection in Schaeffer’s diary of 1952.Acoulogy is the way to distinguish between two levelsof work. The first, typology, allows the classification ofsounds by types of objects. It leans on a specialisedvocabulary applied to the objects: continua, sustainedand discontinuous characteristics, provision of fixed orvariable mass, etc. 66 The phase of typological examinationproduces a classification of the objects. The secondlevel, morphology, is the conceptual tool that categorisesthe ways of describing the classification of the objects.Schaeffer distinguishes between an internal morphology,applicable to those objects which have a certain unity ofcharacter, and an external morphology, when the soundis composed of simultaneous elements differing in65Michel Chion. 1998. Le son. Paris: Nathan, p. 274.66See Pierre Schaeffer, 1966, Traité des objets musicaux, Paris: Seuil,p. 442.

What the GRM brought to music 199nature, even composite, made up from a number ofdetached elements, yet stemming from the same source.These ideas, together with all the multitude of otherswhich were disclosed but which are not discussed here,were experimental. Intended to serve as the foundationon which creation would be erected, they are of necessityimpregnated by the aesthetic choices of their inventor.Schaeffer united them in his great project of a solfège ofsounds, the proof that his ambition was to put together acomplete and coherent musical system, rivalling that ofthe solfège of notes. To better make them operative andto spread them around, he undertook an enormouscatalogue of examples of sound, with a commentary byhimself. 67 He was helped by Guy Reibel in this task, withthe assistance of Beatriz Ferreyra, François Bayle andHenri Chiarucci. Many of the ideas were accepted by thecommunity of composers attached even indirectly to theParis School, and one finds them adopted in Anglo-Saxon countries as well, where they spoke ratherstrangely of ‘concrete music’ to designate the naturalprovenience of the sounds and their remoulding intomusical sounds, without necessarily following theSchaefferian solfège.The Traité has been used as a pedagogical work, inwhich one may try to use words to describe sounds andto frame them into categories; this is illustrated by agreat number of sound examples with comments.Undoubtedly it with this intention that the book ismost often read. Ironically, even though the taxonomyis segmented into elementary categories, it is difficult tofind an approach based on these in many producedworks. By contrast, it presents a considerable effort togive a universal approach to very different compositionalactivities. It inspires admiration for what is aunique large-scale treatise focused on its thinking thatthe sound may come to substitute for the note as thematerial from which music is made. Finally, and this isoften emphasised, certain properties of sounds found inthe Traité represent classifications currently in use; andterms such as ‘allure’ or grain, for example, havebecome part of the vocabulary of electroacoustic music.In the period during which he was preparing theTraité as in the years that followed it, Schaefferrequested the practice of Étudesasoneofthefociatthe GRM, which he had inaugurated in 1948. Thisinsistence occupied the fourth position in the series ofmethodological rules he articulated in 1957: ‘Beforeconceiving works, undertake studies’. 68 This was thespirit Schaeffer proposed to the composers of the youngGRM, an experience which would find its first form of67This remarkable pedagogic exercise was first brought about byFrançois Bayle, Agnès Tanguy and Jean-Louis Ducarme. Todayit is available on compact discs accompanied by the completetranscription in three languages. Paris, Institut national del’audiovisuel/Groupe de recherches musicales, 1998.68Pierre Schaeffer. 1957. ‘Lettre à Albert Richard’, La revuemusicale, no. 236, Vers une musique expérimentale, p. XIV.expression in the Collective Concert. 69 A kind ofrevolution, this project requested a contribution fromall of the GRM’s composers with regard to a singlequestion: what connection should there be between themusical object and composition? Should one not placethe idea of structure before that of object? Allcollaborators attacked this problem while Schaefferproposed the project of a concert which would be fed byall of them. A veritable experimentation followed,carried out on the question of structures, the operativeidea which acted like yeast in germinating musicalobjects. Experimental protocols were brought to readinessand each was applied to fill grids that evaluatedthem in order to validate the effect of structures. Butwhen the results were analysed and discussed, itappeared that the subject of musical structure had notbeen of great importance and thus experience led to acollective concert in which the composers – at least thosewho had accepted to participate in the experience all theway through (it appears that there were ten), 70 eachcomposed about ten minutes of music sharing the samematerials. The collective concert was a unique chance tothink together beyond the musical object. Up until then,the act of composing used to be dependent on analysisof how the material was listened to; Schaefferianphilosophy was contingent upon this. With the collectiveconcert, the idea was to seek supplementary modelswhich inclined towards composition as an independentactivity. Iannis Xenakis, for a time responsible for theprogramme, suggested a model based on combinatorialtheory for this occasion. This would lead to working onthe musical fragments made by certain composers withthose provided by others. The project then wasconducted through a sort of axiom that rested on aformalisation of sound. Schaeffer stressed musicalstructures which could work with the mathematicalmodels put forward by Xenakis; even though in sodoing, he was advancing indisputably towards astructuralist approach. It therefore led to a series ofprofound upheavals at the GRM.12. THE RELAYED GESTURE IIIThe production of musical works, starting from theearly 1960s, developed afterwards, while Schafferundertook to put in place new teams of research: theGroup for Technical Research supported the developmentof new electronic instruments and the Group forImage Research focused on audiovisual questions thatwould take on a growing importance for Schaeffer.69On this subject, see François-Bernard Mâche, ‘Le ‘Concertcollectif’. Chronique d’une expérience’ 1963, La revue musicale,no. 394–7, Recherche musicale au GRM, 1986, p. 193–9.70The participants in the Concert collective given on the 18 March1963 were Fr. Bayle, Ph. Carson, E. Canton, L. Ferrari, I. Malec,Fr.-B.Mâche, J.-E. Marie, B. Parmegiani and N.V. Tuong.

200 Marc BattierThe development of a device for electronic productionwas the responsibility of François Coupigny, 71 whodirected the Group for Technical Research. Coupignyproduced an ensemble of electronic modules designed togenerate signals and to process external sources. Thesedevices emerged in about 1969. Thereafter called thesynthesiser (a term which at the beginning they had triedto avoid because it had a meaning that linked it toelectronic music), it became the heart of the new Studio54 at the GRM; installed by Henri Chiarucci in 1970,conveniently set up above the nerve centre of the studio,the mixing console furnished the tape recorders withremote controls. It served also as a model for a moremodest but portable unit, used for concerts up to thepresent day. It was in this way that the compositionalenvironment of the GRM took the same path as otherstudios in the world, namely that of automation. Thistendency began with the cybernetic inventions of Louisand Bebe Barron in New York, and includes others suchas Raymond Scott’s electronium (United States), Josef-Anton Riedl’s Siemens studio in Germany, the BelgianIPEM studio in Ghent, and the Dutch studio in Utrecht.The GRM way of composing in part depended on thetechnological environment in which it was deployed. Wehave seen how the experience of microphone recordingcan lead to a particular listening experience, and howthis act was relayed by the devices and machinesinvented for composition.Under these conditions, the question of musicalnotation was posed in a way that had not been made uptill then, as the realisation of music had depended on theemployed production techniques. There are only a veryfew examples of prescriptive notation in the ParisSchool tradition. Schaeffer, in his first experiences, hadtried to note his figures of concrète objects for his firstétude, but this tentative experiment was quicklyabandoned. It flows from his theory of the primacy ofthe ear that the work should be composed as close aspossible to the material, and given that no instrumentalistis required, notation is of little utility. In the courseof training young composers, Schaeffer would askstudents to make études, stemming from schemes inwhich the types of objects to be used were specified. Themost developed notation is that which offers visualmarks for the diffusion of works. François Bayle’sconcept of the acousmonium in 1974 hastened the usageof notation: graphics, imposed upon a temporal axis,allowed the diffusion of sounds at the heart of thisorchestra of sound projectors. For the Paris School,notation was not something to be inscribed in theconception but in the gesture. Even with the arrival ofcomputer technology, which forces one to specify exact71Francis Coupigny. 2001. ‘Sous la direction de Pierre Schaeffer:repères pour un parcours inventif’. In Sylvie Dallet and AnneVeitl (eds) Du sonore au musical, Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 55–60.data, the gesture remained a focus with the creation ofthe Syter digital machine.But how did the GRM welcome the arrival ofcomputers? The development of digital music in Europewas late and very gradual. The GRM was amongst thefirst to invest in this novel and still somewhatinaccessible technology. It fell to Francis Régnier toexplore the possibilities, despite the extreme cautionattached to it by Schaeffer ever since 1970.During that period, the most developed software fordigital synthesis and processing was Music V, anapplicationinwidespreaduse,developedattheBellTelephone Laboratories by Max Mathews and histeam. 72 Jean-Claude Risset played his part in this. Hewas the first to introduce it later in France, at theUniversité d’Orsay. The program was placed at thedisposal of the GRM on a mini-computer. Thiscomputer system was installed in the little Studio 123at the Maison de la radio, which was near Studio 116,dedicated to conventional analogue techniques.The first attempt to distribute Music V among thecomposers of the GRM failed. Seeing that it wasnecessary to predetermine the data and code thingsexactly, the musicians could not find the equivalent ofthe gesture. The answer to this setback was found in thedevelopment of digital programs conceived to emulateconventional processing of sounds. The goal was thus toattempt to reproduce in software the manipulations ofthe analogue studio so that composers would findthemselves in familiar territory. Bénédict Mailliard, inStudio 123, then defended the idea of a conversationaltype of programme. With this class of software the usercould choose the values of transposition and displaythem as variables similar to conventional machines. Onecalls this conversational because the software establishesa dialogue with the musician and the latter respondsaccording to those choices that seem good to him. Hetherefore works on an interface which, in the background,steers a number of processing programmes. The‘set of resonant filters’ deserves a special mention,because it became one of the most attractive tools andbecause it represents an original contribution to digitalmanipulation. The filters allow sounds to pass throughadjustable frequency bands up to a level where thefilter itself resonates and accompanies the treated soundwith a sort of spectral reverberation. Besides that, themusician can freely choose the number of filters makingup the treatment set, as it is software-based and the onlylimits are those of the machine: the gesture now takesplace in the virtual domain. One can hear this applied inthe first work that came out of Studio 123, Erosphère byFrançois Bayle. The sound editor restores the operationsof editing in the digital domain – segmentation, collage72Max V. Mathews, with the collaboration of Joan E. Miller, F.Richard Moore, John R. Pierce and Jean-Claude Risset. 1969.The Technology of Computer music, Cambridge, Mass.: The MITPress.

What the GRM brought to music 201of sequences. The software for temporal and spectralprocessing, are manifold and varied: they derive fromthe representation of sound in the digital domain, andthus are not transposed computer versions of conventionaltreatments.The practice of using computer programs has onlypartially modified this stance. Software manipulationdemands a form of coding of values. That very oftennecessitates notation specifying at least a pre-existingstate.TheGRM,afterhavingtriedtospreadtheuseofMusic V, chose to create an environment based ongestures.From the middle of the 1970s, research at the GRMled to the development of a program using a real-timeaudio-numeric system. This was the Syter project(système temps réel).With Syter, composers had access to real-time andinteractive control of processing programs for digitalsound. The software developed for Syter was thentransferred to platforms of personal computers with theGRM Tools program. This new package allowed thetreatment techniques in use at the GRM to becomeaccessible to a wide public of users.13. ENERGYA new phase of musical research was marked by thearrival of François Bayle as director of the GRM in1966, when Schaeffer devoted himself to otherfunctions. During nearly thirty years, Bayle was tomark the compositional direction of the Paris Schoolwith his imprint. In 1997 he was succeeded by DanielTeruggi. This composer, who joined the GRM in 1980,has put in place a clearly defined course of action,which, as this article is being written, gives a newdirection to the GRM.From François Bayle’s catalogue, one notes thatworks of chamber music without an electroacousticdimension were the most prominent up to 1970. In thatperiod instrumental works, of which only some involvedmagnetic tape playback, included traditional instrumentsas well as less traditional ones such as the glassharmonica, Baschet crystal, the Ondes Martenot andthe Hammond organ as instrumental sources thuswidened the spectrum of possibilities in orchestrationand of expression.Two works were to launch the next phase of Baylianwriting. One was the suite for tape Jeîta ou Murmure deseaux, conceived in seventeen movements; the other,more importantly, l’Expérience acoustique, between1969 and 1971. Several major works followed, of whichVibrations composées (1973), Grande polyphonie (1974)and Camera oscura (1976) are the most important fromthat period.Bayle rarely resorted to live sources; writing for tapebecame systematic for him. A new form of writingappeared, and one finds its source in the terminologyemployed at the time. New terms blossomed in thecourse of the 1960s. The majority referred to a sound’scause: bounces, rustlings, evolving gestures. Certain ofthem invoke the idea of flowing, or of surface: tissue,fluid, hesitation. Others again allude to discontinuities:fragmentation. Certainly, the idea of motion that waspresent in Schaefferian theory in that period wasevolved further. New terms are borrowed from subtitlesof works, or from the writings of the GRM’s composersat the time. These choices reflected a new attitudetowards conducting sounds. Rather than incliningtowards the object with a view of examining itsproperties, the sounds became forces influenced by themovements that cause them. Among the representativeworks are Bernard Parmegiani’s De natura sonorumwhich is frequently quoted as exemplary of this period.It breathed life into a new form of sonic analysis, and itstechniques of realisation as well as its stylistic assumptionsare exposed in the work. 73 The principle of thework is to ally concrète objects to electronic sources.Putting these materials into an intimate relationshipsometimes creates a vertiginous fusion of texture andtone, sometimes of radical contrasts. The magisterialessay by musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez has shownthe poetic categories of it: starting from Nattiez’observations, one understands better how, in a worklike De natura sonorum, the nature of the musical objecthas been transformed: the relations of energy are thedriving force of the constitution of objects. The soundobject became sonic material through a recordedfragment. Musique concrète, following the example ofthe cinema, would proceed by putting together individualsound sequences, usually short, especially the firststudies of noise in 1948. It was François Bayle who gaveform to a completely different conception. The vocabularyemployed by this composer celebrates hisinfluences but also introduces his own new models.One of the most important concepts in the process of therefounding of the Paris School is the idea of morphogenesis,which Bayle directs towards the question of theflow of energy that animates the sounds. Giving adirection to composition towards certain dynamicmaterials was for Bayle the means of generating sonicforms in motion. The sound was thus liberated and thestyle of composition at the GRM was completelychanged by this. Bayle made images of sounds emergefrom forms. These he named iSounds (iSons). Thethought around this concept, amply developed in hiswork of 1993, 74 is indeed a radical return to questionsrelated to the material, but also led to a deeply novel73Jean-Christophe Thomas, Philippe Mion and Jean-JacquesNattiez. 1982. L’envers d’une oeuvre. De natura sonorum deBernard Parmegiani, Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut nationalde la communication audivisuelle.74François Bayle. 1993. Musique acousmatique. Propositions …positions. Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut national de lacommunication audivisuelle.

202 Marc Battierattitude towards composition. Managing flows, makingimages emerge from sound – all that evolved from theend of the 1960s, but it is Bayle who translated thecompositional option into a conceptual formation.It was during these decisive years that the compositionaltendency, designated by the term ‘acousmatic’became stronger; the term approved by Schaeffer at theend of the 1950s (and which afterwards passed intogeneral use) was adapted to describe music recordedonto sound media. This exists without any visualinformation for the public. According to his owntheory, the effort of causal recognition collides with aconstant erasure organised by the creator. When Baylerecovered the term in the middle of the 1970s, hecommented on the perpetuation of the model. One cansee by this action the choice between music recorded ona given medium and other forms of musical presentation;for example, mixed music allying instruments andan electroacoustic constituent without distinction eitherthrough a medium or live, direct, which continuallyexpanded elsewhere during this period. Bayle promotedthe term acousmatic above all to make visible the newtheoretical status of the musical object. Schaefferquickly realised this, when he declared to Bayle thatuntil then the musical object gave life to time, but afterBayle had further evolved Schaefferian ideas, it was timethat gave life to the musical object.REFERENCESBayle, François. 1993. Musique acousmatique. Propositions …positions. Paris: Buchet-Chastel and Institut national de lacommunication audiovisuelle.Bayle, François. 2003. L’image de son. Technique de monécoute/Klangbilder. Technik meines Hörens. Münster: LitVerlag, Bilingual edition.Chion, Michel. 1983. Guide des objets sonores. PierreSchaeffer et la recherche musicale. Paris: INA/BuchetChastel.Chion, Michel. 1998. Le Son. Paris: Nathan.Dufourt, Hugues. 1999. ‘Pierre Schaeffer: le son commephénomène de civilisation’, in Ouïr, entendre, écouter,comprendre après Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, pp.69–82.Gayou, Évelyne. 2006. ‘Le GRM, Groupe de recherchesmusicales. Des racines de la musique concrète àl’électroacoustique des années 2000. Histoire, oeuvres,concepts, outils: une synthèse’, doctoral thesis supervisedby J.-Y. Bosseur, Université Paris-Sorbonne.Risset, Jean-Claude. 1999. ‘Pierre Schaeffer: recherche etcréation musicales et radiophoniques’, in Ouïr, entendre,écouter, comprendre aprèsSchaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel,pp. 69–82.Schaeffer, Pierre. 1952. A la recherche d’une musique concrete.Paris: Seuil.Schaeffer, Pierre. 1966. Traité des objets musicaux. Essaiinterdisciplines. Paris: Seuil.Teruggi, Daniel. 1998. ‘Le système SYTER. Son histoire, sesdéveloppements, sa production musicale, ses implicationsdans le langage électroacoustique d’aujourd’hui’, doctoralthesis, Université Paris 8.Thomas, Jean-Christophe (ed.). 1999. Ouïr, entendre, écouter,comprendre après Schaeffer. Paris: Buchet/Chastel.Thomas, Jean-Christophe, Philippe, Mion, and Jean-Jacques, Nattiez. 1982. L’envers d’une oeuvre. Denatura sonorum de Bernard Parmegiani. Paris: Buchet/Chastel and Institut national de la communicationaudivisuelle.