TY - JOUR
AU - Ridout,, Sam
AB - Abstract This article situates Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète in the context of the end of the French empire. In drawing out conceptual continuities between Schaeffer’s administration of colonial radio in the mid-1950s and works of musique concrète from the same period, I argue that both projects are predicated on a commitment to the capacity of acousmatic listening to provide access to universal essences. The invocation of the ‘primitive’ in Schaeffer’s writing and music thus serves to buttress the universalizing rhetoric of musique concrète, portraying it as a neutral site for the reconciliation of different cultures, underwritten by a shared human essence. As such, musique concrète partakes in the logic of a colonial humanism, in which empire is conceived of as another such neutral framework. By way of conclusion, a form of acousmatic listening opposed to essence and empire is elaborated from the writings of Schaeffer’s anticolonial contemporaries. In the eighteen years separating Pierre Schaeffer’s founding of musique concrète in 1948 and the publication of his theoretical magnum opus, the Traité des objets musicaux in 1966, the French colonial empire effectively came to an end, reduced to a handful of small island territories. The process of decolonization was traumatic for the metropole as well as for the colonies, particularly in the cases of French Indochina (1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62), the latter precipitating significant violence in mainland France, including the massacre of Algerian demonstrators by French police in Paris in 1961 as well as the bombing campaign of the Organisation Armée Secrète in 1961–62. Republican France, as Gary Wilder notes, ‘was never not an imperial nation-state’. As such the end of empire engendered a crisis in French national identity, an identity to which a commitment to a politics and culture conceived of as universal had been integral since the Revolution.1 This looming backdrop to the two decades following Liberation figures little if at all in most historical accounts of musique concrète, where it is often characterized as one experimental moment in the post-war European musical avant-garde, hidebound and entirely determined by its technological means, and in any case quickly superseded by such later tape works as Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) or Kontakte (1959), both by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur’s Scambi (1957), or Luciano Berio’s Visage (1961).2 Not unrelatedly, there remains a persistent tendency to take at face value the autonomy of musique concrète, expressed in exemplary form in Schaeffer’s concept of reduced listening, a listening that purports to listen only for the ‘intrinsic’ features of sound. One consequence of this claim is that musique concrète has been written of exclusively under the rubric of absolute music, such that historians are forced to draw historically tenuous lines between Schaeffer’s initial experiments and his supposed precursors. Évelyne Gayou, for example, is determined to prove, at least circumstantially, that Schaeffer cannot have not been influenced by Luigi Russolo and Edgar Varèse, despite Schaeffer’s earliest published references to both futurism and Varèse being ambivalent at best.3 This positioning obscures some otherwise rather obvious characteristics of musique concrète, one of which is its rhetorical and musical engagement with non-Western music. A global perspective was, indeed, a consistent feature of Pierre Schaeffer’s musical and music theoretical activities from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. In the Traité des objets musicaux (1966) and his teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, from 1968 onwards, non-Western music, as Patrick Valiquet argues, functioned in some sense as a guarantor of the quasi-structuralist universality of Schaeffer’s theory of listening, as proof of the successful identification of the universal structures of perception underlying all musical practices.4 At the turn of the 1950s, however, the relation to non-Western music is figured on different terms. Pieces such as the Étude aux casseroles (1948), Maskerage (1952), Orphée 53 (1953), or Simultané camerounais (1959) seem to recall the avant-gardist invocation of the ‘primitive’ found in Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913) or Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde (1923), and perhaps most classically in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), as an assault on ‘over-civilized’ bourgeois mores and aesthetics. Early instances such as these developed a conceptual apparatus that was to shape French engagements with non-Western culture over the following decades, from Antonin Artaud’s writings and performances in the 1930s and 1940s, which drew on indigenous Mexican and Balinese cultures, to the pages of lifestyle magazines in the 1960s, in which ‘exotic’ artefacts were displayed as fashionable additions to a sleek modernist home.5 The trope of primitivism in twentieth-century French culture has been examined by Hal Foster, Carole Sweeney, and Daniel J. Sherman and others, who in varying ways point to its articulation of the fraught material and ideological relationships between modernity, universality, and empire.6 In addition, Schaeffer’s biography intersects with the history of France and its colonies at a number of points: in the early 1940s he encountered Léon-Gontran Damas, the poet and writer associated with the Negritude movement, at Radio Vichy, where the latter read Guyanese stories on the air (the apparently implausible situation of a broadly anticolonial black intellectual working for the national radio of an authoritarian racist state speaks to the ideological confusion of the regime’s first year). After Liberation, Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor, also associated with Negritude, worked at Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai on cultural broadcasts for the colonies. In the late 1940s, Schaeffer served as the representative of Morocco and Tunisia at international broadcasting conferences, and from 1953 to 1957 he was at the head of French overseas broadcasting, working primarily in French West Africa.7 Negritude serves as an important—if problematic—interlocutor to the primary questions occupying this article. Negritude had its origins among black French colonial subjects in interwar Paris, and principally Aimé Césaire, from Martinique, Senghor, from Senegal, and Damas, from Guiana.8 Drawing influence from French symbolism, the Harlem renaissance and indigenous African traditions, these writers asserted a positive vision of blackness and black aesthetics in their poetry and essays.9 Negritude was, as Achille Mbembe puts it, a ‘declaration of identity’ that defied the Western figuration of the black man in terms of lack (of history, of civilization, of reason).10 In an essay from 1939, Senghor outlines his conception of blackness and ‘the black [nègre] soul’, a sensibility shaped by emotion, rhythm, animism and community in opposition to European individualism, capitalism and Hellenic reason.11 It is important to note at this juncture that I am concerned for the most part with texts and pieces that precede the outbreak of the Algerian war and that pertain to French colonial territories in West Africa. The difference of this colonial context from that of either Algeria or Indochina is marked; the transition to independence was relatively smooth and peaceful in French West Africa, thanks in part to the presence of an African élite who were to varying degrees genuinely committed to republican ideals and wary of falling under the sphere of influence of either the United States or the Soviet Union.12 Indeed, unlike nationalists such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana or Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt, the intellectual élite in French West Africa for the most part envisaged a future involving the maintenance of a federal relationship with metropolitan France.13 While independence came sooner than either metropolitan or African political élites had hoped, it passed without significant unrest or bloodshed.14 As such, the oppositions that might be expected to structure such an article—colonial and French imperialist/anticolonial and African nationalist—are difficult to maintain, and the rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics that I discuss are profoundly ambivalent: Schaeffer’s conceptions of the ‘primitive’ and French universalism, and of the French presence in West Africa, are difficult to differentiate unambiguously or conclusively from those of, say, Senghor.15 LISTENING TO THE UNIVERSAL In this article I seek to situate musique concrète against the backdrop of the end of the French empire and Schaeffer’s role in colonial radio serving as a mediating link between the two, in order to suggest that the seemingly ahistorical exploration of the ‘primitive’ and the universal in musique concrète is in fact eminently historical, occurring as it does at precisely the period in which republican universalism was being so radically called into question.16 In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the continuities between Schaeffer’s various aesthetic and political or administrative projects, underwritten by a commitment to a universalism and a humanism inflected by radiophonic or concrete listening. This is a universalism clearly manifest in the title of a talk given in January 1954, ‘From the totem to the antenna’, in which Schaeffer suggests that the ‘cloud hooks’ of the Dogon people, tall ritual structures built on altars, represent a ‘naïve intuition’ of a ‘universal character’, ‘rendered more objective’ by the development of the radio antenna by the whites.17 Schaeffer’s rhetoric of the concrete is framed in terms of getting beyond the abstract, the superficial, or the inauthentic to the real, meaningful essence underneath, a structural model that also pits the culturally contingent against the universal. The impulse towards the universal in Pierre Schaeffer’s theories of listening has been noted a number of times, in particular by Valiquet and John Dack.18 Discussing Schaeffer’s later writings, Valiquet has suggested that the universality arrived at is a universality ‘almost in spite of difference’; as he puts it: ‘All musics are equal for the acousmatic listener not because their differences are all valid on their own terms, but because their differences are secondary to human perceptual structures, which according to acousmatic theory must all be the same.’19 I would argue that a similar logic is operative in the early 1950s, though where the later writings attempt to identify a phenomenological universality, the earlier writings seek an objective universality of sonorous forms. For Schaeffer, concrete listening is a privileged mode of listening that affords a glimpse of the universal, the concrete or acousmatic listener figured as what Donna Haraway calls a ‘modest witness’, a supposedly neutral observer who contributes nothing to the observed.20 Central to Schaeffer’s theories of listening is a bracketing of the referent, most famously expressed in his concept of reduced listening, a mode of listening that brackets social or cultural meaning and attends instead to a pre-cultural sound ‘in itself’. While this conceptual apparatus is not fully developed in the early 1950s, In Search of a Concrete Music documents Schaeffer’s sharp opposition between the musical and the dramatic or anecdotal, in which he explicitly seeks to expunge the latter in favour of the former, conceived in terms of ‘pure’ sound.21 Schaeffer hopes to engender a non-indexical listening, ‘where the train [that is, the train in Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer] must be forgotten and only sequences of sound color, changes of time, and the secret life of percussion instruments are heard’.22 As Brian Kane has compellingly argued, this is to a large degree simply a rephrasing of the aesthetics of absolute music, an attempt to read a quasi-Hanslickian autonomy into sounds that have not, in the way that those of the orchestra have, been culturally coded to make their causes inconspicuous and to function without friction as bearers of formal information.23 What I want to suggest, however, is that not only is Schaeffer’s figure of the listener contingent on a certain culturally and historically specific conception of musical aesthetics, but also that the function of non-Western music in Schaeffer’s theoretical system is one that, without meaning to, relies on the contingency of that listening position. Non-Western music offers an expedient solution to the problem to which I alluded above—the problem of hearing non-orchestral sounds in a framework normally restricted to orchestral sounds. Schaeffer’s desire for a mode of listening that brackets social or cultural meaning and attends instead to sound ‘in itself’ finds its answer in music for which the social or cultural meaning is radically alien to the listener. Non-Western music is in this sense a music that arrives ready-bracketed, but only for a certain sort of listener, that is, a Western listener. What this listening reveals, then, is neither universal subjective structures of perception nor ‘a[n] [objective] shared universe of sound’ but the necessary particularity of Schaeffer’s reduced listening.24 This partiality or particularity that presents itself as universal resonates with critiques of whiteness found in the writings of Césaire and Frantz Fanon among others.25 For the generations of Senghor, Césaire, and Fanon, the normative alignment of whiteness with reason and universality was felt and experienced viscerally: their capacity to speak from a position of universality was dependent on their adopting the language of the ‘white world (that is to say, the real world)’.26 Césaire later referred to this as ‘European reductionism’: ‘the system of thought or even the instinctual tendency of an eminent and prestigious civilization to take advantage of its prestige by creating a vacuum around it that abusively reduces the notion of the universal … to its own dimensions, that is, to think the universal only on the basis of its own postulations and through its own categories’.27 Especially for Fanon, the critique of whiteness is articulated in phenomenological terms, that is, as a question of experience, appearance, and perception. This line of argument has been taken up in recent years by writers such as Sara Ahmed, who, explicitly drawing on Fanon, theorizes a ‘phenomenology of whiteness’ as an experienced ‘world’.28 Attending to the context of sound and listening, Marie Thompson diagnoses a ‘white aurality’ present in the ontological turn in sound studies, a ‘racialized perceptual standpoint that is both situated and universalizing’.29 This ‘white aurality’, of which Thompson takes the writing of Christoph Cox to be representative, purports to get beyond the cultural, the linguistic, or the particular, so as to see, or rather hear, ‘from everywhere and nowhere, having liberated itself from (which is to say, obscured its indebtedness to) perspective’.30 In disavowing the partiality and historicity of a white, masculinist, and Eurocentric perspective, the advocates of the ontological turn naturalize this standpoint as a universal ground.31 In other words, categories and concepts—ontology, sound in itself, matter—are employed as if they are neutral and without history, denying their imbrication with, as Thompson lists, ‘Eurological histories, practices, ontologies, epistemologies and technologies of sound, music and audition’.32 Jennifer Lynn Stoever sets out a similar set of arguments about listening, race, and universality in relation to radio broadcasting in the United States, where the radio was theorized in terms of a post-racial or ‘color-blind’ listening that presents an ideology of universality and neutrality that disavows its (white) partiality, aligned with a post-Second World War iteration of liberal democracy.33 Like Schaeffer, Cox is committed to a strong binary opposition between nature and culture, and he advocates for sonic practices that capture or reveal ‘the nature of the sonic’. While Schaeffer and Cox diverge on a number of points, they share an underlying desire to get ‘beyond representation and signification’, as Cox puts it, or beyond the conventional and the linguistic, in Schaeffer’s terms, and to reach a sonic real underneath.34 As Thompson argues, this is a nature, a materiality or an ontology of sound that is constituted by a ‘white aurality’ that obscures ‘its own, active presence’.35 What is taken to be natural or cultural, essential or accidental in sound is not given, but a sorting carried out by a white aurality. The ‘sound in itself’ of musique concrète is, as I have already suggested, itself in many ways a product of the nineteenth-century ideology of absolute music and its commitment to music as a natural and universal language, but it is also constituted by the new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution which afford the reproduction of sound and the splitting of the senses.36 In the case of musique concrète, a whole host of mediations—from the ideology of absolute music and sound reproduction technologies to colonial anthropology—are obscured. As a subspecies of Thompson’s ‘white aurality’, Schaeffer’s listening for the universal cannot acknowledge the extent to which its universals are constituted in the act of listening. In what follows, I first trace the universalist politics underlying Schaeffer’s administration of colonial radio before turning to the universalizing logic operative in works of musique concrète and Schaeffer’s associated writings, drawing on an analysis of Schaeffer’s Étude aux tourniquets (1948). Finally, I suggest how Schaeffer’s conception of a universal listener and a listening for the universal might be problematized by contemporaneous anticolonial thought, in particular Frantz Fanon’s account of radio listening during the Algerian war. SCHAEFFER AND THE RADIO D’OUTRE-MER Schaeffer’s role in colonial radio administration, despite its absence from the canonical history of musique concrète, is difficult to disentangle from his better-known radio and musical experiments. Both are guided by an emphatic commitment to the universal potential of technologically reproduced sound. A broadcast from 1946, for example, titled ‘Radio Babel’, proposes, in the form of an aesthetic radio work, a model of radiophonic universalism that prefigures a passage in In Search of a Concrete Music, in which a personal exercise in concrete listening at an international conference allows him to hear all the more clearly the truth behind the various delegates’ words.37 The Studio-École, founded by Schaeffer in 1955 to train radio professionals for a future ‘overseas network’, bears more than a passing resemblance to earlier initiatives such as the Studio d’Essai and the Groupe de Recherche de la Musique Concrète (GRMC) in its aim to give a broad training to an élite cadre of young professionals conversant in both the art and technology of radio.38 In addition, a table of contents for a prospective work entitled ‘Le phénomène radiophonique’, much of which was eventually published as Essai sur la radio et le cinéma and Propos sur la coquille in 2010 and 1990 respectively, proposes a section on overseas radio alongside chapters on the Studio d’Essai and radio aesthetics.39 There is therefore good reason for drawing this period of Schaeffer’s work into an account of musique concrète, a move that can provide a concrete historical context to the otherwise abstract invocations of the ‘primitive’ and the universal found there. From 1950, the Ministry of Overseas France was concerned by the state of French colonial radio, with only a handful of weak transmitters in sub-Saharan Africa oriented largely towards the small white French population.40 In 1954, a decree by the new government of Pierre Mendès France founded a new service, the Société de la Radiodiffusion de la France d’outre-mer (Sorafom), unifying responsibilities that had previously been dispersed between the Ministry for Overseas France and Radiotélévision Française, under the auspices of the Ministry for Overseas France and the Société financière de radiodiffusion, a public-private initiative.41 The decree placed Schaeffer at the head of this organization, which sought to develop an ‘overseas network’ that would serve the ‘native’ [autochtone] population.42 This project entailed developing radio equipment that was appropriate for the climate of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, a task delegated to Jacques Poullin, who had also been responsible for the technical innovations of the GRMC.43 In 1955, Sorafom established the Studio-École in Paris for the training of radio professionals for the new overseas network.44 In collaboration with André Clavé, with whom Schaeffer had worked at Jeune France, the students participated in conferences that sought to theorize new models of radio broadcasting adapted politically, aesthetically, and technically to the needs of overseas France and developed programmes for the Studio-École’s own broadcasts.45 The material achievements of the project were impressive: nine new transmitters were built between 1953 and 1957, and the total duration of yearly broadcasts increased significantly, from 35,800 hours in 1956 to 53,300 hours in 1961.46 Sorafom was also significant in making, collecting, and publishing recordings of African music, a role eventually institutionalized in the form of Ocora, the in-house record label of Sorafom’s post-colonial successor.47 Schaeffer’s vision of French overseas broadcasting was animated by his commitment to the radio’s capacity to ‘abolish distance, vanquish time … [and] establish links between men of all races and of all lands [pays]’, what I have termed above a radiophonic universalism.48 As such, this new radio would combine the best of ‘white’ and ‘black’ culture, drawing together ‘French genius’ and ‘autochthonous folklore’.49 In practice, the broadcasts developed sought to combine educational content and public health information alongside others concerning French and indigenous culture, including recordings of traditional music and literary programmes presenting both African writers and the classics of French literature.50 While this programme has been described as a ‘decolonization of the radio’, and Schaeffer as ‘a little-known actor of decolonization’, it is more apt to consider it under the rubric of ‘association’, the colonial ideology that sought to replace the failed policy of assimilation by acknowledging and respecting the difference of the colonial Other.51 ‘Association’ was the watchword of interwar colonial humanists, reformers who desired a form of colonial government that would preserve elements of African political and social structures while gradually implementing a state-led developmentalist economic programme.52 The universalism of the assimilationist fantasy, in which ‘primitives’ slowly become French (or evolve, as the term for the educated class of colonial subjects, ‘évolués’, implies), is replaced by another universalist fantasy of the French empire as a neutral ground for the preservation and reconciliation of different, autonomous cultures.53 Indeed, Schaeffer’s own conception of the French colonial project was rather conservative, criticizing those who called for the ‘premature liberation’ of the colonies, and suggesting, even, that the granting of universal citizenship to colonial subjects in 1946 was ‘a little hasty’.54 This follows closely the logic of colonial humanism as described by Wilder, in which the colonized are no longer conceived as biologically inferior in racial terms but merely as politically immature, requiring the paternal oversight of the French, who support self-determination in principle while infinitely deferring it in practice.55 That this was a project concerned with buttressing the French colonial presence in sub-Saharan Africa can be surmised from Sylvie Dallet’s suggestion that the significance of the station at Fort Lamy, now N’Djamena in Chad, lay in its role as an ‘intellectual vehicle for French culture’ to ‘counter the Arab propaganda of Radio Cairo’, a reference to anticolonial broadcasts sponsored by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, keen to establish a broad front among colonized peoples.56 Charles Duvelle, who from 1960 directed the Ocora record label, confirms this suspicion, situating Sorafom emphatically in the context of the decline of the French and British empires and the emergence of the Cold War struggle between Soviet and US interests in the African continent.57 Sorafom was not without its contemporary critics; as Sylvie Dallet reports, Senghor was suspicious of any attempt at the ‘emancipation’ of Africans not led by Africans, while Wilfred Ekué, director of Radio Dakar, was quite understandably indignant that the Studio-École was based in Paris rather than in regions it was supposedly serving.58 Schaeffer later recounted that while he had expected resistance from conservatives and from the administration, he had not expected the distrust and hostility of progressive African milieux.59 Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that Schaeffer’s conception of the role of French culture and administration in West Africa diverged significantly from that of Senghor, who even after Senegalese independence remained committed to the dissemination of French language and culture as means to improve social mobility.60 This says as much about Senghor as it does about Schaeffer, and there are several points at which Negritude appears to converge with a reformist colonial humanism; as Wilder forcefully puts it, it was ‘a politically moderate project to reform French colonialism’, ‘[whose] writers never called explicitly for the political independence of colonized peoples’ and ‘deliberately collaborated with colonial humanism, sometimes challenged it, and unwittingly reproduced many of its problematic positions’.61 The terms under which Schaeffer’s overseas radio project were carried out were thus those of colonial humanism: the Other’s difference and its sameness, its human essence, were both affirmed. The Other’s cultural difference was to be preserved as something authentic and organic, and subsumed under a synchronic, universalizing ethnographic framework. The radio, for Schaeffer, would be the site of ‘association’—a trope to which I shall return in due course—or reconciliation of French and indigenous cultures, the ‘fusion of currents of thought of the north and south’, underwritten by the radio’s universalizing capacity.62 MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE AND THE ‘PRIMITIVE’ Musique concrète’s invocation of a form of aesthetic primitivism has gone largely unremarked. Timothy D. Taylor is among the few writers to have suggested that the figure of the ‘primitive’ is central to musique concrète from 1948 to 1953, aligning Schaeffer’s project with a humanism represented by the Musée de l’Homme and Claude Lévi-Strauss. While this alignment seems reasonable, the progressive character of this humanism is accepted at face value by Taylor, and the relation between Schaeffer’s work on colonial radio and musique concrète is discussed only in passing.63 Attending in more detail to musique concrète’s primitivism allows for a logic related to that which underwrites Schaeffer’s conception of colonial radio to be traced, a logic in which the ‘primitive’ functions as a signifier of musique concrète’s return to origins and fundamentals. The primitivism found in musique concrète takes different forms; in the Étude aux casseroles, for instance, one of the records that Schaeffer manipulates, alongside recordings of a harmonica, barges, and the voice of Sacha Guitry, is an ethnographic recording from Bali. Here, the non-Western element is one, seemingly insignificant, among others. Listening to the Étude aux tourniquets, another of the Cinq études de bruit, with this fact in mind, however, suggests that this piece, too, is calling on a primitivist set of references. The piece, according to Schaeffer, uses as source material original recordings of tuned (though not equally tempered) and untuned instruments, including xylophones (perhaps balafon) and a zanza, a West African lamellophone, by Gaston Litaize, material that recalls West African music.64 This, too, is a fairly incidental link to the sort of manoeuvre found in Picasso’s use of African art, in which the ‘African’ serves to invoke a magical, animist relation between subject and object, in part as an avant-gardist critique of art as institution.65 However, Max de Haas’s short film Maskerage, with a soundtrack composed by Schaeffer, spells out the implicit rhetoric of affinity between musique concrète and the ‘primitive’. Set to a percussive, looping score that draws on various ethnographic recordings, in particular from Bali and Mexico, and percussion with primitivist connotations (‘the “tam-tam” or another primitive music [mélodie]’, Haas suggests), the film takes an eerie, starkly lit journey around the National Museum of Ethnology in Amsterdam, dominated by expressionistic shots of masks from around the world, explicitly drawing together the formal and thematic tropes of the avant-garde with non-Western artefacts.66 Orphée 53 and Simultané camerounais continue to call on an affinity between musique concrète and the ‘primitive’, the former depicting an invocation of ‘Manitou’, a reference to the belief systems of Algonquian peoples of North America, in the style of ‘Negro [nègre] song’, while the latter seeks to recreate a performance heard by Schaeffer in northern Cameroon using the techniques of musique concrète, ‘to render Negro [nègre] music … for current consumption’.67 In 1952, in a footnote to In Search of a Concrete Music, Schaeffer spelt out his conception of this affinity between musique concrète and ‘primitive’ music: personally I attach great importance to the strange encounter between concrete music and so-called primitive musics. This is a good moment to recognize that extremes meet, and to explain why. On the one hand, the latest fashion in Western technique leads us to find sound objects that undeniably have more in common with exotic musics than any Western music. On the other, the aesthetic and psychological impressions produced by concrete music inevitably make us think about the role music plays in other civilizations. Finally, the concrete experiment in music allows us to approach the problems of exotic or primitive musics in a quite different spirit from Western musicologists.68 Schaeffer, while acknowledging difference (‘other civilizations’), ultimately disavows it, constructing the Other as essentially the same. Foster, drawing on Homi Bhabha, aligns this logic with the Freudian account of fetishism, a logic that Bhabha identifies as the characteristic manoeuvre of colonial discourse, ‘an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences’, producing ‘the colonized as a social reality which is at once an “other” and yet entirely knowable and visible’.69 Here, Schaeffer can be seen to accord the Other a difference that is assimilable to an original wholeness or similarity, assuming a position that transcends the difference between Western and primitive.70 The affinity consists, it seems, in the fact that these musics share surface similarities: as Romuald Vandelle puts it in a volume of La Revue musicale co-edited by Schaeffer and titled ‘Musical experiences: concrete, electronic, exotic musics’, ‘if, from a judicious choice of recordings, an uninformed audience is played works of exotic music and works of experimental music, they could come to confuse them’.71 Neither Schaeffer nor Vandelle is particularly specific about the supposed similarities, other than a reference to the abandonment of the diatonic system, but it is possible to surmise a few, such as non-equal-tempered tunings, a greater focus on rhythm than on harmony, and the extensive use of repetition. These are, of course, purely formal similarities and as such they presuppose the abstraction of the music in question from all contextual meaning, an approach that is not at all given or natural but is rather the imposition of a formalist reading onto non-Western musical practices. The deeper meaning to which these surface similarities are understood to attest is something like the universal role of music in different civilizations. Foster identifies and criticizes a similar logic undergirding the curation of a 1984 exhibition on the theme of primitivism and modernism at the Museum of Modern Art. There, works of sculpture by Picasso, Max Ernst, and others were juxtaposed with ‘knowingly selected’ works of ‘primitive’ sculpture so as to draw out formal and, by implicit extension, spiritual kinships in terms of universal human essences or characteristics. As Foster puts it, ‘the show abstracted and separated the modern and the tribal into two sets of objects that could then only be “affined.” Thus reduced to form, it is no wonder they came to reflect one another in the glass of the vitrines.’72 The object of Foster’s critique is the pretension to universality of a formalist modernism, in particular in its institutional American reception, which calcifies into what he terms ‘MOMAism’.73 This is, I would suggest, exactly the operation that supports the suggestion of an affinity between musique concrète and ‘primitive’ music. While the abstraction of purely formal elements is perhaps less immediately striking in the context of music, the formal autonomy of which is often taken as given, it is necessary for both musique concrète and non-Western music to be thought of in such abstract terms for these parallels to be drawn.74 For Foster, ‘coincidental affinities seemed to be derived in equal part from the formalist reception of the “primitive” read back into the tribal work and from the radical abstraction performed on both sets of objects’.75 At the same time, the very real mechanisms by which these objects came to be abstracted are elided, that is, various forms of imperialist plunder.76 The referent—all the contextual meaning of musical practices as embedded in a social context—has been bracketed so as to reveal a set of abstract, formal universals. The particular historical situation to which this iteration of primitivism responds—or rather, the tension or contradiction it seeks fantastically to reconcile—is the undoing of French imperial universalism. Sherman takes up the figure of ‘association’, introduced above, as an ‘ideological keyword’ more than a practical policy, which allowed France to conceive of its empire in terms of coexistence and respect for difference rather than assimilation.77 Sherman examines the rhetoric of ‘association’ in interior design magazines in the 1960s, arguing that ‘association style’, the tasteful ‘juxtaposition of objects from different cultures, usually with the added element of contemporary works of art and furniture’, ‘offered a means not only of obscuring the colonial past of the objects it enshrined, but of molding an acceptable future’.78 This style of argument can be found in contemporaneous writing on art: Sherman quotes a 1953 survey of art history, in which Germain Bazin argues that ‘the principles of the birth and development of forms are the same whatever the region of the world’, though one might just as easily refer to André Malraux’s humanist survey of world art, The Voices of Silence (1951), whose glossy photographic reproductions of artworks from around the world serve to illustrate his claim that these artefacts express elements of a universal human character.79 As in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, formal homologies are identified, reducing ‘actual conflict [Sherman has the Algerian war in mind] to the harmless clash of objects, easily reconcilable to a perceptive eye, and provid[ing] a concise narrative of harmony, reconciliation, and shared humanity’.80 The primitivism of musique concrète thus attempts to rescue a beleaguered colonial ideology, offering a reformist vision of France’s colonial future, no longer articulated in the language of biological racism or the mission civilisatrice but in terms of a shared humanity. French West Africa is central to this vision; in the French colonial imaginary, the West African is the ‘primitive’ par excellence, and in that capacity functions as a representative of a logical and historical origin, ‘a “zero degree” with reference to which one [can] outline the structure, the growth, and above all the degradation of our society and our culture’.81 The ‘primitive’ acts as a redeeming supplement to the modern, which in turn affects a neutral view of the whole. This much is implicit in Schaeffer’s suggestion that ‘attending to the distant past can meet with preoccupations of the future: some so-called primitive musics suddenly appear much less crude, much bolder than certain modernist experiments’ (a proposition that also speaks to the difficulty in clearly delineating between relativist or pluralist and evolutionist models of cultural difference).82 French West Africa’s exemplary status as counterpart to the disastrous decolonization of Algeria and Indochina makes it an especially convenient touchstone for an affirmation of a colonial humanism, of a shared humanity under the framework of the French empire. The radio, the work of musique concrète, and the French empire (‘Greater France’) all function, then, as a neutral space where extremes meet. ÉTUDE AUX TOURNIQUETS AND MASKERAGE If, for Schaeffer, the totem or the ‘cloud-hook’ and the antenna register the same universal impulse, an analogous musical formal pairing, one ‘primitive’ and the other modern and technological, might be made between ‘primitive’ repetitions and those of the sillon fermé or closed groove, the central formal and technical device of the early years of musique concrète, in which a record is cut such that, rather than spiralling inwards, short fragments of recordings are repeated.83 In other words, the ideological presuppositions I have traced above can be shown to be at work at the level of the musical detail. To speak of ‘primitive’ repetitions is, of course, as much to cite a conventional mode of conceptualizing ‘African music’ as it is to point to actual characteristics of that music.84 The Étude aux tourniquets employs both forms of repetition, pitting passages organized around the repetitions of short recorded fragments against passages that appear to be relatively unedited recordings of Litaize’s sketches for xylophone, bells, zanza, and whirligigs. I have labelled the two forms of repetition ‘closed groove’ and ‘primitive’ (see Table 1), the latter drawing on several established rhythmic features of West African music, including a timeline-like pattern, hemiola, and dialogic interplay. Table 1. Étude aux tourniquets (1948) Divisions . Subdivisions . Form of repetition . Description . 0″–20″ 0″–3″ Closed groove Brief introduction followed by quasi-fractal montage repetitions (approximately: ABBAABBCCCDDCCDCDCB′B′) 3″–20″ 23″–1′02″ 23″–47″ ‘Primitive’ Timeline-esque rhythmic figure; question and answer figure in zanza 47″–1′02″ Much faster section: continuous crotchets; mild hemiola/polyrhythm 1′02″–1′11″ Closed groove Interruption by closed groove shard, followed by closed groove treatment of material from preceding section 1′11″–1′23″ ‘Primitive’ More continuous crotchets, and a melodic element on zanza 1′23″–1′57″ 1′23″–1′35″ Closed groove Low bell-like closed groove 1′35″–1′57″ Melodic zanza Divisions . Subdivisions . Form of repetition . Description . 0″–20″ 0″–3″ Closed groove Brief introduction followed by quasi-fractal montage repetitions (approximately: ABBAABBCCCDDCCDCDCB′B′) 3″–20″ 23″–1′02″ 23″–47″ ‘Primitive’ Timeline-esque rhythmic figure; question and answer figure in zanza 47″–1′02″ Much faster section: continuous crotchets; mild hemiola/polyrhythm 1′02″–1′11″ Closed groove Interruption by closed groove shard, followed by closed groove treatment of material from preceding section 1′11″–1′23″ ‘Primitive’ More continuous crotchets, and a melodic element on zanza 1′23″–1′57″ 1′23″–1′35″ Closed groove Low bell-like closed groove 1′35″–1′57″ Melodic zanza Open in new tab Table 1. Étude aux tourniquets (1948) Divisions . Subdivisions . Form of repetition . Description . 0″–20″ 0″–3″ Closed groove Brief introduction followed by quasi-fractal montage repetitions (approximately: ABBAABBCCCDDCCDCDCB′B′) 3″–20″ 23″–1′02″ 23″–47″ ‘Primitive’ Timeline-esque rhythmic figure; question and answer figure in zanza 47″–1′02″ Much faster section: continuous crotchets; mild hemiola/polyrhythm 1′02″–1′11″ Closed groove Interruption by closed groove shard, followed by closed groove treatment of material from preceding section 1′11″–1′23″ ‘Primitive’ More continuous crotchets, and a melodic element on zanza 1′23″–1′57″ 1′23″–1′35″ Closed groove Low bell-like closed groove 1′35″–1′57″ Melodic zanza Divisions . Subdivisions . Form of repetition . Description . 0″–20″ 0″–3″ Closed groove Brief introduction followed by quasi-fractal montage repetitions (approximately: ABBAABBCCCDDCCDCDCB′B′) 3″–20″ 23″–1′02″ 23″–47″ ‘Primitive’ Timeline-esque rhythmic figure; question and answer figure in zanza 47″–1′02″ Much faster section: continuous crotchets; mild hemiola/polyrhythm 1′02″–1′11″ Closed groove Interruption by closed groove shard, followed by closed groove treatment of material from preceding section 1′11″–1′23″ ‘Primitive’ More continuous crotchets, and a melodic element on zanza 1′23″–1′57″ 1′23″–1′35″ Closed groove Low bell-like closed groove 1′35″–1′57″ Melodic zanza Open in new tab The contrasting passages—rhythmically articulated montages in which the seams are audible and Litaize’s pastiche of African music—are unified not only by their timbral palette but by their use of repetition. In positing itself as a unity, the piece stages and makes a claim for the essential affinity between the two repetitions, implying that, like the ‘cloud-hook’ and the antenna, they are underwritten by what Schaeffer elsewhere refers to as ‘an intuition that, though naïve, heralds a universal character’.85 Something similar occurs in Schaeffer’s Simultané camerounais, in which recordings from Cameroon are montaged and superimposed; as in the passage from 1′02″ to 1′11″ of the Étude aux tourniquets, the repetitive techniques of musique concrète are applied to ‘primitive’ material.86 Of course, what is actually ‘affined’, to use Foster’s quasi-neologism, with musique concrète is thoroughly abstracted and mediated: the ‘primitive’ music of the piece is confected by Litaize, an organist who had studied with Marcel Dupré and Louis Vierne, and there is nothing to suggest that he had any expertise in non-Western music, or in writing for non-Western instruments. Schaeffer writes of his closed grooves, too, as radically outside the flow of time and history, rather than as a historically contingent technological affordance: they arise ‘from a symbolic difference’ between the spiral and the circle. The closed groove ‘has neither beginning nor end’, it is ‘a sliver of sound isolated from any temporal context, … made of time that now belongs to no time’.87 The timelessness of the closed groove’s circle, as opposed to the spiral of a record’s regular mechanism, described suggestively as a ‘magic circle’, implies a homologous relation to the distinction between pre-modern, mythic cyclical time and a modern, linear (or, for Schaeffer, spiral) time. Schaeffer suggests that the closed groove is not, or not merely, a historically specific technique, but a means of access to, or an automated reiteration of, primal and universal origins.88 These two repetitions, then, are abstracted from their two contexts, one a signifier for the ‘primitive’, the other a technological device, so as to reveal—or rather, constitute—ahistorical essential characteristics of human musical activity. Maskerage employs different but aligned techniques for ‘affining’ the ‘primitive’ and the modern. Composed as the GRMC moved from working with shellac discs to composing with magnetic tape, the piece relies to a much lesser extent on the repetition of short units than does the Étude aux tourniquets. For much of the film, the sound of the prepared piano—by 1952 a central element in the sound-world of musique concrète—acts as a timbral mediator between other sounds: tuned percussion, drums, and a clock striking 12. Punctuating this timbral flux are bursts of a recording of a kecak chorus, an aestheticized ritual from Bali that was developed in the 1930s for Western audiences as an ersatz signifier of authentic primitive culture, thus already, as Michael B. Bakan notes, ‘a floating sonic signifier enmeshed in schizophonic processes’ rather than a self-present origin.89 The soundtrack self-consciously toys with the thresholds between sound effect and music, such as the bell tones that are interwoven with the gong-like sounds of the prepared piano, or the falsetto voice that accompanies the appearance of a skittish cat. What Schaeffer had theorized in other contexts as the slippage between sound effect, music, and speech afforded by attention to the concrete here takes on a particular political valence: the abstraction of the concrete, so to speak, the autonomy of the recorded surface, allows for the smooth transition between wildly different cultures.90 As in Schaeffer’s conception of colonial radio, the recorded surface becomes the site of this reconciliation and recognition of difference, a difference that is, in Bhabha’s formulation, ‘almost the same, but not quite’.91 Kane’s account of acousmatic underdetermination allows for a more fine-grained theorization of this flatness. As Kane argues, in the acousmatic situation ‘one can only establish qualitative identity but not numerical identity’; that is, without the contribution of the other senses it is only possible to establish that two sounds sound alike, but not that they are ‘the same numerically distinct individual’. In the acousmatic situation, Kane concludes, ‘types or universals, rather than particulars, are primary’; only similarity and not identity can be established.92 To shift the emphasis of Kane’s argument a little, acousmatic underdetermination also entails, by extension, that it is difficult to establish with any certainty that two sounds that sound alike are distinct and discrete individual sounds. As a consequence, the constitutive underdetermination of the acousmatic appears to reduce the distinctions between different sounds, producing a form of equivalence between sound effects and music, ‘traditional’ Balinese and avant-garde Parisian, tending towards a sonic monism.93 It seems, then, that the difficulty, or, indeed, impossibility of discerning a prepared piano from a gamelan in the acousmatic situation is a dynamic internal to the functioning of the piece; if the piece makes a claim for the universality of concrete listening, this claim rests on the underdetermination of the acousmatic situation. As such, as early comparative musicologists like Otto Abraham and Erich von Hornbostel attested, recorded sound lends itself to this sort of comparative exercise, constituting different sonic cultures as comparable by removing visual information.94 This manoeuvre shares a structuring principle with the ethnographic museum that is the film’s setting, offering a ‘neutral’ frame in which artefacts can be read comparatively.95 Far from being neutral, however, the acousmatic veil functions as a crutch for Thompson’s ‘white aurality’, or what Stoever refers to as a ‘color-blind’ aurality, keeping real material relations and historical conditions hidden from view.96 By turning from Schaeffer to his anticolonial contemporaries, what follows attempts to articulate an alternative model of acousmatic listening that engages head on with these historical conditions. FANON AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF LISTENING While Schaeffer was developing a universal theory of listening buttressed by the exotic sounds of the colonies, colonial subjects, and francophone ones in particular, were grappling with the relationship between anticolonial politics and the universal. In the 1930s, in fact, the poetry of Senghor, Damas, and Aimé Césaire had deployed the ‘primitivist’ iconography of ‘African sensuality and harmony with nature’ to ends similar to those of the rest of the avant-garde, as a means to critique Western reason and valorize the contribution of the ‘primitive’ to world culture.97 Césaire and Fanon would later criticize the essentialism of what Jean-Paul Sartre describes as Senghor’s ‘objective’ Negritude, Fanon being particularly critical of Senghor’s reliance on white ethnographers and colonial officials like Leo Frobenius, Maurice Delafosse, and Hubert Lyautey.98 ‘The black soul’, Fanon insists, ‘is a white man’s artifact’, ‘woven … out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’.99 Nevertheless, the generation of anticolonial thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s, shaped as they were by Hegelianism, mediated by Marxism as well as the writings of Alexandre Kojève and Sartre, and by their French education, remained committed at some level to a form of universalism.100 Where Schaeffer’s universalism is predicated on the givenness of certain essences—human creativity, the human condition etc.—Senghor, Césaire, and Fanon (with significant differences) insist on a dialectical humanism, in which, as Senghor puts it, ‘one can grasp man’s permanent features only through his historical, geographical, and ethnic background’.101 Fanon and Césaire’s critique is stronger yet: that which Europe has termed humanism is not really a humanism at all. ‘[T]he West’, Césaire writes, ‘has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.’102 Fanon, often construed as a more Manichean thinker than either Césaire or Senghor, concludes The Wretched of the Earth by invoking a new humanism, drawing inspiration from while critical of European thought: ‘All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them’; the task, according to Fanon, is to ‘work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’.103 What they argue for is, indeed, a universal, but a universal that is yet to be achieved, that ‘can be articulated’, as Achille Mbembe puts it, ‘only in the language of what-is-to-come’.104 This entails an open-ended conception of the universal as one that ‘will always escape repetition because of its radical difference’, as in Césaire’s vision of ‘a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars’.105 It is a project such as this that Judith Butler, whose critique of Western humanism is informed by that of postcolonial thinkers such as Césaire and Fanon, seeks to advance in her work. ‘The task’, she argues, ‘is to compel the terms of modernity to embrace those they have traditionally excluded, where the embrace does not work to domesticate and neutralize the newly avowed term; such terms should remain problematic for the existing notion of the polity, should expose the limits of its claim to universality, and compel a radical rethinking of its parameters.’106 In calling existing universalism into question, these writers give an intimation of a universalism without recourse to essence, oriented, that is, not to origins but to the future.107 ‘This is the Voice of Algeria’, an essay of Fanon’s from 1959, gives an account of what Stoever describes under the rubric of a ‘decolonization of listening’, an account that suggests how a dialectical, anticolonial logic might be brought to bear on Schaeffer’s radiophonic universalism.108 The essay chronicles changing Algerian attitudes towards the radio, a transvaluation of the radio from a tool of the oppressor and a threat to traditional morals and modes of sociability to a central ideological apparatus of the revolutionary struggle.109 Rather than taking radio to be a neutral container for the meeting of ‘primitive’ and modern, African and European—essences that remain untroubled in the course of broadcast and reception—Fanon emphasizes the transformative character of the appropriation of radiophonic technology by the Algerian nationalist movement. The radio, for Fanon, as an apparatus (understood not simply as a piece of machinery but as a set of relations between individuals and between individuals and technologies) that is constitutive of revolutionary Algerian consciousness, undoes the ‘strict, almost feudal type of patrilineal hierarchy … that characterize the Algerian family’: ‘traditional resistances broke down and one could see in a douar groups of families in which fathers, mothers, daughters, elbow to elbow, would scrutinize the radio dial waiting for the Voice of Algeria’.110 The engagement with radio gives rise to a ‘radical transformation of the means of perception, of the very world of perception’.111 As John Mowitt argues, Fanon’s reading of ‘the voice of Algeria’ deconstructs any neat distinction between production and reception: as a result of the cat-and-mouse ‘war of the radio-waves’, in which the French jam nationalist broadcasts and nationalists attempt to evade jamming, the voice of Algeria arrives scrambled: ‘The obstreperous clash of resistances, in spacing out the voice, in separating the voice from itself, produces a reception context composed of a collective charged with the urgent labor of filling in the tears in the voice.’112 Here, listening refutes its traditional passivity vis-à-vis vision; it is, rather, an active practice, a supplementary ‘bad reception … that produces … a resistance about which the subjects must lie in order to secure the truth of the revolution and of themselves’.113 The radio is no longer simply a communication device, and radiophonic listening an unveiling of timeless truths and origins, nor is it the site of a reconciliation between colonized and colonizer that leaves intact the colonial apparatus. Instead, radiophonic listening is a technique for engendering a subject and an Algeria that is yet to be constructed—Mowitt emphasizes the performative character of Fanon’s title (‘Ici, la voix d’Algérie’), calling a liberated Algeria into existence.114 This takes place not through a collapsing of distance, but precisely in the ‘space between enunciation and address’ that for Bhabha characterizes the colonial context, in the décalage—the gap or lag in time and space—that structures diasporic relations.115 The difference between this model of radio listening and Schaeffer’s can be articulated as two responses to the underdetermination of the acousmatic. The spacing of the source and cause from the sounding effect leads Schaeffer, in the context of musique concrète, to autonomize the effect, to demand ‘that the listener hear the sonic effects as self-generated, as autonomous sound objects bracketed from worldly connection’, thus attempting to rescue reproduced sound from the condition of writing.116 Fanon’s ‘bad reception’, by contrast, takes up the differential spacing of the acousmatic situation as a means to de-privilege what Bhabha calls ‘the topos of enunciation’, adopting the ‘signifying position of the minority that resists totalization—the repetition [or reception] that will not return as the same’.117 Fanon’s ‘new man’ is mediated by the metonymic series voice–radio–revolution: rather than something that was always there, waiting to be discovered, the human is always yet to fully emerge (as Fanon’s friend Sartre puts it, ‘human universality exists, but it is not a given; it is in perpetual construction’).118 By extension, the same can be said of listening: it is itself under perpetual construction, ‘a dynamic historical and cultural practice’, without a pre-cultural, natural essence.119 CONCLUSION While Schaeffer’s later writings and activities have appeared only briefly here, a great deal remains to be written regarding the figure of the ‘primitive’ and the non-Western in relation to Schaeffer’s universalist project. The Traité des objets musicaux continues to call on such familiar primitivist stock figures as ‘l’Indien’ (referring to indigenous peoples of the Americas), ‘le tam-tam nègre’, and ‘les Hindous’, with the not-unrelated addition of the ‘Neanderthal’, in support of Schaeffer’s universal theory of listening.120 Indeed, in an essay from 1982 entitled ‘The Primitive Ear’ Schaeffer opposes ‘the so-called refined, cultural, musical listening, of the ‘do-re-mi-fa-sol’ to another listening, which ‘resemble[s] the primitive listening of the Indian [l’Indien, i.e. Native American]’, ‘for sound in itself’; the ‘primitive’, ‘the index to a hidden good Nature’, is again invoked to condemn the over-civilized West.121 Valiquet has forcefully argued that, while the Traité des objets musicaux, from 1966, may attempt to hear the music of others, it cannot account for ‘the hearing of others’. Valiquet gives a suggestive reading of Schaeffer’s project and the form of universalism entailed by its engagement with structuralist thought. Indeed, Schaeffer quotes from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale (1958) in the preface to the Traité des objets musicaux, invoking a passage that accords with the humanism examined in this article: Perhaps one day we shall discover that the same logic is at work in mythical and scientific thought, and that man has always thought in the same way. Progress—if indeed the word still applies—would not have had consciousness as its domain, but the world, where a humanity endowed with unchanging faculties would, in the course of its long history, have been continuously grappling with new objects.122 In an interview from 1969, Schaeffer explicitly aligns his theory of listening with Lévi-Strauss’s critique of ethnocentrism, declaring his aim, in an echo of the Lévi-Strauss passage cited above, ‘to find, through their diversity, shared mechanisms’ in musics from different cultures.123 Schaeffer’s theory thus opens itself to the critique of Lévi-Strauss put forward by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, published in 1967, one year after the Traité, and in particular to Derrida’s accusation that ‘the critique of ethnocentrism … has most often the sole function of constituting the other as a model of original and natural goodness, of accusing and humiliating oneself, of exhibiting its being-unacceptable in an anti-ethnocentric mirror’.124 In this light, Lévi-Strauss’s critique of ethnocentrism replays the familiar trope of the innocent, uncontaminated ‘primitive’ from which the Westerner might learn, imposing an ethnocentric dichotomy between speech and writing on peoples ‘without writing’.125 How French electroacoustic music’s continued engagement with non-Western music was inflected in the postcolonial era remains to be explored. Potential case studies abound: Anticycle II (1974), by the ethnomusicologist and composer Jean Schwarz, which pairs the tape techniques of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales with Schwarz’s compositions for non-Western percussion instruments, or Enrico Fulchignoni’s film Orient-Occident (1960), which explores ‘mysterious correspondences’ between ancient sculptures from Europe, Asia, and Egypt to a soundtrack composed by Iannis Xenakis, employing diverse percussive sounds cloaked in reverberation.126 It is difficult to avoid listening for traces of the traumatic and drawn-out end of French rule in Algeria in Luc Ferrari’s Promenade symphonique dans un paysage musical (1978), composed of recordings made in El-Oued in 1976, only nine years after the last French forces had left Algeria. Musique concrète bears the mark of a pivotal moment in the contestation of figures of universality that were and remain central to the modern political imaginary.127 As such, it is best understood not as a strictly autonomous art form with no meaningful relationship to society and history, but as an aesthetic mediated by its intellectual and social context. As the conceptual continuities between Schaeffer’s different projects that I have demonstrated make clear, the history of musical aesthetics cannot be clearly distinguished from a socio-political history; why certain (aesthetic) categories, such as a universal music or mode of listening, are prized over others is shaped by the broader political valorization of categories like the universal. Musique concrète is not merely an index of its context, but also a site in which political commitments and visions were tested and worked over. Attending to the historical formation of French electroacoustic music in the context of the end of France’s empire should caution against the too hasty transplantation of its associated rhetoric of universality and emancipation to the present.128 Footnotes 1 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005), 3; James D. Le Sueur, ‘Decolonizing “French universalism”: Reconsidering the Impact of the Algerian War on French Intellectuals’, Journal of North African Studies, 6 (2001), 167–86 at 169–70. 2 See, for instance, Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music (Oxford, 2013), 19–38; Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (Oxford, 2010), 52–54. 3 Évelyne Gayou, Le GRM: Cinquante ans d’histoire (Paris, 2007), 48 and 62; Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley, 2012), 88–9 and 169. Schaeffer later claimed not to have known of either Russolo or Marinetti in 1948. Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Oakland, 2017), 535. 4 Patrick Valiquet, ‘Hearing the Music of Others: Pierre Schaeffer’s Humanist Interdiscipline’, Music & Letters, 98 (2017), 255–80. 5 See Louis Arnorsson Sass, ‘“The Catastrophes of Heaven”: Modernism, Primitivism, and the Madness of Antonin Artaud’, Modernism/Modernity, 3 (1996), 73–91 for an account of primitivism in Artaud, and Daniel J. Sherman, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945–1975 (Chicago, 2011), 78–83, for primitivist tropes in interior design. 6 Hal Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, October, 34 (1985), 45–70; Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport, Conn., 2004); Sherman, French Primitivism. 7 Carlos Palombini, ‘“Dans une bureau à Marseille, un jeune ingénieur rêve”’, in Schaeffer, Essai sur la radio et le cinéma: Esthétique et techique des arts-relais, 1941–1942 (Paris, 2010), 63–111 at 75; Daniel Racine, Léon-Gontran Damas: L’homme et l’œuvre (Paris, 1983), 32–33; Schaeffer, Les Antennes de Jéricho (Paris, 1978), 158–62. Damas was later a technical adviser for French overseas radio, from 1958 to 1963. Racine, Léon-Gontran Damas, 40. 8 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 151. 9 Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC, 2015), 22; Aimé Césaire, ‘Discours sur la Négritude’ [1987], in Discours sur le colonialisme: Suivi de Discours sur la négritude (Paris, 2004), 77–92 at 87–8. 10 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC, 2017), 28–30; cf. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; London, 2008), 21. 11 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ [1939], in Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme (Paris, 1964), 22–38; cf. Senghor, ‘L’Esthétique négro-africaine’ [1956], in Liberté I, 202–17. Schaeffer’s own encounter with two of the three protagonists of Negritude, while not exactly the focus of this article, is intriguing; Schaeffer shared several intellectual points of reference with Senghor as a consequence of their shared debt to the Catholic nonconformism of the 1930s. Indeed, much of Senghor’s thought is articulated in terms borrowed from this milieu; his preference for the ‘person’ and ‘community’ rather than the ‘individual’, his criticism of Western rationalism, and his desire for a renewal of folk traditions all exhibit the influence of such writers as Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Senghor regularly cited Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin, and Sylvie Dallet notes Schaeffer and Senghor’s shared admiration for Mounier; Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation: Pierre Schaeffer et la Sorafom’, in Michèle de Bussierre, Cécile Méadel, and Caroline Ulmann-Mauriat (eds.), Radios et télévision au temps des “événements d’Algérie”, 1954–1962 (Paris, 1999), 171–81 at 176. See John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau, 1930–2000 (Montreal, 2002) for an overview of Catholic nonconformism. A not unrelated context to the universalist humanism under discussion here is the post-war internationalism represented by UNESCO and the intellectual current of European federalism, both of which drew inspiration from figures associated with Catholic nonconformism like Maritain, Mounier, and Alexandre Marc. See Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 53–83; Paul Betts, ‘Humanity’s New Heritage: UNESCO and the Rewriting of World History’, Past and Present, 228 (2015), 249–85; Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way, 8–16. In the late 1940s and 1950s, many of the broadcasts produced by Schaeffer, such as Une Heure du monde (1946) and ‘L’Avenir de l’Europe fédérée occidentale’ (1948), reflected a commitment to this form of internationalism: see Alexander Stalarow, ‘Listening to a Liberated Paris: Pierre Schaeffer Experiments with Radio’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 2016), 84–121; Jocelyne Tournet-Lammer, Sur les traces de Pierre Schaeffer: Archives 1942–1995 (Paris, 2006), 33, 40, and 44. From the late 1940s onwards, Schaeffer regularly participated in conferences sponsored by UNESCO. 12 Senghor, ‘L’Avenir de la France dans l’Outre-Mer’, Politique étrangère, 19 (1954), 419–26 at 422. 13 Wilder, Freedom Time, 133–66. Sékou Touré is the striking exception among francophone African leaders. For Nkrumah and Eric Williams’s model of an anticolonial federalism, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019), 107–41. 14 Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford, 2002), 11–21. 15 Nevertheless, as Homi Bhabha insists, ‘the similitude of the symbol as it plays across cultural sites must not obscure the fact that repetition of the sign is, in each specific social practice, both different and differential’. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; London, 2007), 234. 16 Schaeffer himself implies a connection when he notes that he ‘was involved with the radio in Africa in the same period as [he] was doing concrète’. Tim Hodgkinson, ‘An interview with Pierre Schaeffer – pioneer of Musique Concrète’, http://timhodgkinson.co.uk/schaeffer.pdf. 17 Schaeffer, ‘Du totem à l’antenne’ [radio broadcast of talk given in Jan. 1954] https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-nuit-revee-de/les-grandes-conferences-du-totem-lantenne-1ere-diffusion-12021954/. That Schaeffer was familiar with Dogon belief systems at all is attributable to the interwar ethnographic work of Marcel Griaule, a paradigmatic representative of a colonial-ethnographic humanism concerned to record and preserve the Other in its difference. 18 Valiquet, ‘Hearing the Music of Others’, 278–9; John Dack, ‘Pierre Schaeffer and the (Recorded) Sound Source’, in James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow (eds.), Sound Objects (Durham, NC, 2019), 33–52 at 35. 19 Valiquet, ‘“All Sounds Are Created Equal”: Mediating Democracy in Acousmatic Education’, in Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates (eds.), Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (New York, 2018), 123–37 at 125. 20 Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York, 1997), 23–4. 21 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 13, 56, and passim. 22 Ibid. 14. 23 Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014), 99. This is not to suggest that Schaeffer had any familiarity with Hanslick’s writings, or, indeed, with German debates in the aesthetics of music, but more to point to what was by the early 20th c. one available mode of conceptualizing autonomy and musical meaning. In France, this is perhaps most apparent in the rhetoric of objectivity associated with neoclassicism: a reaction against Romanticism and in particular the perceived decadence of the late 19th-c. emphasis on self-expression. Writers such as Boris de Schloezer, with whom Schaeffer was to work after the Second World War, and Nadia Boulanger, with whom Schaeffer studied in the 1930s, spoke of a geometric, pure, and impersonal music. In a text from the early 1940s, Schaeffer writes that music ‘has no object to present, … no material as a medium but only sounds to be shaped [mettre en forme] and … is for aesthetics exactly what mathematics is for science’; Schaeffer, Essai sur la radio et le cinéma, 47–8. See Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Rochester, NY, 1996), and Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford, 2014), 262–8. 24 Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects, 502; Vandelle, ‘Musique exotique et musique expérimentale’, 35. 25 Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’ [1956], trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text, 28 (2010), 145–52; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 26 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 24; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955; New York, 2000), 69. 27 Césaire, ‘Discours sur la Négritude’, 84–5. 28 Sara Ahmed, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8 (2007), 149–68. 29 Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax, 23 (2017), 266–82 at 266. 30 Ibid. 273. 31 Ibid. 268. 32 Ibid. 274. 33 Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York, 2016). 34 Christoph Cox, ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10 (2011), 145–61; Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 38; Schaeffer, Propos sur la Coquille: Notes sur l’expression radiophonique (Arles, 1990), 59. 35 Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, 278. 36 See Bonds, Absolute Music, particularly 112–26; Kane, Sound Unseen, 39. Kane traces the supplementary relationship between technè and physis in musical listening practices in chapter 4 of Sound Unseen. 37 Stalarow, ‘Listening to a Liberated Paris’, 115–21; Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 21–2. 38 Martial Robert, Pierre Schaeffer: D’Orphée à Mac Luhan (Paris, 2000), 34; Étienne L. Damone, ‘Vers un réseau d’outre-mer’, in Martin Kaltenecker and Karine le Bail (eds.), Pierre Schaeffer: Les Constructions impatientes (Paris, 2012), 165–77 at 166. 39 Schaeffer, ‘Le phénomène radiophonique’ [9 March 1953], Caen Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Fonds Schaeffer, Box 91, Dossier 861. See Palombini, ‘Dans un bureau à Marseille, un jeune ingénieur rêve…’ for the publication history of these texts. 40 Damone, ‘Vers un réseau d’outre-mer’, 165–6. 41 Ibid. 166. 42 Schaeffer, ‘Du totem à l’antenne’. 43 Schaeffer, Les Antennes de Jéricho, 162–3. 44 Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation’, 179; Robert, Pierre Schaeffer: D’Orphée à Mac Luhan, 135–6. 45 Damone, ‘Vers un réseau d’outre-mer’, 166–72; cf. Tournet-Lammer, Sur les traces de Pierre Schaeffer, 66–8. 46 Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation’, 175–9. 47 Robert, Pierre Schaeffer: D’Orphée à Mac Luhan, 41–2; André Videau and Charles Duvelle, ‘Rencontre avec Charles Duvelle’, Hommes et Migrations, 1220 (1999), 110–13. The only recording published while Schaeffer was in charge was, fittingly, of the Dogon funeral ceremony for a certain Marcel Griaule, made by François Di Dio. Cf. n. 17 above. 48 Schaeffer, ‘La radio instrument de culture’ [talk given in 1954], Caen Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Fonds Schaeffer, Box 55, Dossier 471.1, 1. For earlier articulations of a radiophonic universalism in the context of French colonialism, see Edwin C. Hill, Jr., Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore, 2013), 123–30. 49 Schaeffer, ‘La radio instrument de culture’, 8 and ‘Annexe B’. 50 See, for example, ‘Annexe A’ to Schaeffer, ‘La radio instrument de culture’. These programmes, such as those of Yves le Gall, were undertaken more with an interest in preserving and disseminating folklore than with any strictly scientific ethnographic project. In 1958, Schaeffer adapted one of the earliest francophone African novels, Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir (1953), for French radio. 51 Robert, Pierre Schaeffer: D’Orphée à Mac Luhan, 34; Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation’, 171–81. 52 Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa, 29; Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 50. 53 Sherman, French Primitivism, 85–6. 54 Schaeffer, ‘Du totem à l’antenne’. 55 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 143. Cf. Bhabha’s discussion of that ‘syntax of deferral’ that is a ‘specific colonial temporality and textuality of that space between enunciation and address’. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 135. As I suggest below, this also captures something about the ‘syntax’ or structure of the radio apparatus. 56 Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation’, 181. For an overview of the role of Radio Cairo, sponsored by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, in promulgating anticolonial politics in East and Central Africa, see James R. Brennan, ‘Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1953–64’, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, Ohio, 2010), 173–95. 57 Videau and Duvelle, ‘Rencontre’, 111. Duvelle also claims that it was Jacques Soustelle—anthropologist, last Governor-General of French Algeria, and fierce opponent of Algerian independence—who urged Schaeffer’s development of French colonial radio, though this may be the result of confusion on Duvelle’s part; in 1945–6 Soustelle briefly served as Minister for Information and then as Minister for the Colonies, but at the time of Sorafom’s development he held neither post. 58 Dallet, ‘Un acteur méconnu de la décolonisation’, 176–7. 59 Marc Pierret, Entretiens avec Pierre Schaeffer (Paris, 1969), 147–8. 60 Frank Gerits, ‘The Ideological Scramble for Africa: The US, Ghanaian, French and British Competition for Africa’s Future, 1953–1963’ (Ph.D. thesis, European University Institute, 2014), 226. Gerits suggests that from the mid-1950s Negritude was adopted as the face of French public diplomacy in West Africa; see pp. 93–5. Senghor remained committed to French as ‘a language with a universal vocation’. Senghor, ‘Comme les lamantins vont boire à la source’ [1956], in Liberté I, 218–27 at 225. 61 Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State, 253. Mbembe gives equally if not more damning appraisals; see Critique of Black Reason, 41–3 and ‘France-Afrique: Ces sottises qui divisent’, Africultures, 8 Aug. 2007. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York, 2007), 82–3 for contemporary criticisms of Negritude from Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. In a more recent book, Wilder offers a sympathetic account of post-war Negritude as an attempt to negotiate the postcolonial order outside of a binary of neo-colonialism and anticolonial nationalism. See Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC, 2015), 62–3. 62 Schaeffer, ‘Du totem à l’antenne’. This programme of conservation, strengthening of links between a people and its culture and between different cultures within ‘Greater France’, is set out most explicitly in ‘La radio instrument de culture’. 63 Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (New York, 2001), 55–60. 64 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 16. Indeed, once one begins to consider musique concrète with this conjuncture in mind, many examples appear, including the Mexican flute of Variations sur une flute mexicaine (1949), as well as the theme of Étude noire (1948), derived ‘almost imperceptibly from the folklore of Asia Minor’. Présentation d’oeuvre: Études de Bruits, Caen Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Fonds Schaeffer, Box 117, Dossier 887. 65 Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York, 1964), 266. Yve-Alain Bois gives a more detailed reading of the lessons Picasso took from African art, distinguishing a ‘morphological’ imitation of appearance from a ‘structural’ understanding of the arbitrariness of the signifier; Bois, ‘Kahnweiler’s Lesson’, trans. Katharine Streip, Representations, 18 (1987), 33–68. 66 Schaeffer’s notes, and a letter from Haas to Schaeffer, dated 19 Nov. 1951 in Caen Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Fonds Schaeffer, Box 106, Dossier 1055. 67 Schaeffer, Livret d’Orphée 53, version française complète, 12, reproduced in Cyrille Delhaye, ‘Orphée de Pierre Henry et Pierre Schaeffer: 1951–2005, de palimpseste en palimpseste’ (Ph.D. thesis, Université de Rouen, 2010); Schaeffer, ‘Simultané camerounais’, La Revue musicale, 244 (1959), 62. 68 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 182. 69 Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, 60; Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 100–1. 70 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 107. 71 Romuald Vandelle, ‘Musique exotique et musique expérimentale’, La Revue musicale, 244 (1959), 34–7 at 34. 72 Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, 47. 73 Ibid. 54–8. 74 Indeed, for early proponents of sound recording as a tool of comparative musicology, the acousmatic reduction of the sound recording was part of the technique’s appeal: ‘[w]ith the phonograph’, write Otto Abraham and Erich M. von Hornbostel, ‘one can record a piece of music and study it at leisure in the study, where attention is not so much distracted visually as it is at performances by exotic peoples’. The acousmatic reduction separates, or rather constitutes, ‘the music itself’, apart from its accidental contextual meanings. Otto Abraham and E. M. von Hornbostel, ‘On the Significance of the Phonograph for Comparative Musicology’ [1904], trans. Ray Giles, in Klaus P. Wachsmann, Dieter Christensen, and Hans-Peter Reinecke (eds.), Hornbostel Opera Omnia (The Hague, 1975), i. 183–202 at 195. 75 Foster, ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art’, 50. 76 Michel Leiris documents the looting characteristic of Marcel Griaule’s interwar ethnographic work among the Dogon in Phantom Africa, trans. Brent Hayes Edwards (1934; Calcutta, 2017). 77 Sherman, French Primitivism, 62–3. 78 Ibid. 78 and 83. Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966), a film set between Senghor’s Senegal and the French Riviera, employs a mask not unlike some of those in Maskerage in a critique of the abstractive logic of association style. The protagonist presents a mask to her white employer, who later displays it in her minimally decorated white-walled apartment. After the protagonist’s suicide, the employer’s husband attempts to return the mask to her family in a refused reconciliation, but a young boy takes it and follows (chases?—the scene is ambiguous) him out of the township wearing the mask. The mask is here neither a representative of an authentic, holistic ‘folk’ culture—the retour aux sources fails—nor is it smoothly accepted into the neutral, white interior of the metropolitan home. Primitivism as a European aesthetic trope returns against the neocolonial Frenchman. 79 Germain Bazin, quoted in Sherman, French Primitivism, 69; André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (1951; London, 1954), 630–42 in particular. 80 Sherman, French Primitivism, 85–6. It is this ahistorical curatorial humanism at which Roland Barthes takes aim in an essay from the mid-1950s titled ‘The Great Family of Man’, a ‘classic humanism’ ‘which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History’. Roland Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’, in Mythologies (1957; London, 1982), 100–2 at 101. Fred Turner offers a more sympathetic appraisal of the exhibition that is the subject of Barthes’s essay, reading it as ‘an effort to make visible a new, more diverse, and more tolerant vision of both the United States and the globe’ (p. 209). Nevertheless, it is difficult not to read its rhetoric of individual freedom, liberal democracy, and opposition to totalitarianism, particularly in the exhibition’s tour outside the USA, as of a piece with a universalism that, though well-intentioned, is just as problematic as its French counterpart. Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago, 2013), 181–212. 81 See, for example, Fanon’s references to French stereotypes of the Senegalese in Black Skin, White Masks; Patricia Leighten, ‘The White Peril and l’art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism and Anticolonialism’, Art Bulletin, 72 (1990), 609–30 at 610–13; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1967; Baltimore, 1997), 115. 82 Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Situation actuelle de la musique expérimentale’, La Revue musicale, 244 (1959), 10–17 at 17. That is, either the alignment of the Other with an archaic past from which Europe has evolved, or a model of cultural difference as contemporary with each other; cf. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 185; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris, 1952), 13; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983). 83 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 81. 84 Paulla A. Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton, 2002), 33–45; Simha Arom, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology, trans. Martin Thom, Barbara Tuckett, and Raymond Boyd (1985; Cambridge, 2004), 17–18. Arom collaborated with Schaeffer and the GRM in the 1960s and 1970s, including speaking at the GRM’s seminar course in 1969–70. Michel Chion, ‘Reflections on the Sound Object and Reduced Listening’, in James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow (eds.), Sound Objects (Durham, NC, 2019), 23–32 at 28–9. 85 Schaeffer, ‘Du totem à l’antenne’. 86 Rudolf Frisius, ‘Unsichtbare Klänge: Musik über Musik – Musik zweiten Grades’ [2008], http://www.frisius.de/rudolf/texte/MuM.pdf. 87 Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 31–2. 88 Christophe Levaux, with explicit reference to Schaeffer’s closed grooves, traces a longue durée history of ‘repetitive audio technologies’ ‘back at least as far as the middle of the ninth century’. Like most longue durée histories, Levaux emphasises long-term stability at the expense of short-term change. Levaux, ‘The Forgotten History of Repetitive Audio Technologies’, Organised Sound, 22 (2017), 187–94 at 188. 89 Michael B. Bakan, ‘The Abduction of the Signifying Monkey Chant: Schizophonic Transmogrifications of Balinese Kecak in Fellini’s Satyricon and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 18 (2009), 83–106 at 87–92. I owe the identification of this recording to Michael Tenzer. Towards the end of the film, short repeated fragments of jazz emerge, recalling an earlier primitivist association of US jazz with authentic African origins (of which Milhaud’s previously mentioned La création du monde is a paradigmatic musical example). 90 Schaeffer, ‘L’Élément non visuel au cinéma (I) – Analyse de la “bande son”’, La Revue du cinéma, 1 (1946), 45–8; Schaeffer, ‘L’Élément non visuel au cinéma (III) – Psychologie du rapport vision-audition’, La Revue du cinéma, 3 (1946), 51–4; Schaeffer, ‘Concrete Music’ [1954], in James Eugene Wierzbicki (ed.), The Routledge Film Music Sourcebook (New York, 2012), 150–3; Schaeffer, Propos sur la coquille, 50. 91 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122. 92 Kane, Sound Unseen, 146–7. 93 Ibid. 147. 94 Abraham and Hornbostel, ‘On the Significance of the Phonograph for Comparative Musicology’, 195. 95 Jann Pasler points to the parallel roles of Universal Exhibitions and transcriptions of non-Western music into Western notation in constituting musical universals, lending ideological support to French imperial universalism. Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley, 2009), 426–32 and 572–82; Pasler, ‘Sonic Anthropology in 1900: The Challenge of Transcribing Non-Western Music and Language’, Twentieth-Century Music, 11 (2014), 7–36. Cf. Alexander Rehding, ‘Wax Cylinder Revolutions’, Musical Quarterly, 88 (2005), 123–60 at 146–8. 96 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 233–43. 97 Sherman, French Primitivism, 9; see ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ for Senghor’s exposition of this aesthetic, which draws explicitly on the work of Leo Frobenius. 98 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2 and 99. A quotation from Lyautey, a reformist governor of Morocco, serves as an epigraph to Senghor’s essay ‘Vues sur l’Afrique noire, ou assimiler, non être assimilés’ [1945], in Liberté I, 39–69, and other colonial governors come in for praise in a number of Senghor’s essays from the 1930s and 1940s. See, for example, ‘Le Problème culturel en A.O.F.’ [1937], in Liberté I, 11–21. 99 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 7 and 84. Cf. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 43. 100 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Black Orpheus’ [1948], in The Aftermath of War, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford, 2017), 259–329 at 287. Senghor describes the humanist values of the ‘French genius’ instilled in him and Césaire at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in ‘Lycée Louis-le-Grand: Haut lieu de culture française’ [1963], in Liberté I, 403–6 at 403–4. 101 Senghor, On African Socialism, trans. Mercer Cook (1961; London, 1964), 78. 102 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 73. 103 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; London, 2001), 253–5. 104 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 160. 105 Ibid.; Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, 152. 106 Butler, Undoing Gender (Abingdon, 2004), 180. Jane Hiddleston explicitly aligns Butler’s humanism with that of Césaire; Hiddleston, ‘Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism’, Modern Language Review, 105 (2010), 87–102 at 102. 107 It is in part as a consequence of rejecting the colonial characterizations of African music in terms of essential and ahistorical origins that anticolonial writers like Fanon were wary or dismissive of invoking African musics. For a rich account of this ‘missed encounter’ between ethnomusicology and the theory and literature of anticolonialism, see Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘The Sound of Anticolonialism’, in Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (eds.), Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Durham, NC, 2016), 269–91. 108 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line. 109 Fanon, ‘This is the Voice of Algeria’, in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (1959; New York, 1965), 69–97. 110 Ibid. 70 and 83. 111 Ibid. 96. 112 John Mowitt, Radio: Essays in Bad Reception (Berkeley, 2011), 94. 113 Ibid. 95. 114 Ibid. 88. 115 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 135; Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 13–15. Edwards borrows the term from Senghor. Edwin C. Hill, Jr. deploys Edwards’s theorization of diaspora as a figure of anticolonial radio listening, arguing that the colonial radio’s universalizing ideology is undone in Césaire’s poetry, where the latter ‘exploits and widens the gap’ that colonial radio seeks to cover over. Hill, Jr., Black Soundscapes White Stages, 136–45. 116 Kane, Sound Unseen, 150. Schaeffer’s claim in the context of colonial radio administration that radio abolishes distance and vanquishes time implies another attempt to affirm the immediacy and self-presence—the speech-like character—of reproduced sound, and deny the radio’s spacing of source and effect, of enunciation and reception, centre and periphery. 117 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 232. 118 Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (1946; New Haven, 2007), 43. 119 Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 232. 120 ‘Translators’ Introduction’ in Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects, pp. xxi–xxvii at xxii. 121 Schaeffer, ‘L’Oreille primitive’, in L’Oreille oubliée (Paris, 1982), 14–15 at 14; Derrida, Of Grammatology, 114. 122 Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Schaeffer, Treatise on Musical Objects, p. xxxviii. 123 Pierret, Entretiens, 47–55. Lévi-Strauss appears to have attended a performance of Orphée 51 in 1951, and later wrote a withering appraisal of musique concrète in Le Cru et le cuit (Paris, 1964), 31. Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, 101. 124 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 114. 125 Ibid. 121. 126 Enrico Fulchignoni, Orient-Occident (1960), https://fresques.ina.fr/artsonores/fiche-media/InaGrm00813/enrico-fulchignoni-orient-occident.html. Schwarz worked in the ethnomusicology department of the Musée de l’homme before joining the GRM in the late 1960s, where he led a course on ‘ethnic music’. 127 By this I mean in particular a liberalism of formal equality—that of rights—and social harmony that obscures and legitimates material and structural inequalities. Marx’s assessment in ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ is perhaps the most famous articulation of this argument; Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, trans. Joris de Bres, in Political Writings: The First International and After (Middlesex, 1974), 339–59. See also Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London, 2006); Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, 2011); David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (Cambridge, 2015). 128 Something approaching a postcolonial musique concrète, that is, a music that articulates the spatio-temporal disjuncture—the spacing or décalage—that structures both the acousmatic and the diasporic, may be discernible on the fringes of this tradition, for example in the recordings of Ghédalia Tazartès and Trevor Mathison’s soundtracks for the films of the Black Audio Film Collective. Tazartès’s Diasporas (1979) can be taken to refer not only to his own Greek Jewish heritage, but also to other Mediterranean diasporas with whose vocal traditions he engages. © The Author(s) (2020). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - ‘FROM THE TOTEM TO THE ANTENNA’: MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE AND THE UNIVERSAL AT THE END OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE
JF - Music and Letters
DO - 10.1093/ml/gcaa060
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