Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on musical objets) represents the culmination of Pierre Schaeffer's thinking on the nature of music and sound. Building upon more than a quarter century of broadcasting and compositional research, Schaeffer's book saw immediate adoption as a research guide by the composers and technicians of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), the experimental broadcasting unit Schaeffer founded in 1958. It has since taken on a reputation as one of the canonical texts of the academic electroacoustic tradition as a whole. Now, a half century after its original publication, Schaeffer's finely wrought metalanguage for the relationship between human listening and musical sound is finally beginning to appear in English translation. 2 The lack of translation until now, however, has not hampered the growth of a robust and independent anglophone tradition of Schaeffer scholarship. There is a particularly strong current of critical writing building upon Schaeffer's thinking about the affordances of an 'acousmatic' approach to sound, that is, when sound is encountered in the absence of a visible source. 3 With few exceptions, however, the focus has been upon putting Schaeffer's ideas to compositional work rather than 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. 4 And yet these studies frequently invite us to think of 1 Early versions of this article were presented at the 2015 Annual Conference of the Royal Music Association in Birmingham and the weekly research seminar organised by Benedict Taylor at the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. I would like to express my gratitude for the generous feedback I received from John Dack, Kyle Devine, Brian Kane, Peter Nelson, and three anonymous reviewers. Thanks are due as well to Marcelle Deschênes, who provided invaluable primary sources from her private archive in Montreal.
This article examines ongoing efforts to associate the decline of the modernist electroacoustic music tradition with the rise of digital technologies. Illustrative material is drawn from ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in the Canadian city of Montreal. The author surveys examples of institutions, careers, performances and works showing how the digital is brought into the ideological service of existing musical orders and power structures by musicians, policy-makers and other intermediaries. Drawing upon the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Georgina Born, as well as on contemporary media theory, the author argues that accounts of the disruptive agency of digital mediation are incomplete without a corresponding attention to the complex cultural mechanisms by which it is kept under control. What is at stake in the transformation of Montreal's electroacoustic tradition is not a collapse so much as a further remediation of modernist social and aesthetic principles.
This article weaves together futurist electropop, the neorationalist memescape, neoliberal urban planning, and digital finance to illustrate some of the new epistemological and political challenges facing the growing musicological subfield of critical organology. Drawing upon recent studies of financial technology, it argues that calls to erase theoretical abstraction and return to a “common-sense” concern for “tangible things” come dangerously close to endorsing the neoliberal drive to replace public institutions with entrepreneurial competition. The aims are to show that the “affordances” of music technology today are not necessarily discernible when organologists limit their attention to musical instruments’ ontologies alone, and to propose an alternative focused on “repairing” music technology’s capacity for democratization. The first section presents a reading of the Grimes single “We Appreciate Power,” situating the music in relation to an ethnographic account of the scene where Grimes first emerged. The second section seeks a definition of affordance that makes sense of the technological politics at work in things like rationalist meme economies and neoliberal innovation hubs. The concluding section outlines the case for a reparative organology that would both account better for materiality and resolve anxieties around theoretical abstraction.
This article examines the early reception of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical work in Quebec through the teaching of Marcelle Deschênes, principal author of the first electroacoustic theory and ear training curricula at both Université Laval and Université de Montréal. An account of Deschênes’s educational career is provided, along with remarks on the contents of her early courses in Morpho-typology and her listening workshops for children, using newly excavated primary material from her private archives. While existing scholarship presumes that Schaefferian thinking arrived in Quebec with the ‘orthodox’ acousmatic approach of Francis Dhomont, this article asserts that a pluralist and multidisciplinary interpretation of Schaeffer’s work can be discerned which pre-dated Dhomont’s teaching and has had an equally lasting impact overall. A methodological argument is also made for including education and other forms of ‘reproductive labour’ in the history of electroacoustic music.
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