Theoretical works in French are notoriously difficult to translate into English, and Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects is no exception. In fact, the six hundred pages of this book present more than the usual problems, as Schaeffer was attempting to outline a whole new theory of music and had to find the terminology to articulate the concepts and describe the phenomena on which it was based. He himself considered his work untranslatable; indeed, the task of producing the first translation into English was at first quite daunting.
We should say immediately that this is not intended to be a critical edition of the Treatise. Our aim is to give as accurate a translation of the original as possible in good academic English to be used as a foundation text by musicologists, students, and anyone interested in the history of music. One problem for a modern reader is that Schaeffer, in both editions of the Traité,1 tended to give rather incomplete bibliographical references, rarely supplying page numbers for his quotations and often omitting details of publication. We have added what supplementary bibliographical information we have for some of these quotations, but where sources are extensive, obscure, or out of print, we have simply given the bibliographical details that appear in Schaeffer’s original text.
A consequence of this is that, especially after such a lapse of time, it is difficult, even in the case of a French source, to know the full details of quotations and almost impossible, in the case of a work translated into French, to know which translation Schaeffer used. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that many of the sources from which he quotes have not been translated into English. We therefore decided to translate all direct quotations in the text ourselves. The reader should therefore be aware that where details of an English translation of a book or review are given in the footnotes, the English will not be exactly the same as the translation in the Treatise.
We also thought it important to give something of the flavor of this pioneering period in musicology by trying, as far as possible, to reproduce the terminology of the 1950s and 1960s. We have therefore used terms such as wireless, gramophone, and record in an attempt to reproduce something of the flavor of this period and have tried to avoid words and expressions that came into English at a later date. In some places, where Schaeffer is making a joke or launching one of his tirades against contemporary life or theoreticians of music, which he does quite often, we have used a more relaxed, colloquial register, but generally the style is quite formal. We do not, especially where academic works are concerned, subscribe to the school of thinking that holds that the task of the translator is to produce a “recasting” of the original in an accessible, modern idiom, clearly stamped with the translator’s identity. The Treatise is a difficult and complex book, and any attempt to “simplify” or “modernize” it would do it a great disservice and color the reader’s interpretation to an unacceptable degree. Although, of course, it is impossible for translators not to imprint something of themselves on a text, we have endeavored to keep this to a minimum in order to give the reader, as nearly as we can, the impression of actually reading the original.
One problem linked with such an approach is the noninclusive nature of Schaeffer’s language, which, of course, was quite standard in his day. As in our translation of In Search of a Concrete Music, we decided not to change this, and we hope our female readers will accept male-centered language as giving a sense of period to the text. We have, however, changed some of the expressions that are now considered politically incorrect—for example, “le tam-tam nègre,” “l’Indien,” and “les Hindous,” which we felt might give racial offense. We have translated these expressions as “native tom-tom,” “Native American,” and “Indians,” which we hope will be more acceptable to a modern readership.
Many of the difficulties facing the English translator of any French academic work arise from differences apparently inherent in the two languages and in the way of thinking of the two cultures, which, it may be argued, are to a greater or lesser extent interlinked. French, since the time of Descartes, has been much happier to deal in abstractions and general notions than English, with the result that many French sentences translated literally appear hopelessly stilted and pompous in English. This is often true of everyday as well as academic language; there is, or was, a public notice on French trains and the métro: “Le signal sonore annonce la fermeture imminente des portières,” which translates literally as “The sonorous signal announces the imminent closure of the doors.” An English translation would probably be something along the lines of “When the signal sounds, the doors will close,” but it is a good illustration of the differences between the two languages—French with its abstract nouns and adjectives, English with its preference for more down-to-earth verbs and clauses.
Schaeffer, despite the fact that “musique concrète” focuses on examining the musical potential of real sound of any sort, and despite his criticism of the head-led a priori music of the serialists, writes firmly within the French academic tradition. In fact, he constantly refers to Descartes when outlining his method, and the Treatise concludes with a quotation from the Discourse on Method. His work is full of long, abstract sentences and complex syntax, which sometimes must be analyzed much as a Latin expression before being transcribed into acceptable English. To give an example: a characteristic sentence, if translated literally, would read: “Comparable in originality to the ostinato of cells of which the elements, taken in isolation, are totally unforeseeable, but of which the repetition, considered globally, is of no information, the mixed weft, making a complex content and a not necessarily regular facture slowly evolve, is relatively foreseeable, although of not negligible information.”2 More than seven hundred pages of this may well decide the reader to abandon the text altogether. The Schaefferian sentence constantly raises the question, familiar to translators but here particularly challenging, of how far to deviate from a literal translation for the sake of writing comprehensible English. Sometimes it was as if we were creating something along the lines of a parallel, though we hope still accurate, text, where syntax was loosened, nouns changed into verbs, adjectives changed into adverbs, Anglo-Saxon words replaced Latinate words, and word order was drastically altered. We have not, however, altered the length of sentences or the ordering of paragraphs as these do not affect the quality of the English and can shed light on the structure of Schaeffer’s thought.
Schaeffer shares with French tradition a desire for generalization and the creation of universally applicable rules, such as his breakdown of Jakobson’s comments on language into “general rules” (299), or the definition of the “laws of the piano” (234), which may sometimes seem overly schematic to Anglophone readers. In addition, as can be seen from the second example, the language used in these contexts does not always sit very easily in English. One expression, “the most general instrument possible,” caused some debate; we considered translating it as “the most universal instrument possible” but finally for the sake of accuracy stayed with the literal translation, as indeed we have done with the whole vocabulary of generalization and laws. This aspect of the treatise is important to the understanding of Schaeffer’s thought, and to modify it would be to fail in our aim to be as faithful as possible to the text. It also gives a fascinating insight into a different mode of thought.
Coupled with this, and still broadly in the French tradition, Schaeffer’s way of thinking about the new music is highly schematic. He sees it almost diagrammatically, as a sequence of vertical or horizontal levels going, for example, from the most complex to the most simple or from the most specific to the most general. The whole music theory is based on a series of abstract and opposing dualisms, or “pairs” as he calls them—for example, natural/cultural and ordinary/specialized, for different ways of listening, or the “four musical axioms” depending on the pairs form/matter, articulation/stress, criterion/dimension, and value/characteristic. Two key dualisms, which are introduced at the very beginning of the treatise, are abstract/concrete and objective/subjective.
The terminology used here is immediately problematic. The adjective concrete and even more the noun in “the concrete” are not used readily in English; indeed, the immediate connotation of concrete in English is the building material. We considered using the expression real-world but decided to stay with concrete as we felt that real-world did not have the breadth of meaning to cover the whole range of Schaeffer’s usage of the term, which goes beyond everyday reality to encompass the concrete in the philosophical sense. This was amply illustrated when we realized that for the sake of consistency musique concrète would have to be translated as “real-world music,” which does not at all convey the full implications of musique concrete. Concrete, in Schaeffer’s sense, refers to the listener’s perception of every feature that constitutes the sound, whether the sound is real-world, electronic, instrumental, or virtually any other manifestation. In contexts in which the word concrete sounds particularly odd, as in “concrete composer,” we have used expressions such as “composer of concrete music.”
“Subject/subjective” and “object/objective” present similar difficulties. In French, subject is used to denote the perceiving individual and subjective everything that pertains to that individual, whereas object and objective refer to everything that belongs to the world external to the subject. In English the distinction is not as strict; English speakers do not refer to an individual as a subject but, for example, talk about the “subject” of a thesis, while in French it is the “object.” In general we have used the word individual for “subject” when it refers to a person, with the occasional exception when the argument requires the contrast “object/subject” to be absolutely clear, and we have changed object to subject when it refers to the theme of research or of books.
Another key term is sonore, used as both an adjective and a noun “le sonore,” and here we believe the translations we finally adopted are something of a compromise. In French, le sonore is “sound” in its most general sense; to translate it as “the sonorous” would be both clumsy and inaccurate, as sonorous refers only to a particular type of deep, resonant sound in English. We considered using the relatively new term sonoric but finally decided quite simply on sound, partly because “objet sonore” is already widely translated as “sound object.” We are still not entirely happy with this solution, however, particularly as a translation of le sonore as “sound” does not quite have the generality of meaning to convey Schaeffer’s thought in every context.
Other French terms that can cause confusion, but that are used constantly in the treatise, are the verb faire and the noun expérience. Schaeffer’s aim was to encourage musicians to “faire de la musique” based on concrete sounds. The problem is that faire means both “to make” and “to do” in English. The composer François Bayle, who knew Schaeffer personally, told us in conversation that Schaeffer’s emphasis would have been on “doing” rather than “making,” but after much thought we decided to stick to the conventional expression “to make” rather than “to do” music. Similarly, expérience has two meanings in English: “experience” and “experiment.” Here it is often much more difficult to decide which meaning Schaeffer intended, since, indeed, the whole of “musique concrète” was both an experiment and an experience. The subject matter of chapter 28, for example, could just as well be “the musical experiment” as “musical experience,” and the reference to electronic music as an “experience” (520) could carry both meanings. It may be useful for the reader to keep these ambiguities in mind.
Apart from these general difficulties, there is a whole group of specialist terms devised or adopted by Schaeffer as he tried to hammer out a vocabulary that would adequately articulate the theory of “musique concrète.” Finding an English equivalent, or deciding to leave these terms in French, taking into account that many of them have been taken into the English vocabulary of musicology, was one of our most difficult tasks, particularly as they are vital to the understanding of Schaeffer’s Treatise. Often they are words current in the French language but with an extended or modified meaning, such as allure, trame, lutherie, or contexture, but Schaeffer also coins new terms, such as grosse note or acoulogie. Most of these key words are dealt with in the footnotes as they occur in the text and therefore need no further comment here, but allure caused particular problems. As mentioned in the footnotes, allure has a number of widely different meanings in French, its basic meaning being “way of going.” Schaeffer defines allure in music as “‘revealing’ the energetic agent’s way of being and, very broadly, whether this agent is living or not” (550). The English word nearest in meaning is probably gait, but after much consideration we decided that the homonym gate was too intrusive and despite the rather unfortunate English meaning of allure decided to keep the French term.
Schaeffer uses the accepted term solfège to describe both music theory in general and his own new theory. Where he is clearly alluding to his own theory, we have translated solfège as “the music theory” as opposed to “music theory” when the term is used in its general sense. As is mentioned in the notes, solfège also has wider connotations than “music theory” and where appropriate is translated as “musicianship.”
Given the above remarks, the reader may expect to find a rather dry manual of music theory, of interest only to the most committed musicologist. This is, in fact, far from the case. As well as fulfilling its serious musicological purpose, the Treatise is an entertaining and often amusing read. Schaeffer was a highly educated polymath, who had studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris, one of the most prestigious universities in France. He was widely read, cultured, and, at least as a young man, a devout Catholic, and he brought all these factors to bear in his writing. In fact, he initially considered himself a writer, publishing not only articles and essays but also works of fiction, of which the best known is probably the novel Clotaire Nicole (1938). He has a novelist’s gift for storytelling, an essayist’s ready wit and cutting sarcasm, and a religious person’s awareness of what might be called the mystic or spiritual dimension of music and the arts. The Treatise is, indeed, a theoretical work, but it sparkles with wit, energy, and humor, some of the latter quite risqué, as when he plays on the two meanings of consommation in French, “consumption” and “consummation” in the sexual sense (649). References to the Bible and to the Mass abound, often used wittily to ridicule his contemporaries, as in his diatribe against modern composers who are carried away by their “digital Catechism” and the “electronic laying on of hands” (657), but also to articulate his firm belief in the profound philosophical significance of music. The text is studded with literary allusions to, for example, Molière (55), Boileau (686), and Queneau (365), as well as to French fairy tales and Greek mythology. Schaeffer’s “most general instrument possible” is implicitly compared to the comic fairy-tale figure of “Mère Gigogne” (12), while the computer is personified as “the beloved Ogre” with his aficionados following the “Cartesian pebbles of total reduction to numbers” like the Babes in the Wood, into the trap of worthless music (128). Perhaps the most important of these allusions, however, are the references to Orpheus, which run throughout the book, and to which we shall return later. Schaeffer had a lifelong fascination with this myth and, indeed, believed he had much in common with its tragic hero. Orphée was the title of his first “concrete opera,” performed in 1951.3
Perhaps, however, what most contributes to the Treatise’s literary as well as musicological merit is the abundance of entertaining stories, parables, parodies, conceits, and metaphors, often based on details as banal as hotel plumbing, a doctor’s surgery, or sheaves of corn, which are used by Schaeffer to illustrate and explain many of his more abstruse ideas. The difficulty of finding typological criteria is exemplified in the parable of the attic (429), the anatomy of musicianship in the vignette of the child and the grass (339), a method of analyzing those sounds usually called noises in the description of a farmyard scene involving a toad, a paddle wheel, and a waterfall (394). The critique of traditional music theory is couched in terms of its elements being presented at Customs and being treated with great suspicion and bafflement by the customs officers (315), while the pianoforte is presented as a bulldozer, “steel-clad and rosewood finished,” crushing the fragile structures of other musics (603). Apart from their explanatory function, these and the many similar tropes that occur throughout the book are often extremely amusing. They are also great fun for the translator as Schaeffer moves from register to register, ironical, narrative, literary, poetic, using puns and double entendres that require an exercise in ingenuity to render in English.
Yet beneath all the wit there is a deeply spiritual man, angry about what he considers the commodification and trivialization of contemporary music and anxious to see it restored to its proper status. It is through the myth of Orpheus that Schaeffer explains his ideas about the deeper significance and purpose of music. He sees the musician-god’s descent into the Underworld as an exploration of the depths of the unconscious, which only art makes possible, a test of the courage and faith required to challenge human limitations, even if this ultimately means failure. This is where human beings reach the ultimate goal, “to understand what we are” (661), and hence Schaeffer’s well-known definition of music as “man described to man in the language of things” (662). Even if a modern reader finds it hard to sympathize with these aspects of the Treatise that verge on the mystic, they add another, poetic, dimension to the writing and even today give food for reflection.
We are very pleased to have had the opportunity to translate the complete text of Pierre Schaeffer’s Treatise on Musical Objects rather than the shorter version that he himself prepared for translation purposes. The shorter version omits these nontheoretical aspects of his writing, which are, we believe, what make the Treatise such an approachable and engaging text, as well as a key theoretical work. We hope the reader will agree.
Christine North