Overview

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 Television Francaise (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.

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9781399539234

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Reviews

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. -- Simon Waters, SARC, Queen’s University Belfast & Orpheus Instituut, Ghent. 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. -- Elaine Kelly, The University of Edinburgh

Author Information

Patrick Valiquet has taught music research at Notam, Bidston Observatory, and the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Huddersfield. He studies the history and philosophy of experimental music in the francophone world.

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