Blog #2: Scha(ef)ferian Discourses

Coming into this assignment, I fully expected that I was going to remain Team Pierre, but by the end of the assigned chapter for this week by Brian Kane I feel like I can see the benefits to both Scha(ef)fer’s points of view more clearly. Kane extols the virtues and genius of Pierre Schaeffer throughout, even defending Schaeffer on the basis that some of the greatest minds of the 20th century seemed unable to grasp the nuance of his highly complex thinking on sound and technology (Kane 37). However, Kane’s explorations into what he finds problematic about Schaeffer’s theory is conversely what made me feel more compassionate for R. Murray Schafer, perhaps because it elucidates the shared connection that they both had in trying to find (or develop) a vocabulary for that which had previously been beyond description: the sounds that make up the framework of the world just beyond our consciousness, and what they should be called when we start listening to them in a meaningful way.

Materially and historically specific forms of technology (magnetic tape and its possibilities of editing, splicing, and playback; the phonogéne, the morphophone, analogue filters, and artificial reverberators) may have afforded the conditions for developing musique concrète, but Schaeffer views technology as something far greater than the sum of such material conditions. (Kane 40)

Under the heading “Phantasmagoria” (39) (side note: the vocabulary that Kane employs can be seen as either dreamy or nightmarish, depending on how much you like googling terms and analyzing poetic descriptors) Kane illustrates a great snapshot of an inherent difference between the two Scha(ef)fers – the fundamental view of technology as greater (Pierre Schaeffer) or less than (R. Murray Schafer) the sum of its parts. I think the reason I found this section so compelling is partially the framing Kane gives it as part of his “OBJECTIONS” (36) to Pierre Schaeffer. Rather than viewing technology as the tool through which musique concrète is developed, Kane explains that Schaeffer personifies the method of production so thoroughly that the machine is conflated with feeling man's own experiences: “It is not solely a question of machines for making, but of machines for feeling” (40). The machine facilitates man’s understanding of himself, sure, but a piece of this understanding almost seems to fracture into the technology, embodying the machine to gain perhaps an even deeper understanding through this process of being able “to hear…[what] his ears could never have made him hear” (Kane 40).

I don’t necessarily think that Pierre Schaffer is wrong in this theory, but I do agree with Kane that it seems to give a lot of credit to the machine. That being said, where I think Pierre Schaeffer and R. Murray Schafer most closely meet is in their theories of sound, and the awe that they both embody in their writings. While Pierre Schaeffer expresses wonder at the sounds created by machines, R. Murray Schafer expresses fear. The power of the “Sacred Noise” which has become transferred into industrial sounds as R. Murray Schafer describes (76) does not seem that different in result and experience from Pierre Schaeffer's transcended objects, wherein the perception of the thing is cumulatively felt through conscious interaction (Kane 20). Now, it could be said that the key difference between these arguments is the presence and quality of said consciousness; R. Murray Schafer proclaims repeatedly that the danger of sounds is as much their imperialism as their insidiousness (77). The general lack of attention paid to sound by society is “transmogrified” by mechanization (Schafer 74), implying that a lack of consciousness about these threats is as much of a problem as the sounds themselves. Again, though, I think that it really depends on the attitude the listener holds towards consciousness rather than the sound itself; Pierre Schaeffer embraces the astonishing ability of the sound object to communicate a new meaning to those able to listen (Kane 19) while R. Murray Schafer condemns the unique ability of machines to create “flat line” sounds on the basis that they are “suprabiological” and therefore inherently unnatural (78).

I can’t help but agree with Francisco López that Schafer’s arguments against industrial noise do read as somewhat “puerile”; however, I think that López’s argument that the intention behind the environment/sound relationship is what matters the most in what implicates both of the Mr. S’s in the responsibility of sound theory.

…a return to the original impulse of philosophy, as identified by Aristotle: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” (Kane 23)

López states that it is the imperative of humanity to interpret reality through art, but it is not the job of art (and by extension music) to retain the posterity of that relationship, and in fact striving for this end weakens artistic endeavours. Therefore, it must be decided whether the sound being made and listened to is art, or not - whether observation and categorization of the world necessarily be considered as philosophizing as Pierre Schaeffer indicates (23), or from the viewpoint of a “documentary or communicative reason to keep the cause-object relationship in the work with soundscapes” (López) as R. Murray Schafer seems to prioritize in his fore-fronting of industrial sound as a cause with “unhappy consequences” (71). If we view R. Murray Schafer as a documentarian and Pierre Schaeffer as a musician (rather than as a puritan and an artist, respectively, as López seems to imply) it explains why the causation of sound matters and doesn’t, respectively: it’s the job of a historian like R. Murray Schafer to speak to whether the master behind the “curtain" (Kane 24) is working for good or evil intent, but a musician like Pierre Schaffer is not bound to the same sense of morality in the creation of art that extends beyond the limits of reality.

Pierre Schaeffer’s framework for acousmatic reduction is inherently problematic: Kane offers that it is the time in which Schaeffer works that gives much of the weight to his enchantment with recording technology as a developing form, again enfolding the experience of the thing with that which ironically anchors and yet offers separation from itself (24). This technology which allows Pierre Schaeffer to make “musique concrète" (Kane 26) facilitates the development of a new art form based around listening as a means of re-interpreting the world through sound (Kane 29). To R. Murray Schafer, the responsibility of his chronicling is not to make art, but to bear witness to that which is not the concern of art: to call attention to the ugliness that rises up as a shadow to the advent of shiny new technologies, and remember the “hideous descriptions of brutality and human degradation” (Schafer 74-75) that may not be caused directly by the sounds of new industry, but nonetheless provide a secondary soundtrack beneath the hum of technological progress.

Not that I want to make a broad generalization between fascism and the role of sound in the era of the post-Industrial Revolution, but Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” article did come to mind in considering the perspectives of our Misters Schafer and Schaeffer. While Pierre Schaeffer would perhaps scoff at this comparison, R. Murray Schafer in identifying “Sound Imperialism” (77) would perhaps not think it too much of a stretch. Sontag’s ruminations on whether it is right to remediate Nazi art and artists ultimately comes down on the side of holding history accountable to reality rather than myth (76) regardless of the worth of the work (81). While I don’t think that the sounds that Pierre Schaeffer made it his life’s work to study fall under the same category that Sontag is drawing attention to, the sounds that R. Murray Schafer is talking about are perhaps a closer comparison. R. Murray Schafer’s Power of Noise (74) can most easily be attributed to causal listening; however, semantic and reduced listening are likely also employed at the resonant level in the transfer of powerful Sacred Noise to those sounds made by the “profane world” of industry (76). The transcended object of Pierre Schaeffer’s theoretical framework, meanwhile, has gone beyond the scope of causal listening (Kane 20), but invites the same kind of extra-object interpretations that the Power of Noise similarly inspires – the difference here being a control of design for the purposes of art, rather than ulterior motives such as religion and industry.

In conclusion, I would posit that between these two Scha(ef)ferian theorists the same language is being spoken, but in different and discrete dialects. After all, do not the church bell echo forwards and backwards in time for the individual subject, the vessel in which the sound waves culminate as a heard experience, the hearer, to generate imaginings both of and beyond the bell itself? Is it possible to consider the church bell a single limitless object, unbound from the bell that necessarily describes the gonging in our insufficient vocabularies as Pierre Schaeffer did, and yet also remember that history that church bell and all the iterations of soundscapes that reverberated around it, the good and the bad, as R. Murray Schafer claims is the responsibility of the listener?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqslA_CKub8

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Kane, Brian. "Pierre Schaeffer, the Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction." Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice: Oxford University Press, 2014. pp. 15-41.

Schafer, R. M. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Alfred Knopf/Random House, New York, 1977/1994, pp. 71-99.

Sontag, Susan. "Fascinating Fascism." Under the Sign of Saturn. New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980. pp. 73-105. Ed. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 190. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center.