Pierre Schaeffer’s contribution to audiovisual theory

Nicola Bizzaro

Università degli Studi di Pavia

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Pierre Schaeffer’s international reputation is due almost exclusively to his intense activity as theoretician and composer of electroacoustic music and, in particular, to his formulation of a new conception of an art of sounds (whether recorded or not) that he himself styled musique concrète. Much less well known are the numerous other fields in which he did re­search and in which, over half a century, he confronted a large number of crucial topics in contem­porary culture, not necessarily within the province of the arts. Such treatments invariably sprang from an original standpoint and often intro­duced a fiercely polemical note into on-going debates con­cerning international culture. In this highly varie­gated panorama a thorough reflec­tion on the creative use of the technologies of audiovisual recording and reproduction could not have been lacking, and indeed it oc­cupied a central role. First and foremost Schaeffer highlighted their ability to act as a link between “[…] two truly intractable ent­ities: the tumultuous course of time through each and every space and the duration, as if crystal­lised, of an im­mobile con­sciousness” (Schaeffer [1946] 1990: 43; 1970: 93).

Although it accompanied the full arc of his working life, his enquiry into the audiovisual component as part of what he styled the arts-relais – a term that is difficult to translate, perhaps ‘linking-arts’ or ‘indirect arts’ (see Palombini 1998) – never crystallised into a comprehensive theory. With the exception of a handful of writings specifically dedicated to these issues, most of the insights he came up with are to be found as digressions either in generic discussions (on theory of mass-media and cultural policy) or in more specific contexts (concerning radio and analyses of mono-media reproduction technologies).