Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete.
29 Facts About Pierre Schaeffer
2.
Amongst the vast range of works and projects he undertook, Schaeffer is most widely and currently recognized for his accomplishments in electronic and experimental music, at the core of which stands his role as the chief developer of a unique and early form of avant-garde music known as musique concrete.
3.
Pierre Schaeffer's writings are often oriented towards his development of the genre, as well as the theoretics and philosophy of music in general.
4.
Today, Pierre Schaeffer is considered one of the most influential experimental, electroacoustic and subsequently electronic musicians, having been the first composer to utilize a number of contemporary recording and sampling techniques that are now used worldwide by nearly all record production companies.
5.
Pierre Schaeffer's parents were both musicians, and at first it seemed that Pierre would take on music as a career.
6.
Pierre Schaeffer studied at several universities in this inclination, the first of which was Lycee Saint-Sigisbert located in his hometown of Nancy.
7.
Pierre Schaeffer received a diploma in radio broadcasting from the Ecole Polytechnique.
8.
Later in 1934 Pierre Schaeffer entered his first employment as an engineer, briefly working in telecommunications in Strasbourg.
9.
Pierre Schaeffer had begun working with new contemporaries whom he had met through RTF, and as such his experimentation deepened.
10.
In 1938 Pierre Schaeffer began his career as a writer, penning various articles and essays for the Revue Musicale, a French journal of music.
11.
Pierre Schaeffer is generally acknowledged as being the first composer to make music using magnetic tape.
12.
Pierre Schaeffer's continued experimentation led him to publish A la Recherche d'une Musique Concrete in 1952, which was a summation of his working methods up to that point.
13.
Pierre Schaeffer left the GRMC in 1953 and reformed the group in 1958 as the Groupe de Recherche Musicale[s].
14.
In 1954 Pierre Schaeffer founded traditional music label Ocora alongside composer, pianist and musicologist Charles Duvelle, with a worldwide coverage in order to preserve African rural soundscapes.
15.
Pierre Schaeffer suffered from Alzheimer's disease later in his life, and died from the condition in Aix-en-Provence in 1995.
16.
Pierre Schaeffer is buried in Delincourt in the very nice and green Vexin region where he used to have his countryside property.
17.
Pierre Schaeffer was thereafter remembered by many of his colleagues with the title, "Musician of Sounds".
18.
Pierre Schaeffer believed traditionally classical music begins as an abstraction that is later produced as audible music.
19.
Pierre Schaeffer developed the concept of including any and all sounds into the vocabulary of music.
20.
Pierre Schaeffer was among the first musicians to manipulate recorded sound for the purpose of using it in conjunction with other sounds in order to compose a musical piece.
21.
Pierre Schaeffer's work is recognized today as an essential precursor to contemporary sampling practices.
22.
Pierre Schaeffer was among the first to use recording technology in a creative and specifically musical way, harnessing the power of electronic and experimental instruments in a manner similar to Luigi Russolo, whom he admired and from whose work he drew inspiration.
23.
Pierre Schaeffer then went on to work as an assistant to Pierre Henry in 1967.
24.
Pierre Schaeffer composed several works by processing the feedback between two tape recorders and a microphone.
25.
Pierre Schaeffer himself was a prize winner at the awards more than once.
26.
Mass-production for his work was limited at best, and each piece was, by Pierre Schaeffer's terms, intended to be released foremost as an expose to the masses of what he believed was a new and somewhat revolutionizing form of music.
27.
Some individual tracks even found their way into the use of other artists, with Pierre Schaeffer's work being fronted in mime performances and ballets.
28.
Apart from his published and publicized music, Pierre Schaeffer conducted several musical presentations via French radio.
29.
Pierre Schaeffer predominantly wrote treatises and essays, but penned a film review and two plays.