TY - JOUR
AU1 - Valiquet,, Patrick
AB - Abstract This article presents a political archaeology of Pierre Schaeffer’s ethics of listening as it appeared in his 1966 Treatise on Musical Objects. Through close readings of writing and teaching material by Schaeffer and his contemporaries, it is argued that Schaeffer’s phenomenology not only systematizes a modern, technologically mediated mode of listening, as his followers have long asserted, but also aligns aural discipline with the emergence of the structuralist ‘human sciences’ in France. The crux of Schaeffer’s work thus lies in his attempt to prove the plurality and cultural relativity of aesthetic experience by establishing underlying cognitive mechanisms as individual and universal. Particular attention is given to structuralist undercurrents in Schaeffer’s accounts of the relationship between sound object and reference structure, and in the system of four ‘listening functions’. The article concludes by sounding new epistemological cautions in response to contemporary calls to reinstate Schaefferian thinking. Published in 1966 and revised in 1977, the Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects) represents the culmination of Pierre Schaeffer’s thinking on the nature of music and sound. Building upon more than a quarter of a century of broadcasting and compositional research, Schaeffer’s book served an immediate function as a research guide for the composers and technicians of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the experimental broadcasting unit Schaeffer had founded in 1958. It has since taken on a reputation as one of the founding texts of the academic electroacoustic tradition as a whole. Now, a half century after its original publication, Schaeffer’s finely wrought meta-language for the relationship between human listening and musical sound is finally beginning to appear in English translation.1 The lack of translation until now, however, has not hampered the growth of a robust and independent anglophone tradition of Schaeffer scholarship. A particularly strong current of critical work builds upon Schaeffer’s thinking about the affordances of an ‘acousmatic’ approach to sound, that is, an encounter with sound in the absence of a visible source.2 With few exceptions, however, the focus has been on putting Schaeffer’s ideas to work rather than on their implications for the descriptive study of music more broadly. Historians have similarly treated Schaeffer’s theoretical work as a footnote to his endeavours as a composer and engineer.3 And yet these studies frequently invite us to think of Schaeffer as establishing, through his practical work, a new ethics of listening proper to electroacoustic media, in which the quantized matrices of melody, harmony, and rhythm fall away to reveal the texturally and temporally continuous flow of a truly ‘post-literate’ sonic experience. The consensus among disciples has been that, to the extent that Schaeffer’s practice anticipated certain developments in the technical practice of electronic music and sound art, the ethics of listening he develops in the treatise is ripe for rediscovery.4 Parallels have been drawn between Schaeffer’s early account of radio and cinema as arts-relais, which figures human mastery as the key to the transformation of media into true instruments, and Walter Benjamin’s call to reclaim the political power of mechanical reproduction.5 But at the same time, a line of critique has emerged charging Schaeffer with an ahistorical, essentialist conception of the technologically mediated listening he sought to theorize.6 As Brian Kane has written, Schaeffer’s theoretical writing ‘silences’ technology in favour of ‘archetypal’ human experience.7 Combine this with the long-standing stereotype of musique concrète as a kind of naturalist foil to the serialist tradition,8 and the deep strain of spiritual commitments that guided Schaeffer’s interest in the actualization of inner human potentials,9 and what emerges is a picture of his treatise as a defence of human agency in the face of avant-garde technocracy. He states in the closing passage that what makes music unique is power to speak directly to the human spirit. ‘Sound objects, musical structures, when they are authentic, no longer have the mission of informing. They detach themselves from the descriptive world, with a kind of bashfulness, to do nothing but speak better to the senses, the mind [esprit], and the heart.’10 Schaeffer’s focus was clearly fixed on the human experience of musical sound. But at the same time he was reluctant to put his treatise forward as the basis for a practical system of composition. In focusing on the perceptual contours of the ‘sound object’ itself, he explicitly casts composition as a matter for ongoing experimentation. He chides the composer who rushes towards musical results without asking fundamental questions about their material and perceptual preconditions.11 He thus presents his treatise not as a guide to composition, but rather as a prolegomenon to the discovery of ‘possible musics’ in the future.12 It follows that, whereas Schaeffer’s work should certainly be understood as ‘reductive’ in a strictly methodological sense, it is not oriented towards reduction in an aesthetic sense. In fact, his phenomenological account of musical sound offers not only a basis for the invention of new musics, but a means of ‘authentic analysis’ applicable in principle to all musics. While the Western tradition subsumes other musics under its own literate categories and thus refuses to hear them as anything but primitive attempts to achieve its own ends, Schaeffer’s solfège13 sets out to clear a new ground for encountering all musics on their own terms. ‘The question is not to transcribe these languages into our alphabet,’ he writes, ‘but to discover the functions of their own musical objects and the original organization that they determine.’14 In this regard, the intended effect of Schaeffer’s reduction might almost be thought of as approaching the ‘irreduction’ later put forward by Bruno Latour.15 He seeks to undermine normative accounts of musical evolution, and to open listeners to a more holistic plurality of sonic ontologies. This interest in defending the human nature of musical meaning in the face of technological change, and by extension protecting the essential diversity of human expression, forms an ethical thread which is woven throughout the treatise. It is possible to illustrate this by reconstructing the conversation between Schaeffer’s treatise and a body of literature with which it is not commonly associated: the structuralist reception of phenomenology, and especially the emergence of the French ‘human sciences’ as famously deconstructed in Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, also published in 1966, and in Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, which appeared the following year.16 Schaeffer’s failure adequately to address this network of associations may go part of the way to explaining the dismissal of his treatise as a work of philosophy in France. It could also help to explain the dismissal of Schaeffer’s work by early structuralist music theorists such as Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Jean Molino. But most importantly, excavating Schaeffer’s engagement with structuralism highlights the limitations of his humanism, and this leads to a number of caveats which must be raised before contemporary readers should embrace it in English translation. Connecting his work with his contemporaries’ views on the ethics of human culture and communication allows us to measure the degree to which debates have moved on from Schaeffer’s concerns. My focus is on the ethics embedded in Schaeffer’s account of the listening subject as it appears in the treatise. As Jairo Moreno has argued, any account of musical objects presupposes a subject who is the ‘locus of cognition’ upon which ideas of listening and understanding can be constructed.17 By reanimating its ethical engagements, I hope to show that Schaeffer’s treatise provides us not so much with a heretical premonition of our musical future, as with a historically specific ‘listener function’,18 a bundle of auditory relationships and knowledge about audition that circumscribes aural subjecthood in terms proper to French intellectual life in the 1960s. If we are to make use of Schaeffer’s ‘interdiscipline’ in the present, I contend, we must remain aware of the political and epistemological baggage this listener function carries. My intention is neither to trace the genesis of Schaeffer’s intentions, nor to place the treatise on a logical continuum with his earlier writings and experiments. Instead I gather textual and intertextual evidence for the treatise’s synchronic interaction with its immediate political and epistemological surroundings. I consider my approach archaeological in a Foucauldian sense.19 I am concerned with the emergence of inter-related concepts across an archive, and not with their putative origins or genesis, which necessarily recede from view.20 I begin by analysing Schaeffer’s practical use of the treatise in conversation with colleagues and students. I then dive into the text itself, focusing on three issues that link Schaeffer to the contemporary French human sciences: the ‘authenticity’ of the musical object, the concept of entropy as a model of nature and culture, and the ‘listening functions’ at the centre of the musical subject. In effect I am arguing that Schaeffer’s treatise offers much more than a guide to the production of musique concrète, which as early as 1958 he seems to have considered to be a failed and partial experiment.21 It sets aside the project of defining a new musical language per se in favour of outlining a functional perspective in which all forms of human sonic experience might be compared in their cultural and historical contingency. But in doing so, I conclude, it also puts forward an image of audition in its putatively natural state that blocks any further appeal to musical or technological difference. theory in practice Schaeffer claims to have begun the treatise in the early 1950s, during his directorship of the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC). In a 1969 interview he recounts that he had rewritten the book in its entirely no fewer than four times in those fifteen years.22 By the time of its first publication, however, it also bore tangible traces of his interaction with students and colleagues at the GRM, the research unit that succeeded the GRMC in 1958, following Schaeffer’s return from a stint training technicians for the French overseas service.23 As Martin Kaltenecker describes, Schaeffer’s group formed a kind of listening community charged with testing and verifying its leader’s pronouncements. Early participants were responsible for classifying sound fragments using a system of punch cards to allow for easy sorting, and audiences were sometimes enlisted as focus groups to measure preference and perception ‘in the wild’.24 ‘The effort of synthesis that [the treatise] represents certainly engages the responsibility of the author,’ Schaeffer writes in the preface to the 1966 edition, ‘but it rests also on the multiple ancillary works and the collaboration of a whole group.’25 By subtitling the work essai interdisciplines—which suggests an attempt to work between disciplines more than something ‘interdisciplinary’, as the expression is now used—Schaeffer signals that he understands the book as falling outside the normal domains of the disciplines it touches upon, including acoustics, physiology, experimental psychology, electronics, and cybernetics.26 The scope of the investigation is accordingly broad. After an introductory chapter justifying the research as a response to a growing crisis of musical communication, the treatise proceeds in seven books. I focus here on the philosophical books—the first, second, and fourth—but many of the arguments I hope to foreground should be understood as extending across the methodological and taxonomical portions of the treatise as well. In the first, entitled Faire de la musique [Making music], Schaeffer highlights the contingent relationship between music and instruments, tracing an evolutionary narrative from the simple ‘Neanderthal’ calabash drum to the ‘acousmatic’ situation opened up by recording technologies. Borrowing freely from information theory, Schaeffer describes the emergence of musical meaning in terms of a balance between repetition and variation.27 The instrument’s fixed properties are part of the sedimented, redundant background against which novel information necessarily emerges. But the situation changes with electroacoustic technologies, in which the sound is not necessarily defined by the physical properties of a source. Unlike the instrumentalist, the sound engineer must now judge the musicality of each sound her equipment makes possible.28 Responsibility for the determination of a sound’s musical potential, which was previously fixed in the construction of musical instruments, is now given to the ear itself.29 In the second book, entitled simply Entendre [Hearing], Schaeffer zeros in on the system of ‘functional’ oppositions at the heart of his model of musical perception. His functions are numbered from 1 to 4, each specifying a relationship between an intention and a type of object: écouter or indexical listening, ouïr or passive reception, entendre or qualitative hearing, and comprendre or understanding. He then proceeds to enumerate the possible circuits and oppositions that can occur between these relational states, contrasting his model with ‘physiological’ and ‘physical’ accounts such as those of Werner Meyer-Eppler and Fritz Winckel.30 He concludes that the crux of musical communication is neither sensory nor acoustic, inviting the reader to imagine ‘an experimental field of specifically musical perception, where the incitement of an exterior signal and the consciousness of a musical meaning would be conveniently confronted’.31 He closes the book with a diagrammatic synthesis showing how the various ‘dualisms’ identified in the functional model can be subsumed in the ‘original unity’ of the sound object as disclosed by ‘reduced listening’.32 After a third book devoted to juxtaposing standard psychoacoustic models of audition, which measures ordered correlations between stimulus and perception, and an ‘experimental’ model, which seeks the origin of musical relations by focusing only on the structure of perception,33 Schaeffer continues with a fourth book in which he posits the necessity of the sound object on a more general level. He opens with a reflection on Edmund Husserl’s notion of epoché, claiming that by bracketing causal relations the listener constitutes the transcendental sound object in experience.34 But he quickly leaves phenomenology behind to develop an account of the relations between object and structure. This section is heavily influenced by the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, especially the notion of the phoneme.35 Here Schaeffer presents comparisons between traditional musical structure, linguistic structure, and the structure of ‘natural sounds’, showing how the sound object takes on meaning through its relations with various ‘codes’.36 He concludes the book with a final pitch for his own research programme, which he suggests will enable the musician to derive new ‘authentic’ codes, practically and inductively, from the preparation and study of sound objects themselves, rather than with the help of pre-determined reference structures.37 Books V and VI present the methodology and the results of this research as it was undertaken by the GRM: the criteria for a morphology and typology of sound objects, and a solfège leading to descriptive analysis and the ‘synthesis of musical structures’. Again, however, Schaeffer is ambivalent about the potential for such a synthesis by composers. He writes: ‘We do not have at our disposal, for the moment, sufficient results to affirm anything at all on the level of possible or desirable syntheses.’38 Then in Book VII, he restates his commitment to discipline as the necessary path by which this synthesis might become possible in the future. The early consensus inside the GRM seems to have been that, because Schaeffer’s book was so idiosyncratically argued and so far-reaching in scope, most readers would miss its core messages without special initiation. Writing in a celebratory issue of the GRM’s in-house journal Cahiers recherche/musique for the tenth anniversary of the treatise’s publication, Schaeffer’s disciple Michel Chion offers this diagnosis of the conditions that seemed to have conspired so quickly against what, in his opinion, should have been a far more ‘explosive’ book: Contemporary music in 1966 was already softly awakening from the great scientistic and unifying dream of the post-war period—do you remember? A thousand years of serial music, an entirely determinate art-science. … Music set about to accept its own madness, its relativity, the contingency and the diversity of its thousand ‘languages’ [langages]. Thus, in an ideological situation that had become hospitable and flexible [souple], the Traité hardly found the resistance to confirm its impact. Furthermore, as it knew neither psychoanalysis, Marxism, nor other current disciplines, it could not count on fashion to carry it. It didn’t address itself except to those whom its ideas really interested; that is to say, to very few people.39 In short, Chion claims, Schaeffer’s early readers found themselves disarmed by a book filled with ideas that may have been all too timely, but which also refused to deal in the ‘pre-emptory and scintillating phrases’ that endowed the works of, say, a Roland Barthes or a Jacques Lacan with such energy for the French intelligentsia. Despite the rapid proliferation of institutions for ‘music research’ closely related to that which Schaeffer had promoted throughout his own institutional career, the Traité had already garnered a reputation as a pétard mouillé, weighed down with empty polemic, and appealing only to the ‘closed sect’ that had begun forming inside the GRM.40 Chion’s eulogy stops enticingly short of naming the specific perpetrators of this injustice, but the general tendency of post-1968 cultural reform was clear. In a 1974 push to depoliticize the French communications sector, the new government of Valéry d’Estaing had dismantled the monopoly of the Office de la Radio-Television Française (ORTF), a move that threatened to leave the GRM stranded. One year away from retirement, Schaeffer’s last major task as director would be to fight for the preservation of the very institution he had fought so vehemently since the end of the war to establish.41 Schaeffer’s efforts did meet some degree of success—the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) took over all of the ORTF’s archival and public outreach services early the following year—but his reputation as a music researcher seems to have been more difficult to salvage. The most important setback came about as a result of the high-profile alliance between d’Estaing’s predecessor Georges Pompidou and Schaeffer’s long-time rival Pierre Boulez. Georgina Born, building on the earlier assessment of Pierre-Michel Menger, characterizes Pompidou’s move as a calculated attempt to place the international enfant terrible of the avant-garde back in the service of national interests after the post-war decline of France’s cultural profile and the political embarrassments of May 1968.42 Anne Veitl suggests that the move reflected the fact that French attitudes towards high culture still excluded radio and television.43 Whatever the case, Boulez’s ascendancy would be confirmed in 1977 with the opening of the lavish Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). In addition to luring away some of the GRM’s precious technical staff, Schaeffer’s followers saw IRCAM as hijacking the GRM’s research mandate in the service of a malicious technocratic positivism.44 Indeed, some commentators saw the ‘music research’ of the GRM’s ORTF phase as a mere stepping stone towards the Boulezian model that eventually eclipsed it.45 Little wonder that Schaeffer’s supporters felt so quickly obliged to distinguish their work from that of outsiders. ‘If we now see well the seductions of a “scientistic” conception of musical research (a feeling of knowledge and of power over sound),’ Chion’s eulogy for the Traité continues, ‘we also see well that SCHAEFFER brought division and doubt to this domain by dealing in truths such as these: sound perceived is not the physical signal, music is not acoustics, it is not absolute structure, but the result of a relation between subject and object.’46 And yet the late twentieth-century Schaefferian literature made little progress in popularizing these distinctions. From the series of guides and lexiques that appeared in France,47 to the various exegeses and expansions proposed in the United Kingdom,48 most readers favoured a view of the treatise as a compendium of practical advice specific to the electroacoustic medium. The GRM’s research department has remained in the shadow of IRCAM, balancing its modest output in software development with a more traditional public life of concert series, pedagogical outreach, and services to composers.49 Meanwhile, in the final years of his life, Schaeffer expressed a palpable dismay, at times bordering on detraction, at the progress of contemporary composition in general.50 Instead of taking up the hard task of arguing for a generalized, ‘authentic’ solfège applicable to all musics, Schaeffer’s disciples had chosen the much less controversial course of ensuring the survival of their own genre. Part of the reason that reception of the treatise remains so troubled and fragmentary may be that it is still so often abstracted from this larger didactic ambition. Of course, the centrality of education in Schaeffer’s career as a whole has not gone unnoticed.51 Beginning with the visits of students like Pierre Henry, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen to the fledgling Club d’essai, Schaeffer’s research into sound was always integrated with pedagogy.52 This commitment grew from the seeds of his work as a Catholic scoutmaster, and was fertilized by his encounter with the self-disciplinary methods of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff during the occupation.53 The GRM launched its informal two-year stage as a prerequisite to membership in 1961. In 1968, this was replaced with a one-year course accredited by the Conservatoire de Paris. Schaeffer took up a faculty post as its director, a move the GRM must have seen as signalling a consecration of their founder’s ideas.54 From that point until the opening of the INA in 1976, the more intensive Conservatoire course served as the GRM’s main intake point for new stagiaires. The fragments of its content that survive paint a remarkably holistic picture of Schaeffer’s outlook. A syllabus circulated to students in advance describes the course in sweeping terms as an ‘experimental’ introduction to the ‘new musical concepts’ and ‘new practices’ brought about by the ‘influence of audio-visual techniques on music’ and the ‘evolution of musical careers as a function of record, radio, cinema and television’.55 The document addresses an audience not only of composers, but of advanced students in all disciplines.56 The mandatory module taught by Guy Reibel and Henri Chiarucci on solfège expérimentale, for example, should be ‘just as useful to the instrumentalist as to the composer, to the orchestral conductor as to the listener, and to all musicians exercising pedagogical or critical responsibilities’.57 The remaining modules fell into three streams acccording to specialism. The first, taught by Bernard Parmegiani and Albert Laracine, offered training in ‘execution in front of the microphone’ for the ‘young virtuosos’ who needed to learn to perform in studio for the technicians of the ORTF. The second, taught by Schaeffer himself with assistant Daniel Charles, was the provocatively titled musique fondamentale. In a series of ‘open discussions’, it promised to cover the state of contemporary music, the development of new materials and forms, the music of non-Western cultures, and the role of music in society. Again, the syllabus strikes a note of movement across disciplines. It specifically invites participation from researchers outside the conservatory, calling emphatically to ‘renew musical culture through a confrontation with other disciplines and through a re-examination of its social functions, and indeed of its organization and its economy’.58 Only the third stream—led by François Bayle and Ivo Malec, and entitled stage de musique expérimentale—places explicit emphasis on composition. And in keeping with the energy of the times, these classes situate musique concrète within broader aesthetic and political concerns. Specifically, Bayle and Malec highlighted the importance of improvised and collective creation, encouraging students to explore theatrical and participatory actions clearly associated with the new politics of artistic liberation. Examples for analysis included the work of utopian collectives like Musica Elettronica Viva, whose performances students also had opportunities to attend in person.59 We can track Schaeffer’s presentation of the treatise in the classroom with the help of notes taken in simplified shorthand by his Québécois student Marcelle Deschênes, who had won a scholarship to attend after completing her examinations in composition under Serge Garant at Université de Montréal.60 Deschênes’s notebook records seven lectures by Schaeffer ranging from the introductory session of 20 November 1968 to an undated session in early February 1969, as well as six solfège sessions and six sessions of musique expérimentale. Rather than follow the book’s argument to the letter, Schaeffer’s seminar samples unevenly from the Introduction and the philosophical Books II and IV. He devotes a full four sessions to the introductory arguments on music’s ‘historical situation’, moving studiously through his theory’s rationale, and interpolating musical and visual illustrations that range from Varèse to gagaku. The emphasis is on understanding musical listening as such, considered separately from any defence of musique concrète. In the first lecture Schaeffer tries to impress upon his students that contemporary music is undergoing a crisis with respect to the legitimacy of its codes. This crisis had been brought about by three factors. First, composers had begun to explore new materials, and thus listeners were confronted with a previously unknown diversity of experimental idioms. Second, technology had transformed both the production of music and the shape of the musical métier. And third, mass communication and globalization had opened listeners around the world to the musics of others; the ‘intellectual colonialism’ of previous generations was being supplanted by a rising curiosity about the plurality of musical expression around the world.61 What is required, Schaeffer goes on to say, is a re-evaluation of all musics under the guidance of a ‘very general humanism’. The new discipline should aspire to the structural universality of Saussure’s linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology, but also harness the empirical and analytical power of recording and broadcast technology.62 This means understanding the shared structures that allow listeners to make sense of music as individuals. One must, he argues, ‘substitute the idea of robust systems relying on notation with a lived music, sensed in diverse ways’. Turning to the listening experience allows us to rethink music in a ‘modern’ way, recognizing it as having a ‘relativity’ akin to Einsteinian physics.63 Schaeffer spends the next three sessions expanding on the historical and aesthetic conditions that demanded this renewal. How do we square this emphasis on plurality and relativity with Schaeffer’s reputation as a strict disciplinarian and a purveyor of essentialist ‘myths’ about the relationship between listening and technology?64 Doesn’t the notion of reduced listening stand in the way of musical pluralism?65 Several aspects of the treatise suggest that the explanation for these inconsistencies implies a structuralist perspective. The first is the methodical course of empirically informed classification Schaeffer insists upon as a prerequisite to musical invention, an approach Luis-Manuel Garcia describes as ‘grounded in epistemologies of laboratory science’ and ‘lavishly taxonomic’.66 Indeed, early students found themselves totally disarmed in their efforts to derive compositional directives from Schaeffer’s complex matrix of phenomenal categories.67 Perhaps this explains why prominent figures like Boulez dismissed the treatise as the work of a mere technician.68 But structuralism also provides an important context for Schaeffer’s reception of phenomenology, which several commentators have criticized as incomplete or erroneous.69 When the topic of the phenomenological reduction arises in the fifth and sixth lectures of the 1968 stage, Schaeffer characterizes it as only one of many paths at a disciplinary ‘crossroads’. Tellingly, his attention is not on the short technical explanation of the epoché in Book IV, but rather on the division of ‘listening functions’ that opens Book II.70 This suggests that Schaeffer’s interest is less in the object itself than in the complex play of musical difference afforded by relations between objects and listeners. towards an aural authenticity Schaeffer prefaces his brief account of epoché in the treatise with a reflection on the value of the phenomenological enterprise. Instead of using philosophy to deduce an experimental method, Schaeffer claims to have arrived at a philosophical explication only through slow and painstaking practice: ‘[f]rom fortuitous discovery to experiment [expérience], from experiment to explication, we have followed the normal trajectory of all experimental research.’71 He realizes that this process has no inherent logical endpoint, and thus his engagement with phenomenology must be pragmatic. ‘Let us strive not to lose ourselves in a debate that has gone on for centuries, and recognize at least, when we find them formulated by philosophers, the principles that correspond to our implicit experience. Let us choose among the intellectual tools that others have spent their lives forging, those which are adapted to our needs.’72 And yet, in the following paragraph, he makes his famous claim to have been ‘doing phenomenology without knowing it, which is better, all things considered, than talking about phenomenology without practising it’.73 In a sense, Schaeffer is implying here that his experiments would have had the same results if he had never heard of phenomenology and continued to follow his ‘implicit experience’. So what value would his claim to phenomenological ‘correspondence’ have had for his initial readers? What intellectual links would such a cursory gesture to the phenomenological tradition have made? Most commentators focus on the phenomenological sources cited directly in the treatise. Makis Solomos points to the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who until his sudden death in 1961 was the main proponent of the tradition in France, and whom Schaeffer cites directly.74 But Solomos also notes that the typo-morphology and the solfège, which constitute the bulk of the treatise, are more phenomenological in style than in substance. The descriptive tables in Book VI, for example, treat sound objects as if they were sensations independent of perception, and thus discard whatever remains of their pre-subjective universality.75 Kane argues against Solomos that Schaeffer’s phenomenology was primarily Husserlian, pointing to the increasing availability of Husserl’s work in France through translations by Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Suzanne Bachelard, and highlighting Schaeffer’s relatively strict account of the epoché.76 Both connections are important for understanding how the reduction operates in the treatise, but they leave the connection between the reduction and the taxonomies unexplained. By looking closer at the public life of phenomenology around the time of the publication of the treatise, we can reconstruct the bridge between the ‘lived experience’ of reduction and the ‘functional’ relations of the solfège. Schaeffer’s reading of the reduction comes quite late in the French reception of phenomenology. By the time the treatise was finally published the phenomenological method had undergone several waves of reinterpretation as political and technical debates shifted from the existentialist reception that dominated the war years to the structuralist one that emerged in the 1950s.77 For the existentialist thinkers, phenomenology was far removed from Husserl’s detached, formalist search for universal essences. Following Heidegger, they stood for a phenomenology that privileged situated, lived experience and personal responsibility.78 Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, accused Husserl of being ‘a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist’, so trapped in his ideal world of functional descriptions of essences that he was unable to grasp the ‘existential dialectic’, the relationship of the thinking mind or cogito to the ‘totality of being which constitutes human reality’.79 Many among the existentialists also came under the influence of Russian emigré Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s phenomenology,80 discarding the transcendental subject of the Husserlian reduction for a historical subject in open-ended, dialectical progress. Kojève’s Hegel appealed strongly to a generation forced to reconstruct its ethical outlook in the aftermath of war. ‘Hegel’s thought is existentialist’, argued Merleau-Ponty in a 1946 article, ‘in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsibility and which tries to understand itself.’81 The existentialists replaced the question of disclosing essences in their purity with a dialectical critique of values that foregrounded the interrelationship between the meaning in things and the meaning proffered by consciousness.82 As Sartre argued, there could be no meaning except in the situated, intentional choice of a free, individual human subject, and thus the basis of moral behaviour was taking responsibility for one’s own role in constructing the world.83 The existentialists remained influential long after the war, but their ‘humanist’ message quickly sprouted a variety of anti-humanist reactions. By the early 1950s, the existentialist emphasis on freedom and authenticity was under attack from young philosophers on the left reading Husserl for his work on the sciences rather than as a theorist of ‘bourgeois subjectivity’, and by Christians seeking to counteract Sartre’s atheism.84 Schaeffer’s position in the treatise is ambiguous, but his optimism about the universality of individual experience, suspicion about the reach of modern science, and unorthodox spiritual values seem to place him more often on the side of the humanists.85 By listening beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ Schaeffer seeks an ‘authentic sound object … accessible if possible to every listening person’.86 He was not alone in expressing such views. As music critic for Les Temps modernes, the serialist composer René Leibowitz had been a vocal proponent of an existentialist ethics since the end of the war.87 The Russian émigré Boris de Schloezer also applies something approaching existentialist phenomenology as an analytical method in his 1947 Introduction à J.-S. Bach. Completed during the war, Schloezer’s book takes a deceptively experimental approach to its rather traditional subject matter. Instead of the digestible ‘life and works’ promised by its title, Introduction à J.-S. Bach sets out towards the much more ambitious goal of ‘rethinking the musical fact’ as such.88 While Schloezer’s conclusions converge on the ‘concrete ideality’ of the musical work in a manner reminiscent of Roman Ingarden,89 his method and jargon anticipate certain aspects of Schaeffer’s treatise. Charting a synthetic course between subjectivism and objectivism similar to Merleau-Ponty’s in the introduction to Phénoménologie de la perception, Schloezer considers how the musical work can remain a ‘concrete’ thing at the same time as being independent of the three modes of materiality he identifies as pertaining to musical phenomena: the graphic materiality of the score, the vibrational materiality of acoustic waves, and the psychological materiality of the ‘mental attitudes’ to which the sounds give rise in the minds of listeners.90 After considering the differences between musical and linguistic signification, in terms that strongly resemble Schaeffer’s in chapter 17 of the Traité, Schloezer concludes that, while in linguistic communication the sounding signifier is an arbitrary element effectively effaced by the mental signified, in music the sonic is heard and interpreted as such, not decoded into some other form but immanent to the musical experience.91 Understanding music consists for Schloezer not in mastering a reference system of scales and chords, but in adopting a particular kind of listening attitude: not just hearing (entendre), but attending (écouter) to the series of sounds with a view towards comprehending (comprendre) it as a system of immanent relations.92 Curiously close matches to Schaeffer’s language and approach can also be found. Schloezer uses the term ‘objet sonore’, for example, to distinguish the musical work from its acoustic materiality,93 the term ‘allure’ to distinguish the experienced sense of temporal bearing from the absolute values of tempo and note duration,94 and the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ to distinguish the real and specific aspects of musical phenomena from their discursive descriptions. A similar concern with authenticity informs the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet’s formidable 1961 volume Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine.95 Conceived in 1943, sketched between 1948 and 1951, and first published in 1961, Ansermet’s book is encyclopedic in scope.96 Its 700 pages include discussions of musical consciousness, the auditory horizon, the embodiment of music in sound, the form of musical expression, and the evolution of music through history, alongside nearly 200 pages of ‘marginal notes’ on science, history, and the ‘structures of reflection’. Like Schloezer and Schaeffer, Ansermet understood music to have form and meaning only in the immediate flow of the listening experience. While acousticians might look for the reactions of the ear to physical waves, for Ansermet the crux of the musical experience lay in the way these waves, via the auditory apparatus, could be resolved into chords and intervals by an active musical consciousness.97 Ansermet thus sought to ground an authentic listenership attuned to organic, pre-scientific reflection, the authority of which he saw as under assault by the forces of scientism and an ascendant serialist avant-garde.98 Lured by Husserl’s mathematical writings, however, Ansermet concludes that the correlation between acoustic vibration and musical apperception must be governed by a transcendental system of ‘noetic logarithms’, the exposition of which occupies much of the opening chapter and several of the appendices. Interest in Ansermet’s project has since been overshadowed by ridicule and dismissal.99 Nevertheless, Schaeffer was clearly aware of his precursors. He devotes chapter 14 of his earlier book À la recherche d’une musique concrète almost entirely to the discussion of Ansermet’s sketches of Les Fondements, which were presented at early meetings of the International Music Council in Paris. Schaeffer is dubious of his colleague’s mathematical pretensions, but strongly approves of the system to the extent that it denounces serialist music as ‘inauthentic’.100 Although it contains no explicit citations of Schloezer’s work, Schaeffer’s 1952 book does contain frequent references to the work of Bach, and at one point speculates on the fruitfulness of an attempt to apply Gestalt theories to Bach that obviously recalls Schloezer’s Introduction.101 Conversation around Schloezer’s use of phenomenology aired prominently both in Les Temps modernes and elsewhere in years following the war,102 and Schloezer was also among the most notable reviewers of Schaeffer’s À la recherche.103 By the time the treatise appeared in 1966, however, phenomenology’s force of attraction in French intellectual culture had diminished in the face of sustained anti-humanist critique.104 The German left attacked phenomenology’s persistent attachment to Heidegger. Adorno, for example, saw the ‘authentic’ space left over after the phenomenological reduction as an abdication of critical engagement.105 A second line of attack came from the existentialists’ students in France. Foucault was particularly sceptical of his teacher Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to take the lived experience of the body as the condition of existence of all knowledge.106 In Les Mots et les choses (1966), Foucault chides the existential phenomenologist for claiming to prove the transcendence of the body, but providing only empirical observations of its situated conditions.107 To assert that the horizon of practices and beliefs formed the necessary background of all thought, while at the same time asserting the methodological necessity of standing outside that background, was a clear contradiction.108 In short, for Foucault phenomenology took for granted the existence of the enculturated and historically sedimented ‘man’ it sought to establish as primary.109 Schaeffer’s treatise, invoking phenomenological privilege long after the existentialist boom of the 1940s, is significantly more susceptible to such criticisms than the work of Ansermet or Schloezer. Accordingly, Schaeffer’s solution to the problem of background knowledge diverges significantly from Husserl's idealism. the question of structure In the treatise, Schaeffer folds the problem of background knowledge into the concept of ‘structure’. He distinguishes three levels of structure at the close of chapter 15, for example, first for the relations between items in a set (such as the notes in a melody), second for the relations between figure and ground, and third for the way the object is conditioned by a system of reference.110 ‘Remove this object from the structure to which it belongs’, he writes in chapter 16, ‘and just as soon it becomes structure itself, and can hardly be appreciated except by mediating its resolution in objects at the level below.’111 Elsewhere, the universality of the object–structure pair provides the conceptual basis for a practical distinction between ‘typology’ and ‘morphology’. Where the typological procedure involves extracting sound objects from an undifferentiated continuum, the morphological procedure requires the objects to be reheard in terms of their contextures, that is, as structures of interrelated sub-objects themselves.112 His approach towards structuralism as such is tentative, and, like his phenomenology, couched in claims of pragmatic caution and musical particularism. The ambivalence that Claude Lévi-Strauss famously expresses towards musique concrète in the Overture to his 1984 book The Raw and the Cooked has been cited to suggest that Schaeffer should be considered as an object of structuralist criticism rather than a structuralist himself.113 But Schaeffer’s treatise does frequently respond to structuralist ideas, and his commitment to phenomenology would probably have had structuralist overtones for his earliest audiences. Even Merleau-Ponty had negotiated a synthesis of existentialist and Saussurean principles by the end of his life.114 ‘For the philosopher’, Merleau-Ponty writes in Signs, the presence of structure outside us in natural and social systems and within us as symbolic function points to a way beyond the subject-object correlation which has dominated philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. By showing us that man is eccentric to himself and that the social finds its center only in man, structure particularly enables us to understand how we are in a sort of circuit with the socio-historical world.115 Schaeffer seems to have been equally receptive to structuralist ideas about the function of culture and history. We can track this reception in part through Schaeffer’s engagement with information theory and cybernetics. American ideas about communication and control were crucial to the development of French structuralism, and they were also swiftly absorbed into popular discourse about the significance of modern technoscience.116 Yet accounts of avant-garde interest in information theory have mainly focused on its use in formal construction, and particularly its centrality to the aesthetics of serialism.117 Increasingly, however, information theory is recognized as having played a much wider and more generative role in musical thinking between the 1950s and 1970s, particularly in the sense that it put situated perception at the centre of systematic inquiry.118 Diverging from the stereotype of a mechanistic science expressed in terms of hard-wired laws and offering only strictly defined paths for attaining authority, cybernetics presented itself as a set of open-ended strategies supported by exchanges in legitimacy across disciplines.119 Absolute formulae and normative abstractions were replaced with heuristic ‘handbooks’ aimed at democratizing and hybridizing knowledge production.120 Schaeffer’s project is shot through with anxieties over aesthetic and epistemological contingency, the challenges of induction and statistical prediction, and the breakdown of institutional authority, all of which are hallmarks of an information theoretical approach.121 Direct references to information theory first appear in Schaeffer’s 1952 book À la recherche d’une musique concrète, where his understanding seems to have been mediated through the assistance of the engineer and philosopher Abraham Moles. In addition to crediting Moles as a co-author on the book’s final section, a sketch of the Solfège de l’objet sonore that would later be revised and expanded to form Book VI of the Traité, Schaeffer cites Moles’s writing at length, focusing in particular on the emerging understanding of music in terms of information transmission.122 At this point, Schaeffer’s estimation of Moles is highly enthusiastic. Moles passed through Schaeffer’s studio as an adviser while working on his first doctoral thesis in physics in Paris.123 Following this stint with Schaeffer, he moved on first to the Swiss conductor Hermann Scherchen’s private electroacoustic studio in Gravesano,124 and then, with the help of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, to the new Columbia–Princeton studio in New York City.125 Moles draws heavily on his work with the GRMC in his 1958 philosophy thesis, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique, and his 1960 Rockefeller Foundation report, Les Musiques expérimentales.126 Here again we find liberal use of the terms of existential phenomenology: references to recording technology as providing a basis for ‘eidetic variation’, for example, and praise for the ‘authenticity’ of experimental composition in comparison with traditional methods.127 Moles’s main concern, however, was to develop a method for measuring the quantities of information contained in particular musical messages, and thereby to derive inductive judgements about their aesthetic value. For Moles, music generated meaning by imposing an essentially human order on the chaos of the natural universe.128 The backbone of his aesthetics was the concept of entropy. Bracketing its origin in the technical language of thermodynamics, cyberneticians like Moles reduced entropy to a statistical formula for determining information content. If the receiver knew all the units in a series of values sent across a channel in advance, the amount of information transmitted would be zero. If the receiver knew none of the values in advance, however, the series would amount to absolute chaos. Calculating the entropy of the message allowed the receiver, knowing the probabilities of each unit in the code or language of communication, to calculate the incoming message’s position on a scale between these extremes of order and disorder.129 Several translations of the notion of entropy into musical terms were attempted around the same time. Leonard Meyer, for example, gives the role of stabilizing nature to the diachronic progress of ‘style’, which provides a ‘complex set of probabilities’ internalized by composers and listeners alike to shape their ‘habit responses’ and ‘latent expectations’.130 Meaningful emotional responses to music arise for Meyer when these norms are broken—that is, when an individual becomes aware of a deviation, and his or her latent expectations become ‘active’. For Meyer, it follows that information quanta provide the source both of originality within the work and of stylistic progress in history.131 Moles’s version, developed independently of Meyer’s, is more complex and synchronic. Dividing the musical signal into a ‘semantic message’ consisting of quantifiable, convention-bound elements, and an ‘aesthetic message’ consisting of more or less ineffable states of perception, Moles identifies no fewer than eight simultaneous entropic fields which ‘determine each other in an irregular alternation’ during the listening experience itself.132 Schaeffer would later re-evaluate his collaboration with Moles, who appears in the treatise only as a scapegoat for the final remnants of the ‘scientific attitude’ that Schaeffer saw himself as having surpassed in the transition from musique concrète to recherche musicale. Indeed, Moles’s later writings continue to represent the sound object as a physical thing first and foremost, even including diagrams representing it as a solid three-dimensional mass, to Schaeffer’s chagrin.133 The treatise takes several swipes at the engineer’s ‘imprudent’ materialism.134 But Schaeffer continued to model his understanding of the sound object’s relationship with the historical and cultural background on the logic of entropy. This happens most prominently in the ‘dialectical’ pairing Schaeffer constructs between the two basic forces he calls permanence and variation.135 In the prototypical form of the musical instrument, for example, Schaeffer finds a stable and repeatable set of material ‘values’ that must then be varied into a collection of ‘characters’ to form musical utterances.136 His vision of possible compositional extensions to the treatise hinges upon the potential for object–structure relationships in which, rather than the object being articulated in relation to a pre-existing structure, an ‘authentic structure’ might be generated from the qualities of the objects themselves.137 In this sense, Schaeffer’s understanding of musical entropy is not far removed from contemporaries like Boulez or the spectralists.138 But the logic of entropy also exerts an influence on the treatise in the guise of a general ontological politics.139 As Morag Grant has suggested in her work on serialist theory, entropy bears a strong resemblance to the Hegelian dialectic of nature and Geist, and thus provides a scientific explanation for the historical progress of musical culture that could not have been far from the minds of post-war theorists.140 Old-school structuralists like Lévi-Strauss took a pessimistic view, deploying the notion of dynamic equilibrium to relativize the mechanical civilization that threatened to repress cultural diversity and alienate the authentic subject.141 Thermodynamic metaphors also offered a subtle means of resistance to the historical determinism of Marxist orthodoxy.142 The new science of indeterminacy placed the observer of history and culture inside an open system, foregrounding the way techniques of knowledge and measurement construct their objects.143 Schaeffer’s proposal for recherche musicale is similarly anti-determinist, figuring the acousmatic outlook as a response to the impasse of mounting musical complexity.144 His overarching interest is in holding back the advance of musicological rationalization to preserve the natural plurality that human musical communication has generated over the course of its history, and indeed would continue to generate if enabled to develop authentically. the four listening functions Accordingly, Schaeffer’s main theoretical task is to account for the natural dynamics of individual perceptual structure. Jakobson’s turn from phonetics to phonology—from the science of vocal production to the play of phonemes as a synchronic system—is a frequent point of reference.145 Schaeffer first establishes the relations he sees as underlying auditory attention in his ‘Table of Listening Functions’, which appears on page 116 of the 1966 edition of the treatise. The table places four implicit levels of aural consciousness on a matrix distinguishing them in relation to a set of criteria for auditory sign construction: écouter, which Chion explains as ‘lending the ear [to a sound source] through the intermediary of sound’ or ‘treating sound as an index of its source’; ouïr, or passively perceiving sound as such, with no attentional separation from the general acoustic background; entendre, which is to ‘manifest a listening intention’, or to select the qualities of a sound that are of interest in direct relation to other sounds; and comprendre, which is to grasp the meaning and values that correspond to the sound as an abstract sign, as in language.146 Crucially, each function includes both a listening behaviour and a description of its semiotic correlates, the different sorts of meaning or reference it engages. Perhaps because the terms Schaeffer chooses are so difficult to translate from French to English, anglophone scholars have written a great deal on their contrasting meanings. They are often discussed separately as a set of independent ‘attitudes’ or ‘modes’.147 Kane in Sound Unseen, for example, treats the listening functions as an unordered set of ‘noetic acts’, each of which corresponds to a different ‘noemic’ category of sound objects.148 From this perspective, Schaeffer may appear to have simply reinvoked the familiar modernist distinction between active attention and passive distraction, between listening and merely hearing.149 Ian Biddle, for example, places Schaeffer’s programme under the sign of a ‘fixated listening’, ordered by modernity to ‘hold listening in place’ and ‘keep the doors of the concert hall firmly closed’.150 But such a reading fails to do justice to the order and juxtaposition of the functions. Schaeffer’s use of the table in the treatise foregrounds not the unique quality of the individual categories, but the relations made possible by the binary oppositions between them. Listeners are not meant to fall in a fixed mode or function by habit, but rather to follow what Chion refers to as perceptual ‘circuits’ between the sectors of the matrix depending on the objects and intentions involved.151 The functions are numbered from 1 to 4, ‘like the hands of a clock’, and arranged into four quadrants that divide them according to two ‘dualisms’: ‘abstract’ in the left column versus ‘concrete’ in the right column; and ‘objective’ in the top row versus ‘subjective’ in the bottom row.152 There are thus two functions in which meaning is derived from outward reference points—comprendre (referential or symbolic) and écouter (indexical)—and two which are directed by inner apperception—entendre (selective) and ouïr (receptive). Likewise there are two functions orientated by properties Schaeffer considers to be abstract—comprendre (sign values) and entendre (qualities of the sound itself that permit it to be divided and classified)—and two by those he considers to be concrete—écouter (agency, causality, and materiality) and ouïr (the sonic as such). Other distinctions that appear in the course of Schaeffer’s argument map onto the table in a similar way. For instance, the concrete listening common to all animals with ears (écouter and ouïr) is ‘natural’ for Schaeffer, while the deductive, abstract listening of convention-bound humans (entendre and comprendre) is ‘cultural’.153 The play of oppositions that the table of functions makes possible thus reveals the structural relations that underlie all auditory awareness.154 An intersubjective consensus may be reached that an object fits with a particular category after repeated listenings, but this process must be mediated by analysis.155 One place this heuristic and relational understanding of the listening functions arises is in Schaeffer’s discussion of the differences between music and language. Both, he claims, are systems of signs issuing from a common material medium, and studying them thus calls upon a parallel set of disciplinary formations, focused on either signifier or signified, in synchrony or diachrony.156 Each system, however, suppresses a different quadrant in the table of listening functions. Linguistic listening discards ouïr, having no use for the reception of raw sonic detail, while musical listening discards comprendre, being unconcerned with symbolic reference.157 The two kinds of communication are therefore distinguished primarily in terms of the relations they tolerate between the four functions, and not in terms of modes of listening in isolation. This distinction undergirds a further point in Schaeffer’s comparison between musical and linguistic signs. Here he cites Saussure’s well-known axiom that the material signifier (which for Schaeffer is equivalent to the object of ouïr) has a merely arbitrary relationship to its signified (which for Schaeffer is the object of comprendre). Schaeffer, however, asserts that the level of the sonic material is a necessary and fundamental component of musical communication, while the symbolic level of shared mental references is not.158 This for Schaeffer places language closer to the influence of cultural norms for establishing shared codes, and music closer to the supposedly raw forms of nature. Schaeffer also uses the listening functions to structure the diagram entitled Programme de la recherche musicale at the end of Book IV, where he details the differences between traditional music studies and the experimental music research programme of the GRM.159 Here again the quadrants are not divided between the two cultures, as if each privileged a different kind of listening in static opposition with the other. For Schaeffer, the same set of functions provides the basis for the way both formations use listening practice as a source of knowledge about sound. Where a conservatoire training calls upon the capacity for écoute in a course of lutherie or organology, the programme of experimental music research brings écoute into play with the synthesis of new musical objects. Similarly, where a conservatoire student needs to perform ouïe in perfecting his or her instrumental execution, an experimental music researcher would do the same in a project of typology. Schaeffer draws further analogies between the entendres of orchestration and morphology, and between the comprendres of traditional music theory and experimental solfège. The distinction between the two systems is not the functions they privilege, but the circuit they take between the functions. Traditional music training moves from the objective listening of comprendre and écouter to deduce the subjective, while experimental music research begins from the subjective levels of entendre and ouïr to induce the objective. The homology Schaeffer sets up between the two disciplinary configurations points to a synchronic viewpoint that emerges across the treatise as a whole. Schaeffer wants to put the treatise forward not only as an authentic basis for the production of ‘musics to be invented’, but as a means of comparison between any disparate set of musical traditions.160 A diachronic comparison, for Schaeffer, presumes that other traditions should be thought of as progressing inevitably towards the Western system of melodico-harmonic relations. This is mistaken, he claims, because it wrongly identifies tonality as the fundamental structure of Western music. What Schaeffer proposes instead is to figure all traditions as equally contemporary—not ordered in a succession from primitive to advanced, but equally (if differently) invested in the fundamental structures revealed by the discovery of the listening functions and the relational complex of sound objects. The listening functions are not the achievement of a particular kind of musical thinking, but the ‘common trunk’ of all musics, agnostic to the particular ‘dominant perceptions’, ‘families’ of sounds, and musical ‘values’ that human musics might privilege.161 Taking issue at once with Theodor Adorno’s dismissal of psychology in Philosophie der neuen musik, and with serialist attempts to innovate at the level of musical codes, Schaeffer suggests that the goal of musical research should be to abandon prescriptive schemas altogether in favour of a deeper understanding of music’s basis in consciousness. The result should be a multiplication of musical difference, not only at the level of code, but also in the elementary materials and meanings music engages.162 We certainly need to be cautious about the amount of structuralist ambition we read into Schaeffer’s project. Proponents of a systematic semiology of music like Nattiez and Molino treated Schaeffer as a little more than a precocious amateur, acknowledging his insight into the mounting crisis of musical legitimacy instigated by the avant-garde and its technologies, but dismissing his core concepts as confused and misdirected.163 As Carlos Palombini has argued, the combination of phenomenological and structuralist influences in the treatise presents us with an ‘invitation to a generous misreading’.164 But it is unfair to presume that Schaeffer’s theoretical ambitions were unrealized simply because they were eclectic. The period in which Schaeffer worked has been described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank as ‘a fold between modern and postmodern ways of hypothesizing about the brain and mind’.165 The idea that human cognition was a sort of computer had just appeared on the horizon, but without the technology to model it in any useful way, researchers found themselves free to speculate about how the ‘software’ of consciousness might operate. In this regard, Schaeffer’s project was very much of its time. But this reading also brings new inconsistencies to the fore. In reducing the sound object to its perceptual correlates, and formalizing the production of meaningful sonic relations as a commonly held ‘structure of perception’, Schaeffer leaves little room for a positive account of musical inscription. His logocentrism, to borrow Derrida’s term, absorbs the influences of both Husserl and Saussure, who persistently downgrade writing to an act of violence against human expression. Since acoustic vibration is already a mediation for Schaeffer, notation can be cast aside as exterior and instrumental.166 Musical forms shaped by notation become pathological. Sound recording, which provides the basis for both reduced listening itself and for intersubjective consensus between listeners, does not at first appear to count for Schaeffer as a form of inscription. Having reached a certain ‘level of fidelity’, the function of the apparatus changes from ‘reproduction’ to ‘reconstitution’, allowing the listener to shape sound directly as sound instead of as the result of a mediating process.167 The machine becomes a transparent prosthesis to the listener’s internal selection mechanism, which Schaeffer privileges as the universal source of musical meaning. Similarly, Schaeffer’s listening functions leave no space for a situated, embodied aurality. Bodies, desires, and identities are completely evacuated, along with their sometimes turbulent social and political conditions. There is no account of pleasure or power,168 and since Schaeffer misreads Saussure’s langue–parole distinction as an analogue of his own distinction between the abstract and the concrete, there is no proper place for the consideration of differences in performance or competence.169 Like the psycho-acousticians in Jonathan Sterne’s account of ‘perceptual technics’, and contrary to his reputation as an empiricist, Schaeffer conducted his research as if he were investigating human listening as such, not in the interest of finding out about any listener’s actual experiences.170 In this respect Schaeffer’s theory again suffers from the same faults as his structuralist contemporaries, failing to encompass any means of resistance to the polarized order of functional relations.171 Conclusion Schaeffer’s colleagues at the GRM found the tenets of the treatise less accessible on the page than in practice. ‘The TOM [i.e. Traité des objets musicaux] is … a reservoir of provisional ideas to be called into question’, explains François Delalande in a 1976 colloquium collecting views on the book’s immediate legacy.172 Bayle is more critical: ‘TOM is an edifice constructed in a desert, and we must salute it as such, but it was not nourished by its author. Once it was written, Schaeffer let it fall. That’s why this difficult concept [of the object], separated from its operational aspect, has fallen behind.’173 Quite early on, then, consensus seems to have decided that Schaeffer’s work should be treated more as a spur to creative invention than as a rigorous analytical system. ‘€As it was for [Marx’s] Capital€’, speculates Malec, ‘nobody will read the treatise. It will be the least read book, but it may incidentally be the most used.’174 Writing in the same volume, Schaeffer seems almost resigned this fate, describing his book self-deprecatingly as the ‘appraisal of an incomplete research’.175 But the unanswered question of a compositional system sufficient for the ‘operational’ goals of the GRM is, for Schaeffer, beside the point. ‘I have tirelessly warned composers and researchers’, he writes, ‘against an all too common temptation given the general uncertainty: to want to found, on sonic criteria, a musical organization; to want to deduce, from the knowledge of objects, that of the structures that would arise, in fact, from a complementary research.’176 Schaeffer thus continued to assert that his primary achievement was not the invention of a particular music by manipulating sounds in the studio, but rather the provision of a basis for understanding all musics as enmeshed in the structure of sonic experience. Beginning from the objects given to perception and the properties of the perceptual field, it is thus logical to predict, among the many possible musics, differences more radical still than between, say, figurative painting and abstract painting. … The presence of sound and the occupation of duration open onto many domains. Music is plural.177 The use of the treatise has of course not been limited to the acousmatic tradition. We might extend some credit to Schaeffer for helping to spark the spectralist movement, for instance, not only for his deep interest in timbre, but also for his performative stance as a theorist of musical and cultural pluralism.178 Yet most still take Schaeffer’s work as a philosophy of specifically ‘concrete’ composition, in spite of the fact that its author claimed to be neither a philosopher nor, paradoxically, a committed proponent of musique concrète. Instead, readers should heed Schaeffer’s advice to strike the right balance between making and listening. From this more holistic perspective, what Schaeffer calls for is the rediscovery of human auditory experience as a basis for knowledge about music. While it may suggest guidelines for the invention of new musical languages, it does not do so exclusively. Schaeffer’s primary concern is with providing an ethical account of the substance of musical consciousness itself: We have tried to describe … the birth of unconscious musical systems, forged simultaneously by practice and auditory training, which makes the members of a musical civilization so skilled at recognizing the pertinent traits (those that play a role in structure), at the same time that it makes them practically deaf to the non-pertinent traits. … We can now better measure the strength of this training, and all the apprenticeship we need to unlearn it and hear the music of others.179 This project of unlearning places Schaeffer much closer to present-day musicology than his followers normally acknowledge. Using the conceptual tools at his disposal, Schaeffer sought not to establish a single, correct musical knowledge, but to understand and democratize the means of producing musical knowledge. In this regard his work can be read as part of the long line of cybernetically inspired musical humanists insisting on the unpredictability of musical expression, its continuity with language and other forms of sonic gesture, and the entanglement of the researcher in the inductive study of musical knowledge.180 Many aspects of Schaeffer’s ethical message would re-emerge decades later, albeit largely stripped of their speculative structuralist formalities, in the guise of ‘postmodern’, ‘decentred’, or ‘relational’ musicologies, attuned to the substance of musical mediation and difference.181 Of course, Schaeffer did not arrive at the kind of interdisciplinary ‘agonism’ argued for recently by Georgina Born, for example, nor did he discover any useful way of moving beyond his immediate and highly schematic picture of the listening experience to account for music’s wider social conditions. But he did recognize that understanding musical experience in its diversity required an epistemological and ontological break with cloistered formalisms, and that achieving such a break meant questioning any normative hierarchy that would measure musical knowledges on a scale of technical or material sophistication. The treatise achieves this advance, however, by granting the individual listener complete proprietary power over the production of musical meaning. In this sense, it falls neatly into the ‘early sound studies’ paradigm identified by Benjamin Steege with respect to the work of Murray Schafer, an outlook ‘preoccupied with cordoning off, naturalization, or intensive policing of a specific difference of the aural’.182 Both Ian Biddle and Peter Szendy have further identified Schaeffer’s theory with the emergence of individualized modes of musical reception under late capitalism.183 Recording technology, argues Szendy, allows us to make music of our listening itself, and thus to exchange our listenings with others. In Schaeffer’s model, the perceptual structure underlying this music of listening is innate and individual. In order to establish an operational distinction between nature and culture—the natural being chaotic and permanent, while the cultural is normative and contingent184—Schaeffer pushes the listening functions into a transcendent, universal position. The interrelated complexes of sound objects and musical structures that the listening subject constitutes need to transcend nature and culture in order to be truly universal. Schaeffer’s listener becomes like Latour’s ‘modern anthropologist’, severing any deeper links with exotic nature-cultures,185 and music itself becomes a kind of ‘supplement’ to the division.186 Schaeffer makes no attempt to move beyond this impasse, whether by questioning the dialectical history of the nature–culture binary in music, or by trying to conceive of a common ground beyond the individual mind that could encompass the variety of musics and auralities as a real plurality. And therefore Schaeffer’s interdiscipline falls short of recent attempts to rethink the composition of cultural polities along ‘equivocal’ lines of material difference.187 He does not equip us with the tools to ‘hear the hearing of others’, as Sterne suggests should be the goal of contemporary sound studies.€188 While he is prepared to embrace and defend plurality at the level of musical experience and expression, he still sees the diversity of cultures and natures as a kind of veil concealing the absolute reality of perception in its natural state. His faith in the universal structure of consciousness overrides any intuition about volatilities or differences in experience.189 In many ways, however, Schaeffer’s listener also undermines this faith. Vehemently resistant to deductive reasoning as to the content of experience, Schaeffer largely abstracts the subject from liberal notions of sovereignty or self-interest. Understood relationally as a system of attentional circuits, Schaeffer’s listening functions need no correlation with states of self-reflection. They are simply encounters between a kind of pre-personal listening apparatus and a field of sonic intensities. While the treatise portrays recording technologies as an instrumental extension of the listening body, the relationship could easily have been formulated the other way around. What Schaeffer leaves us with is thus a series of open-ended challenges: to multiply the methodological possibilities for music and sound studies; to complicate our understanding of what is human in technologically mediated musical behaviour; and to attend more closely to the entanglement of bodies, disciplines, cultures, and machines in listening experience. This work was supported by a postdoctoral bursary from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, grant number 2015-B3-182905. I would like to thank John Dack, Kyle Devine, Brian Kane, and Peter Nelson for their comments on earlier drafts. Thanks are due as well to Marcelle Deschênes, who provided primary sources from her private archives in Montreal. Footnotes " 1 Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. John Dack and Christine North (Berkeley, 2012); idem, Treatise on Musical Objects, trans. John Dack and Christine North (Berkeley, forthcoming). " 2 Denis Smalley, ‘Spectromorphology and Structuring Processes’, in Simon Emmerson (ed.), The Language of Electroacoustic Music (London, 1986), 61–93; Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art (London, 1996); Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997); Luke Windsor, ‘Through and around the Acousmatic: The Interpretation of Electroacoustic Sounds’, in Simon Emmerson (ed.), Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Farnham, 2000), 7–35; Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014). " 3 Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition, 2nd edn. (London, 2008); Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford, 2009); Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 4th edn. (New York and Oxford, 2013). " 4 Évelyne Gayou, GRM: Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales, cinquante ans d’histoire (Paris, 2007); John Dack, ‘Translator’s Note’ in Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music. " 5 Pierre Schaeffer, Essai sur la radio et le cinéma: Esthétique et technique des arts-relais 1941–1942, ed. Carlos Palombini and Sophie Brunet (Paris, 2010); Carlos Palombini, ‘Technology and Pierre Schaeffer: Pierre Schaeffer’s Arts-Relais, Walter Benjamin’s technische Reproduzierbarkeit and Martin Heidegger’s Ge-stell’, Organised Sound, 3 (1998), 35–43; Igor Reyner, ‘Les Sources de l’écoute acousmatique dans les écrits de Pierre Schaeffer’, Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande, 7 (2014), 85–91. " 6 Brian Kane, ‘L’Objet sonore maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction’, Organised Sound, 12 (2007), 15–24; Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (London, 2009); Kane, Sound Unseen; Mitchell Hermann, ‘Unsound Phenomenologies: Harrison, Schaeffer and the Sound Object’, Organised Sound, 20 (2015), 300–7. " 7 Kane, Sound Unseen, 39–40. " 8 Paul Griffiths, A Guide to Electronic Music (New York, 1979); Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995), 76–7; Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1999), 48. " 9 Philip Nord, ‘Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France: Cultural Politics in the Vichy Years’, French Historical Studies, 30 (2007), 685–709; Martin Kaltenecker, ‘Résonances théologiques de l’écoute chez Pierre Schaeffer’, Droits de cités, 4 (2010), http://droitdecites.org/2010/10/15/kaltenecker/. " 10 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris, 1966), 662. Translations from French are my own unless otherwise noted. " 11 Ibid. 360. " 12 Ibid. 600–1. " 13 A variety of translations for solfège are suggested in the Schaefferian literature, but none captures the particular combination of practical and theoretical discipline entailed in the French, which I therefore retain throughout this article. " 14 Schaeffer, Traité, 604. " 15 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, 1988). " 16 François Dosse, History of Structuralism. Vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, trans. Deborah Glassmann (Minneapolis, 1997); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Anonymous (London, 1970); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974). " 17 Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington, 2004), 7. " 18 Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York, 2010), 23–4. " 19 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972). " 20 Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), 37–41; Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, 2006). " 21 Schaeffer, Traité, 24–6 and 360–85. See also Carlos Palombini, ‘Machine Songs V: From Research into Noises to Experimental Music’, Computer Music Journal, 17 (1993), 14–19. " 22 Marc Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1969), 97. " 23 Étienne L. Damome, ‘Vers un réseau outre-mer’, in Martin Kaltenecker and Karine Le Bail (eds.), Pierre Schaeffer: Les constructions impatientes (Paris, 2012), 165–77. " 24 Martin Kaltenecker, ‘L’Écoute comme exercise collectif’, ibid. 191–201 at 198–9. " 25 Schaeffer, Traité, 12. See also ibid. 476–8. " 26 Ibid. 30–1. " 27 Ibid. 43. " 28 Ibid. 85. " 29 Ibid. 98. " 30 Ibid. 134–6; Werner Meyer-Eppler, Elektronische Klangerzeugung (Bonn, 1949); Fritz Winckel, Klangwelt unter der Lupe (Berlin, 1952). " 31 Schaeffer, Traité, 139. " 32 Ibid. 154. " 33 Ibid. 168–9. " 34 Ibid. 267. In this section Schaeffer draws freely from Edmund Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale, trans. Suzanne Bachelard (Paris, 1957). For a clear summary of epoché in English, see Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, 2003), 44–6. " 35 Schaeffer, Traité, 278 and 286–9. " 36 Ibid. 282–3. " 37 Ibid. 381. " 38 Ibid. 498. " 39 Michel Chion, ‘Jubile pour un livre seul’, Cahiers recherche/musique, 2 (1976), 19–24 at 20. " 40 Ibid. 19–20. " 41 Pierre Schaeffer, Les Antennes de Jéricho (Paris, 1978); Évelyne Gayou, ‘The GRM: Landmarks on a Historic Route’, Organised Sound, 12 (2007), 203–11 at 208–9. For a broader account of the rise and fall of Schaeffer’s model of musical research highlighting its ramifications for the governance of contemporary music in France see also Anne Veitl, Politiques de la musique contemporaine (Paris, 1997). " 42 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 80–6; cf. Pierre-Michel Menger, Le paradoxe du musicien (Paris, 1983). " 43 Veitl, Politiques, 43–4. " 44 Martin Kaltenecker and Karine Le Bail, ‘Jalons’, in Kaltenecker and Karine Le Bail (eds.), Pierre Schaeffer: Les constructions impatientes (Paris, 2012), 9–65 at 56. " 45 See Born, Rationalizing Culture, 85–6 and Veitl, Politiques. To be fair, this interpretation, framed by Born as a progression and by Veitl as a decline, would have seemed highly plausible as IRCAM’s notoriety peaked in the 1990s. " 46 Chion, ‘Jubile pour un livre seul’, 21 [original emphasis]. " 47 Michel Chion, Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (Paris, 1983); idem, L’Art des sons fixés, ou, la musique concrètement (Paris, 1991); François Bayle, Musique acousmatique: Propositions … positions (Paris, 1993), 179–90; Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. Andra McCartney and David Paquette (Montreal, 2005). There was also an unpublished practical Lexique by Québécois composer Marcelle Deschênes, designed for use in the electroacoustic curriculum at Université de Montréal beginning in 1980. " 48 Smalley, ‘Spectromorphology and Structuring Processes’; John Dack, ‘The Relationship between Electro-Acoustic Music and Instrumental/Vocal Composition in Europe in the Period 1948–70’ (Ph.D. Thesis, Middlesex, 1989); Carlos Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects’ (D.Phil. thesis, Durham, 1992). " 49 Gayou, ‘The GRM’, 209–10. " 50 Tim Hodgkinson, ‘€An Interview with Pierre Schaeffer – Pioneer of Musique Concrète’, ReR Quarterly, 2 (1987), 4–9. " 51 Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer, 74. " 52 Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham, Md., 2005), 99; Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music. " 53 Nord, ‘Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France’; Kaltenecker, ‘Résonances théologiques de l’écoute chez Pierre Schaeffer’. " 54 Gayou, ‘The GRM’, 207. " 55 Groupe de Recherche Musicale, ‘Musique fondamentale et appliquée à l’audio visuel’ (Paris, 1968), Montreal, Private Archive of Marcelle Deschênes. " 56 The class of the GRM’s first Conservatoire course did not necessarily live up to the aspiration. It consisted mainly of composers, alongside a handful of pianists, vocalists, and engineers. Among the more notable of the forty enrolled in the 1968–9 session were: later GRM member Jacques Lejeune; the founders of the Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges, Christian Clozier and Françoise Barrière; the Canadian composers Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux and Marcelle Deschênes, founders of the electroacoustic courses at the Conservatoire de Montréal and Université de Montréal, respectively; the Argentine composers Luis-Maria Serra and Eduardo Bertola; and a considerable number of psychedelic rock enthusiasts, among them Igor Wakhévitch, who would go on to compose music for Salvador Dalí’s neglected 1974 opera Être Dieu. Groupe de Recherche Musicale, ‘Stage 68/69’ (Paris, 1968), Montreal, Private Archive of Marcelle Deschênes. " 57 Groupe de Recherche Musicale, ‘Musique fondamentale’. " 58 Ibid. " 59 Ibid. On the politics of MEV’s practice during this period see Amy Beal, ‘“Music Is a Universal Human Right”: Musica Elettronica Viva’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties (New York and Oxford, 2009), 99–120. " 60 Marcelle Deschênes, ‘GRM Notebook 68–69’, Montreal, Private Archive of Marcelle Deschênes; Marie-Thérèse Lefebvre, ‘Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux et Marcelle Deschênes : Pionnières dans le sentier de la création électroacoustique’, Circuit: Musiques contemporaines, 19 (2009), 23–41. " 61 Deschênes, ‘GRM Notebook 68–69’; cf. Schaeffer, Traité, 17–19. " 62 Deschênes, ‘GRM Notebook 68–69’; cf. Schaeffer, Traité, 38. " 63 Deschênes, ‘GRM Notebook 68–69’. " 64 Kane, Sound Unseen, 40–1. " 65 Many in the anglophone acousmatic tradition, for example, figure reduced listening as excluding the kind of contextual information that makes most music meaningful. Denis Smalley, ‘The Listening Imagination: Listening in the Electroacoustic Era’, Contemporary Music Review, 13 (1996), 77–107; Leigh Landy, ‘Écoute Réduite – a Wrong Turn in the History of Electroacoustic Music?’, NZEMS 2009 (Auckland, 2009); Adrian Moore, Sonic Art: An Introduction to Electroacoustic Music Composition (New York, 2016). " 66 Luis-Manuel Garcia, ‘Beats, Flesh, and Grain: Sonic Tactility and Affect in Electronic Dance Music’, Sound Studies, 1 (2015), 59–76 at 67–8. On the intersection of structuralism with scientific approaches in the avant-garde see also Morag Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge, 2001) and Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. " 67 François Delalande, ‘Ce que le G.R.M. pense du T.O.M.’, Cahiers recherche/musique, 2 (1976), 27–33. " 68 Born, Rationalizing Culture, 76. " 69 Kane, Sound Unseen; Makis Solomos, ‘Schaeffer phénoménologue’, in François Bayle and Denis Dufour (eds.), Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer (Paris, 1999), 53–67. " 70 Deschênes, ‘GRM Notebook 68–69’. " 71 Schaeffer, Traité, 261–2. " 72 Ibid. " 73 Ibid. " 74 Solomos, ‘Schaeffer phénoménologue’; Schaeffer, Traité, 266. " 75 Solomos, ‘Schaeffer phénoménologue’. " 76 Kane, Sound Unseen, 17–22. " 77 Dosse, History of Structuralism, 37–42; Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, 2011), 46–7. " 78 Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues (Edinburgh, 2003), 41–3. " 79 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (New York, 1992), 119–20. " 80 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca, NY, 1969). These lectures, which took place at the École pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939, were attended not only by Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty but also Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Kojève’s ‘neo-Marxist’ and ‘post-Heideggerian’ reading of Hegel also had a formative influence on the post-structuralist generation. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 2006), 91. " 81 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Hegel’s Existentialism’, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 63–70 at 65. " 82 Dosse, History of Structuralism, 37. " 83 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1948), 41. " 84 Baring, The Young Derrida, 40–7; cf. Tran Duc Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trans. Daniel Herman and Donald Morano (Dordrecht, 1986); Jean-François Lyotard, La Phénoménologie (Paris, 1954). " 85 Kaltenecker, ‘Résonances théologiques de l’écoute chez Pierre Schaeffer’. Palombini suggests that the appeal of phenomenology for Schaeffer was that it provided him a suitably scientific weapon to fight against the scientificity of elektronische Musik. Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects’, 57–8. " 86 Schaeffer, Traité, 271. " 87 René Leibowitz, L’Artiste et sa conscience: Esquisse d’une dialectique de la conscience artistique (Paris, 1950). " 88 Boris de Schloezer, Introduction à J.-S. Bach: Essai d’esthétique musicale (Paris, 1947), 12. " 89 Fragne, ‘€À la recherche de la réalité musicale’, p. v; cf. Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski (London, 1986). Schloezer also corresponds with Ingarden in his insistence that the musical work can be reconstructed, or in Ingarden’s terms ‘concretized’, by the listener following an engaged reception (see Schloezer, Introduction, 45). Ingarden studied with Husserl in Göttingen and Freiburg and was one of the first to apply the phenomenological reduction to music. Ingarden’s work on music was not translated into French until the 1980s, but Schloezer may have read it in German. Max Rieser, ‘Roman Ingarden and his Time’, in Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, 159–73 at 161. " 90 Schloezer, Introduction, 27; cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris, 1945). " 91 Schloezer, Introduction, 33; cf. Schaeffer, Traité, 296–7. Note that Schloezer and Schaeffer are both engaging here with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, the significance of which I return to below. " 92 Schloezer, Introduction, 33–5. Schloezer uses the words for these attitudes differently from Schaeffer’s listening functions, which I discuss in greater detail below. Hence the difference in my translation. " 93 Ibid. 44. " 94 Ibid. 57–8. " 95 Ernest Ansermet, Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine et autres écrits (Paris, 1989). " 96 Jean-Claude Piguet, La Pensée d’Ernest Ansermet (Lausanne, 1983). " 97 Ansermet, Fondements, 373–9. " 98 Ibid. 296–7 and 896–907. " 99 Ibid. 314–18; Solomos, ‘Schaeffer phénoménologue’. " 100 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 113–22. " 101 Ibid. 153–6 and 163–6. " 102 Robert Francès, ‘La Structure en musique’, Les Temps modernes, 37 (1948), 721–34; Boris de Schloezer, ‘Sens, forme et structure en musique’, Les Temps modernes, 43 (1949), 934–42. See also Pierre Boulez, ‘Bach’s Moment’, in Paule Thévenin (ed.), Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford, 1991), 1–14 at 5–6. " 103 Boris de Schlœzer, ‘Musique concrète, musique abstraite, musique … ’, La Nouvelle revue française, 5 (1953), 920–3. " 104 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Social Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 2001), 278–93; Dosse, History of Structuralism. " 105 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London, 2007), 102–3. " 106 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 33–4. " 107 Ibid. 34. " 108 Ibid. 36. " 109 Foucault, Order of Things, 322. " 110 Schaeffer, Traité, 277–8. " 111 Ibid. 280. " 112 Chion, Guide , 56–7. Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects’, 65. " 113 John Dack, ‘€Acoulogie: An Answer to Lévi-Strauss?’, in Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Proceedings (2007), http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_DackEMS07.pdf; Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago, 1983). " 114 Dosse, History of Structuralism, 37–9. " 115 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 123. " 116 The encounter between Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson in exile in New York is recounted in several sources, including Dosse’s History of Structuralism and Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, 1999). More recent studies have consolidated a more transatlantic account of the growth of information theory in France. See especially Céline Lafontaine, ‘The Cybernetic Matrix of “French Theory”’, Theory Culture Society, 24 (2007), 27–46; Christopher Johnson, ‘“French” Cybernetics’, French Studies, 69 (2014), 60–78. " 117 See e.g. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, 29–33; Jennifer Iverson, ‘Statistical Form amongst the Darmstadt School’, Music Analysis, 33 (2014), 341–87. " 118 Christina Dunbar-Hester, ‘Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 35 (2010), 113–39; Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago, 2010). " 119 See Geoffrey Bowker, ‘How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70’, Social Studies of Science, 23 (1993), 107–27 at 116. " 120 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, 2006). " 121 For a summary of cybernetic social and epistemological principles see Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York, 1954). For a recent assessment of the ontological repercussions of cybernetic knowledge practice see also Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain, 17–33. " 122 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 106–7. " 123 Abraham Moles, Physique et technique du bruit (Paris, 1952); Michel Mathien, ‘Abraham Moles ou l’information et la communication: Au carrefour des sciences, de la vie quotidienne et de l’esthétique’, Communication, 22 (2003), 167–81; Jean Devèze, ‘€Abraham Moles, un exceptionnel passeur transdisciplinaire’, Hermès, 39 (2004), 189–200. " 124 Dennis Hutchison, ‘Performance, Technology, and Politics: Hermann Scherchen’s Aesthetics of Modern Music’ (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2003). " 125 Rockefeller Foundation, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1956’ (New York, 1956), 243; Otto Luening, ‘€An Unfinished History of Electronic Music’, Music Educators Journal, 55 (1968), 136. " 126 Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris, 1958); idem, Les Musiques expérimentales (Paris, 1960). " 127 Moles, Les Musiques expérimentales, 92. " 128 Ibid. 91. " 129 Claude Shannon, ‘€A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27 (1948), 379–423. " 130 Leonard Meyer, ‘Meaning in Music and Information Theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1957), 412–24 at 414. " 131 Cf. Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956). " 132 See Moles, Les Musiques expérimentales, 100–1. " 133 Ibid. 42–7. " 134 See e.g. Schaeffer, Traité, 60, 167, 495. " 135 Ibid. 300–3; cf. Chion, Guide, 74–5. " 136 Schaeffer, Traité, 43–4. In a sense, Schaeffer’s account of this logic’s ‘Neanderthal’ origins makes the distinction of ‘sounds’ from noise the source of musical civilization itself. See also Hugues Dufourt, ‘Pierre Schaeffer: Le son comme phénomène de civilisation’, in Bayle and Dufour (eds.), Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer, 69–82. Elsewhere, Bayle has described this as the crux of the treatise’s argument. François Bayle, ‘En deçà … au-delà … de l’entendre au faire’, E-dossier de l’audiovisuel: Pierre Schaeffer: quel héritage? (Paris, 2010), http://www.ina-expert.com/e-dossier-de-l-audiovisuel-pierre-schaeffer-quel-heritage/en-deca-au-dela-de-l-entendre-au-faire.html. " 137 Schaeffer, Traité, 381. " 138 See e.g. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ‘Boulez in the Postmodern Era: The Time of Répons’, in The Battle of Chronos and Orpheus: Essays in Applied Musical Semiology, trans. Jonathan Dunsby (Oxford, 2004), 233–87; Eric Drott, ‘Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination’, in Björn Heile (ed.), The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music (Farnham, 2009), 39–60. " 139 Annemarie Mol, ‘Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions’, Sociological Review, 47 (1999), 74–89. " 140 Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, 80–7. " 141 Christopher Johnson, ‘€All Played Out? Lévi-Strauss’s Philosophy of History’, New Left Review, 79 (2013), 55–69; Dosse, History of Structuralism, 360–2. " 142 Johnson, ‘€All Played Out?’, 61; cf. Eric Drott, ‘Rereading Jacques Attali’s Bruits’, Critical Inquiry, 41 (2015), 721–56. " 143 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle alliance: Métamorphose de la science, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1986). " 144 Schaeffer, Traité, 16–20. " 145 Ibid. 36, 300; cf. Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham (Cambridge, 1978). It bears mentioning that Schaeffer might have saved himself a great deal of trouble by reading Jakobson more closely. As Jakobson argued against Saussure, the basic units of language must be understood as coterminous with their operation as a relational set, not prior to it. ‘The phoneme functions’, Jakobson writes, ‘ergo it exists.’ Reading between the lines of the Traité we find that the sound object functions in a similar way. Had Schaeffer’s pragmatism outweighed his ambition to systematize, we might have been spared the debate that has swirled around a question of essences that is beyond the scope of an otherwise fairly straightforward exercise of structuralist analysis. " 146 Chion, Guide, 25; cf. Schaeffer, Traité, 112–17. " 147 Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects’, 31–46; Smalley, ‘The Listening Imagination’; Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening (Oxford, 2005), 143–44; Kane, Sound Unseen, 26–30. " 148 Kane, Sound Unseen, 26–7. " 149 Cf. Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 21–2; Jonathan Sterne, ‘Hearing’, in David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sound (Durham, 2015), 65–77 at 70–1. " 150 Ian Biddle, ‘Listening, Consciousness, and the Charm of the Universal: What It Feels like for a Lacanian’, in David Clarke and Eric F. Clarke (eds.), Music and Consciousness (Oxford, 2011), 66–77 at 73. " 151 Chion, Guide, 25. " 152 Schaeffer, Traité, 116. " 153 Ibid. 120–2. " 154 For Dosse the principles of interrelation and generalization constitute the core of the structuralist method. Dosse, History of Structuralism, 22; cf. Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York, 1987), 198–202. " 155 Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Sonic Objects’, 42. " 156 Schaeffer, Traité, 294–5. In the previous chapter Schaeffer also entertains the notion that phonetics might be understood as a ‘solfège des objets verbaux’; ibid. 289. " 157 Ibid. 307–9. " 158 Ibid. 296–7. " 159 Ibid. 369. " 160 Ibid. 602–3. " 161 Ibid. 603–4. " 162 Ibid. 627–9; cf. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 23–4. " 163 See Jean Molino, ‘Musical Fact and the Semiology of Music’, trans. J. A. Underwood, Music Analysis, 9, (1990), 105–56 at 120–4; Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ‘Le Statut sémiologique de l’objet sonore’, Cahiers recherche/musique, 2 (1976), 91–106. It should be noted, in fairness, that this generation of musicologists also found serious fault with the theoretical pretensions of the serialists. See Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics, 206–17. " 164 Palombini, ‘Pierre Schaeffer’s Typo-Morphology of Musical Objects’, 58. " 165 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (1995), 496–522 at 508–9. " 166 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 35–8. " 167 Schaeffer, Traité, 83–4. Schaeffer seems to have developed this view early in his work on radio. See Palombini, ‘Technology and Pierre Schaeffer’; Pierre Schaeffer, Essai sur la radio et le cinéma: Esthétique et technique des arts-relais 1941–1942, ed. Carlos Palombini and Sophie Brunet (Paris, 2010). " 168 Cf. Roland Barthes, ‘Écoute’, in L’Obvi et l’obtus: Essais critiques III (Paris, 1982), 217–30. " 169 Schaeffer, Traité, 305–7 and 314. " 170 Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, 2012), 55–60. " 171 For a similar critique of structuralist semiotics, see Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), 24–33. " 172 Delalande, ‘Ce que le G.R.M. pense du T.O.M.’, 27. " 173 Ibid. 29. " 174 Ibid. " 175 Pierre Schaeffer, ‘La musique par exemple (positions et propositions sur le Traité des objets musicaux)’, Cahiers recherche/musique, 2 (1976), 55–72 at 55. " 176 Ibid. 59. " 177 Ibid. 64. " 178 Cf. Drott, ‘Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination’. " 179 Schaeffer, Traité, 288. " 180 See e.g. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle, 1973); Christopher Small, Music – Society – Education: A Radical Examination of the Prophetic Function of Music in Western, Eastern and African Cultures, with its Impact on Society and its Use in Education (New York, 1977); Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, 1982). " 181 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, 1996); Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (New York and Oxford, 2003); Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 205–43; Nicholas Cook, ‘€Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural Analysis as Relational Musicology’, in Stan Hawkins (ed.), Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott (Farnham, 2012), 193–209. " 182 Benjamin Steege, ‘€Acoustics’, in Novak and Sakakeeny (eds.), Keywords in Sound, 22–32 at 28. " 183 Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York, 2008), 94; Biddle, ‘Listening, Consciousness, and the Charm of the Universal’. " 184 Chion, Guide, 36–7. " 185 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, 1993), 97–100; cf. Schaeffer, Traité, 41–50. " 186 This is also one of Derrida’s primary criticisms of Lévi-Strauss. See Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’, 282–4. " 187 See e.g. William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, 2005), 68–92; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2 (2004), 3–22. " 188 Sterne, ‘Hearing’, 74 (my emphasis). " 189 Schaeffer, Traité, 603–5. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
TI - Hearing the Music of Others: Pierre Schaeffer’s Humanist Interdiscipline
JF - Music and Letters
DO - 10.1093/ml/gcx052
DA - 2017-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hearing-the-music-of-others-pierre-schaeffer-s-humanist-4OtmBWrF0C
SP - 255
VL - 98
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -