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Pierre Schaeffer

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Pierre Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, radio maker and engineer. He was born in Nancy in 1910. His father was a violinist and his mother a singer, but his parents steered him towards engineering. He studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris and first worked as a telecommunications engineer in Strasbourg. From 1936 he worked for French radio in Paris. In 1942 he founded the Studio d'Essai there, which played a part in the Resistance during the war and afterwards became a centre for new music.

Music and breakthrough

At the radio Schaeffer was allowed to experiment with records and equipment. He played sounds backwards, slowed them down and sped them up and layered them over one another. Those techniques were then almost unknown. His first complete work based on those experiments was Étude aux chemins de fer (1948), made from recordings of trains. This is how musique concrète came into being: music that does not begin with notes on paper, but with recorded sounds from reality. From 1949 he worked with Pierre Henry, including on Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950). In 1951 he set up a research group with a studio containing a tape recorder. He is regarded as the first composer to make music with magnetic tape.

Influence

Schaeffer died in 1995. His techniques later became commonplace in every studio: sampling, cutting and pasting and sound manipulation have since been the basis of much pop music. Jean-Michel Jarre was also one of his students.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to Étude aux chemins de fer and try to recognise the sounds of trains: wheels, steam, whistles. Notice how Schaeffer repeats those sounds and turns them into a rhythm.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Mentioned in other articles

See also

Categories: ArtistsElectronic studio and musique concrèteSynthesizer orchestra, ambient and new age