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At the origin of electronic music, the collaboration in 1948 of two men passionate about sounds, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry
At the origin of electronic music, the collaboration in 1948 of two men passionate about sounds, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry
(“1:15 p.m. on Sunday” / France 2)
Long before Jean-Michel Jarre and the invention of the synthesizer, two men were the pioneers of electronic music: Pierre Schaeffer, sound engineer, and Pierre Henry, musician-composer. Together, they laid the beginnings of a new musical movement.
From Jeff Mills to David Guetta via Daft Punk, electronic music has become a musical movement as rich and varied as rock or hip-hop. In France, it was made popular at the end of the 1970s thanks to Jean-Michel Jarre and his famous synthesizer the ARP 2600. His album Oxygenreleased in 1976, has sold more than 18 million copies worldwide and remains a reference in the industry to this day.
Jean-Michel Jarre is a pioneer of electro, but also the heir of other precursors. In 1948, Pierre Schaeffer, sound engineer and researcher at the RTF (French Radio and Television) studio, collaborated with Pierre Henry, musician and composer. Their project: to find a form of musicality in everyday noises.
They invent sampling with scratched vinyl
To do this, they are experimenting with the electrical manipulation of sound; by scratching the groove of a vinyl record, they create a loop that they call “the closed groove”, one of the bases of electro music. “Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry invented the way we make music today with sampling, and all the manipulations that we can do around sound, playing sounds backwards, slowing them down, speeding them up.explains Jean-Michel Jarre.
From these inventions two musical genres were born, electro-acoustics and musique concrete, which rely on everyday objects to produce musical harmony. For Jean-Michel Jarre, these two concepts are the fundamentals of electronic music: “For the first time, they introduced the notion of noises and sounds into music, that is to say mixing the sound of a bird with a clarinet, the sound of an engine with percussion.”.
Excerpt from “Birth of a DJ”, a series broadcast in “1:15 p.m. on Sunday” on March 17, 2024.
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