Pierre Schaeffer was an outspoken critic of disciplines. It is impossible to distil a simple professional or vocational orientation from his written output alone. His published work spans six decades and encompasses plays, novels, journals, memoirs, interviews, engineering reports, reflections on broadcasting administration, music theory, and all manner of criticism. Reading across this body of work one finds Schaeffer constantly reformulating his own image, and often deeply ambivalent about the reception of his projects. His style is wry and combative, and this means that it is never difficult to catch him out in his insecurities: obsessing over the critical remarks of unnamed interlocutors, half-apologizing for his lack of training as an engineer or composer, or under-cutting perceived competitors with questionable jokes about their linguistic or cultural propensities. The few pieces of music he composed bore flippant titles like étude or bidule – since the verb biduler means ‘to tinker’ or ‘to hack’, un bidule in this context might be something like a ‘gadget’ – to avoid having to defend his products as oeuvres. His constant reuse and revision of written material is remarkably resourceful, no doubt betraying the fruits of many years of supervisory experience as a religious youth leader and wartime public servant. But the same talent also seems to indicate that Schaeffer was never quite satisfied with his achievements; nowhere was this more the case than in his forays into music theory.

It is nevertheless precisely upon his theoretical reflections that Schaeffer's reputation is now being rebuilt. Without this work and the handful of compositions to which it pertains, it is doubtful that he would be known to readers outside France, if indeed his name had survived there beyond a small circle of specialists in broadcasting history. He first came to the attention of Anglophone music scholars in the 1950s as the inventor of musique concrète, a body of compositions assembled from recorded material in which formal decisions were meant to be grounded in the ‘concrete’ qualities of the sound as experienced and not imposed by an external, ‘abstract’ system. By appealing immediately to the ears, Schaeffer sought to foster authentic individual expression across cultures in the same spirit of liberalization that guided new organizations such as UNESCO, whose music programmes directly involved him as a representative of French radio. The school of composers and musicologists who took up Schaeffer's cause in France grew quickly in the ensuing decades, spreading first to Belgium and Quebec. Anglophones followed more slowly, but by the mid-1980s, long after Schaeffer himself had renounced composing, the theoretical project he initiated had become firmly rooted in Britain as well. One can now trace his commitment to aural authenticity in a long tradition of Anglophone electroacoustic composers and theorists who extend commitment to education and apprenticeship, sharing his hope that electroacoustic innovations might one day broaden the horizons of all listeners. The translation of Schaeffer's formidable theoretical corpus into English has begun rather late in this reception, and this raises the question as to whether or not Anglophone readers, in spite of having a local Schaefferian tradition that extends his ideas in unique ways, have misunderstood something of his writing by having only limited access to it in their own language.

Among those who would likely answer in the affirmative are the translators of Schaeffer's 1952 book In Search of a Concrete Music, Christine North and John Dack, and the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, Brian Kane. Both volumes are intended to introduce Schaeffer afresh to a new Anglophone public, and both are clearly invested in reactivating his ideas by placing them in new contexts. As North and Dack declare in their translators’ note, their goal is to inspire a ‘re-evaluation’ of still relevant ideas, and thus to extend the Schaefferian tradition into the future. In their words, they seek to correct a perceived ‘disparity between French opinion and that of the Anglophone community’ (xi), taking as given that the former is more positive for being richer. Their approach is guardedly historicist, proposing to ‘be as faithful as possible to the original in order to give the reader, as nearly as we can, the experience of actually reading Schaeffer’ (xi). Although he certainly does not share their celebratory tone, Kane's book performs precisely the kind of re-evaluation that North and Dack hope to facilitate. He narrows in on a key concept in Schaeffer's theoretical repertoire: the ‘acousmatic’, designating both the practice of listening to sounds in such a way as to intentionally disregard their physical sources and referential meanings, and the class of sounds thus heard. Instead of strictly examining the relationship between this concept and the Schaefferian tradition, however, Kane seeks to reclaim it as a vital analytical and philosophical tool, providing a densely researched philological account of its use prior to Schaeffer, and then inserting it into an ‘alternative historical account of acousmatic listening as a practice’ and an ‘alternative theory of acousmatic sound’ with underpinnings in critical theory and psychoanalysis (10–11). From the approaches in the two books we can discern similar arguments for re-reading Schaeffer as a theorist today. Nevertheless, each takes up Schaeffer's ideas at a different stage in their revision, and thus each offers the Anglophone reader a distinct perspective on what he had to say. Dealing with them in chronological order will help to capture the implications of these divergences.

In Search of a Concrete Music is somewhere between a memoir and a manifesto for the first stage of Schaeffer's research for French national radio. It appears to have been written in several stages during this period, and is characterized by an almost frantic movement between genres and voices, weaving in diary entries, analyses, synopses, press clippings, correspondence, conference reports, and remembered conversations. The omnivorous Schaeffer we find here, revelling in fragments, open questions and inconsistencies, is definitely in keeping with what documents remain of his public persona.

The first part of the book was published previously under the title Introduction à la musique concrète in the series Polyphonie in 1950.Footnote ¹ Ostensibly this was a journal of his first year of experimentation and the production of Symphonie pour un homme seul, although many readers have called the veracity of this claim into question, and the anachronisms in the text clearly show revision and annotation to conform with the rest of the volume. Here Schaeffer portrays himself as a wily autodidact, fighting with all his energy against backwards-looking institutions and jockeying for position among his contemporaries. The reception and implications of the Symphonie are expanded upon in Part Two, which charts Schaeffer's proliferating contacts with critics and colleagues, and the beginnings of work on Orphée in collaboration with Pierre Henry. By the end of the second journal, apparently motivated by the rising buzz around electronic music in Darmstadt and unsatisfactory exchanges at UNESCO meetings, Schaeffer leaves behind his log books and correspondence to reflect on establishing his work's aesthetic value. His inspiration is a thesis draft by communication theorist Abraham (André) Moles, a key figure in the Francophone reception of cybernetics who was also an early proponent of understanding music in terms of perception and information.

The third part, entitled L’Expérience concrète en musique (translated by North and Dack as ‘The Concrete Experiment in Music’), is where we really begin to hear Schaeffer's theoretical voice. Here we find the first traces of the engagement with phenomenology that became definitive fifteen years later in the more substantial Traité des objets musicaux. In 1952, however, Schaeffer's phenomenology was still very much in a mixed state, filtered through second-hand American information theory, Gestalt psychology, and French readers of Husserl such as Sartre and Ansermet. The gap between this early work and the Traité is clearer still in the final part of the book, Esquisse d’un solfège concret (translated as ‘Outline of a Concrete Music Theory’). Here again Schaeffer notes his collaboration with Moles, adopting from him a number of figures and terms that strengthen the book's association with contemporary trends in cybernetics. This part of the book certainly points forward to the ‘typological’ element of the solfège généralisé in the Traité, although it includes several criteria that would later be abandoned. It bears noting, however, that North and Dack's translation of the title of this final section effaces the distinction between solfège (as in ear training or ‘musicianship’) and théorie de la musique (music theory). Schaeffer makes clear throughout his theoretical corpus that conservatory discipline is the fundamental point of intervention in musical perception, and this 1952 sketch is very much presented in didactic rather than theoretical terms. Elsewhere the translators clearly allow Schaeffer to distinguish between the two, as for example in the sentence: ‘The concept of object is not mentioned at all in the theory of music [théorie de la musique], whether in musicianship [solfège], harmony, composition, or criticism’ (132).Footnote ² Given Schaeffer's insistence on this disciplinary aspect of his work throughout his career, the absence of discussion about this choice in the translators’ note is certainly concerning.

The book may be more interesting to a contemporary audience for Schaeffer's frequent incidental digressions than for any systematic exposition of the theoretical contributions he would make as head of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM) in the 1960s. The analyses scattered through the journals show Schaeffer to be closely engaged with the lively aesthetic and political debates going on in post-war Paris. His complaints about famous interlocutors seem to be motivated more often by misunderstanding and personal competition than by substantial debate, but they nevertheless give the reader a vivid picture of his attitude towards his intellectual milieu. His assertions about the professional and disciplinary prerequisites for musical innovation also hold interest from a cultural and historical standpoint. We find here arguments for global aesthetic plurality and a hybrid art-science approach to research which foreshadows many of the ‘postmodernist’ interventions in the music disciplines that have taken place since the 1980s, and clearly place him within an overlapping sphere of intellectual influence to that of John Cage and the American experimentalists. To the extent that what Schaeffer seeks in this book is a uniquely aural epistemology, however, at this stage the terms of such a system still elude him.

A good example of the book's provisional quality is the model Schaeffer refers to as a ‘trihedron of reference’ (trièdre de référence). The trihedron was a framework for analysing the characteristics the ‘sound object’ always central to Schaeffer's thinking. In 1952, however, it is incongruously understood in terms of physical measurements rather than intentional qualities. The diagrams provided show sound objects projected against three ‘planes of reference’ representing their ‘harmonic’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘melodic’ dimensions (196) as a basis for typology. By the time of the Traité, however, Schaeffer had completely revised the concept to eliminate the ‘abstract’ attitude implicit in scientific measurement, and distanced himself explicitly from Moles, in whose later work the sound object is understood as fully reducible to such physical properties.Footnote ³ This turn in Schaeffer's thinking is captured in the difference between the ‘acoustic’ and the ‘acousmatic’.

As Brian Kane argues in Sound Unseen, the latter term sits firmly within the Husserlian phenomenology that Schaeffer came upon during his work with the fledgling GRM. In Schaeffer's later theoretical work the concept captured an attitude to listening that enabled one to analyse sound objects not on the basis of physical measurements, but as ‘intentional objects’ appearing to the listener through a process akin to Husserl's epoché. The suspension of causality that occurs when we listen to sounds recorded on tape or record instead of watching their production, thought Schaeffer, is basically analogous to the ‘bracketing’ performed by the phenomenologist who seeks to experience the exterior world free from preconceived judgements or habits of perception. As Kane describes in his meticulously detailed examination, the acousmatic reduction also goes one step further – and here again we encounter Schaeffer's passion for discipline – dividing listening practice into categories based on degree of attention to the source or meaning of the sound. As Kane shows, the implied preference for the active over the passive and for the absolute over the referential in this system betrays a certain formalism in Schaeffer's thinking (34, 136). We see this played out, for example, in Schaeffer's dispute with Luc Ferrari over the younger composer's controversial 1967 work Presque Rien No. 1, which Kane analyses in an ‘Interlude’ to the third part of Sound Unseen. Drawing contrasts with Schaeffer's penchant for organizing compositions by type of effect or by type of source, Kane argues convincingly that Ferrari's work privileges the perspective of the microphone, providing a series of ‘tympanic’ traces that are impossible to reconcile with one discreet mode of listening or another (131–3).

In fact, Schaeffer figures prominently only in the first half of Kane's book, and where he does appear the critique of his work is pointed. Kane's opening analysis of Schaeffer's Husserlian phenomenology of the acousmatic concludes that Schaeffer's project falters on three points: by bracketing the historicity of musical material; by essentializing recording technology into a manifestation of the ‘originary experience’ of listening at the horizon of visibility; and by identifying the practice of musique concrète with the mythological cult of Pythagoras. Kane debunks the Pythagorean myth philologically. First he turns to Schaeffer's acolytes to gather statements of the well-worn story of Pythagoras hiding himself behind a veil in order concentrate his students’ attention on his voice. Then he conducts a lengthy investigation into the literature on the historical Pythagoreans to show how the Schaefferians are confusing the figurative power of veiling in logocentric classical tradition with a physical disciplinary device that may not actually have existed. Later he brings a similar approach to the transmission of the eighteenth-century derivation acousmate, tracing its earliest uses in French to argue again that Schaefferians have discarded the historical life of the concept and replaced it with an ideological fetish.

The alternative history and philosophy of the acousmatic which Kane constructs in the second half of the book situates the acousmatic within a tradition of musical and vocal ‘phantasmagoria’, which he defines as ‘the means of production of transcendence’ (108) emphasizing their technical and ethereal aspects. His analytical selections come from an impressive range of media and historical moments, and the book is at its best in examining the minutiae of some obscure term or example. The argument Kane weaves, through Wagner's architectural designs, Kafka's self-referential story of a mole searching for its subterranean double, Les Paul's multitracked guitar lines, and Mladen Dolar's account of the psychoanalytic voice is that, contrary to Schaeffer's ahistorical phenomenology, the acousmatic situation should be thought of as conditioned by a changing complex of practical, technical, and cultural concerns, and should thus never be essentialized.

In a sense, though, considering the dense hermeneutic engagement of Sound Unseen alongside a translation of Schaeffer's own writing requires us to read both against the grain. Although Kane has produced one of the first serious critical works on Schaeffer in English, he has chosen a very different Schaeffer to the free-wheeling thinker we encounter with North and Dack. Although Kane seeks to distance himself from the Anglophone electroacoustic tradition in reading Schaeffer as a philosopher, the ease with which he is able to discard Schaeffer's phenomenology calls this assertion into question. To be fair, there is very little historical evidence that Schaeffer was a particularly avid reader of Husserl.Footnote ⁴ Nor for that matter did Schaeffer or his followers share Kane's interest in classical philology and etymology. Of course, none of these details necessarily detract from how Kane intends to use the Schaefferian conceptual toolkit, and what interests him is not necessarily Schaeffer as historical or social actor. Nevertheless it seems at times as if, in reading the hyperbole typical of someone whose primary work was as a media personality and diplomat rather too literally, Kane is somewhat over-rationalising his own theoretical ambitions.

This is not to suggest that we are necessarily on more solid ground when encountering Schaeffer's ideas ‘in his own words’. A gap of fifteen years, and important changes in institutional and aesthetic context separate the Schaeffer of In Search of a Concrete Music from the Schaeffer whom Kane identifies as ‘mature’. It is indeed curious that North and Dack did not choose to start with the more widely cited Traité. True, the later book is massive, and its technical details could bear extensive correction, but the abridged 2006 translation into Dutch by Konrad Boehmer grapples with similar issues and succeeds. In contrast, North and Dack distinguish themselves precisely by their disavowal of critical editorial intervention. The brief note that introduces their book does not go nearly far enough in explaining the most important decisions the translators have made, such as the frankly inadequate translation of solfège, or the context in which it was written. Not having critical notes in the body of the text means that Schaeffer's wide range of informal references and allusions will be difficult for most Anglophone readers to digest without some background research.

The question that haunts both books, then, concerns what it means to take Schaeffer literally given the idiosyncrasy and inconsistency of his theory, and the strange mix of bravado and humility that characterizes his rhetoric. Even in French, where his argumentative, sometimes circular style is more idiomatic, he often leaves his readers guessing how to fill in his gaps. Listening to the claims of invention and revolution associated with his voice in the Anglophone tradition, we might often forget the enthusiastic and dissenting musical adventurer always lurking behind the veil.