1. Between aesthetics and technique: the arts-relais

Schaeffer’s interest in the audiovisual field considerably predated the birth of musique concrète: it can be traced back to the second half of the 1930s, at the time of his first collaborations with French radio. His dual training as musician and engineer gave him a distinctive outlook (which may indeed have been unique for the time) on issues in the new arts based on the direct recording of visual and audio images, in particular in the ci­nema and on the radio. He saw these two media as having much in common, in terms not just of technology but crucially of aesthetics. In 1941-42 he discussed these topics in his first major essay, Esthétique et technique des arts relais (Schaeffer, [1941-42] 2010), in which he estab­lished a core of theoretical pre­cepts that was to inform his writings over the years to come, whether in the fields of musical research, mass-media, or the sociology and semiology of audiovisual creation.

In one of the distinctive traits of his approach, running counter to most theorising of his time (and indeed much still today), Schaeffer questions the importance commonly attributed to the crude technical aspect of audiovisual production (the mechanical reproduction of image and sound), and denies that the technologies require different epistemological categories to the ones currently in use in art criticism. To this end Schaeffer outlined an analysis of the process that leads to the birth of a new artistic form, whether this be ‘di­rect’ (such as painting, sculpture and music) or ‘indirect’ (the arts-relais), and identified three phases in which the instrument respectively deforms, transforms and informs the art. He outlined a progressive acquisition of awareness concerning the limits and possibilities of the expressive means used by each manifestation of artistic thought. A first period of apprentice­ship, in which “[…] the instrument is forgiven everything because people are so struck by its novelty” (Schaeffer [1941-1942] 2010: 33; cfr. Schaeffer–Pier­ret 1969: 91), is followed by a stage of technical honing, characterised by the need to imitate models prevailing in other fields. This is the case, for exam­ple, of the numerous theatrical clichés reproduced in the cinema, or again of the multiplication of paintings by photography. Schaeffer saw both these phenomena as being emblematic of an arbitrary deviation (albeit necessary at the time) of the specific properties of the new art form: “[…] people de­mand from the instrument [...] not only what it cannot give but also what is not in its nature to give” (Schaeffer [1941-1942] 2010: 34; cfr. Schaeffer–Pierret, 1969: 92). Finally there is a ‘classic’ phase, when all the main prac­tical problems have been solved and a complete mastery has been achieved over the autonomous expressive modalities for the production of original works (see also Palombini 1998). As can be seen, it is only once any tempta­tion to burden the new technological discoveries with responsibility for extending the syntax of already consolidated languages has been abandoned that the new arts can affirm their true nature. In fact one begins to glimpse a correspondence in principle between the idea, message or content and the procedures which enable its implementation, these procedures in their turn belonging to the social context in which they develop.

While of course it is typical of art in general, and not merely of radio and cinema, to make use of certain instruments in order to generate objects en­dowed with a particular significance, it is clear that the way in which the ‘indirect arts’ represent reality transcends the common understanding of ‘realism’, to the point that what is depicted can be taken for reality itself. In Schaeffer’s perspective, the imitative process of the work of art reveals its own purely illusory nature by virtue of the representational processes acti­vated by radio and cinema. The visual and audio images transduced into signals by the recording equipment and stored in a physical medium are none other than simulacra of the reality which artists manipulate in com­posing their works. It follows that, from this point of view too, there is no difference in principle between a painting featuring a face and a photograph of the same subject. Both are inevitably distanced from the original and, in depicting it, throw light on some characteristics while obscuring others. All that can perhaps be said is that direct and indirect representation are distin­guished by the use the artist makes of such simulacra: if in the first case the reproduction is the work, in the second it corresponds to the material which comprises the work, as colour for the painter, marble for the sculptor or notes for the composer. “Cinema”, as Schaeffer was later to say, “presents itself as the production of works starting from these simulacra [...]. The pub­lic, but also many operators, have failed to recognise this fact. By focusing entirely on the fidelity of the “reproduction”, they lose sight of the paradox by which the reality so treated is at one and the same time quite similar but also quite different” (Schaeffer 1970: 22-23). This suggests a distinctly for­malist conception of the audiovisual work of art, in which the essence of the work is seen as the outcome of ‘pre-existing elements’, to use a definition which was to become a by-word in electroacoustic music.