Pierre Schaeffer

Considered as the father of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer was an engineer, writer, and pioneer of radio technology. After his early work at the National Radio in Marseille in the 1940s, he founded an experimental studio in Paris where the first works of musique concrète were created, including the Études de bruits (1948).

The five studies proposed at Musica in Prossimità are: Étude aux chemins de fer, created using recordings of trains; Étude aux tourniquets, featuring sounds of spinning tops and percussion instruments; Étude violette and Étude noire, based on piano sounds recorded by Boulez; and Étude pathétique, incorporating sounds of pots, harmonica barges, and piano, along with singing and speech.

First performed on October 5, 1948, in the radio broadcast Concert de bruits, these works represented a milestone in the history of music.

In 2011, The New York Times included Étude aux chemins de fer in its history of the mashup, describing it as "first piece of musique concrète, composed from recordings of trains." Music professor Margaret Schedel, who writes that Schaeffer is widely regarded as the first composer to "create music with pre-recorded media", describes Étude aux chemins de fer as a sound collage with "a prominent place in most histories of electronic and computer music".

Collaboration with Pierre Henry, who would become Schaeffer's closest artistic partner, gave rise to works such as Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-1950). In 1951, Schaeffer founded the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, which in 1958 became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), an international center for sonic experimentation. There, an ontological research took shape, challenging the accepted definitions of the notions of music, listening, timbre, and sound, and ultimately leading to Schaeffer’s monumental treatise, Traité des objets musicaux (1966).

Sat 29.11 7:00pm - Sala Italo Tajo, Pinerolo