Sixty years ago, musique concrète was born of the single-handed efforts of one man, Pierre Schaeffer. How did the first experiments become a School and produce so many rich works? As this issue of Organised Sound addresses various aspects of the GRM activities throughout sixty years of musical adventure, this article discusses the musical thoughts behind the advent and the development of the music created and theoretised at the Paris School formed by the Schaefferian endeavours. Particular attention is given to the early twentieth-century conceptions of musical sounds and how poets, artists and musicians were expressing their quest for, as Apollinaire put it, ‘new sounds new sounds new sounds’. The questions of naming, gesture, sound capture, processing and diffusion are part of the concepts thoroughly revisited by the GRMC, then the GRM in 1958, up to what is known as acousmatic music. Other contributions, such as Teruggi's, give readers insight into the technical environments and innovations that took place at the GRM. This present article focuses on the remarkable unity of the GRM. This unity has existed alongside sixty years of activity and dialogue with researchers of other fields and constant attention to the latter-day scientific, technological and philosophical ideas which have had a strong influence in shaping the development of GRM over the course of its history.

The year 1958 witnessed the birth of the institution GRM, nurtured by the French Radio and Television service (RTF). However, the fifty years of the GRM cannot be dissociated from the preceding period, datable from 1942, when Pierre Schaeffer began experiments with radiophonic sound which led him to musique concrète while bringing into existence the institutional infrastructure of the group. We can therefore see the Studio d'Essai (1942–46), the Club d'Essai (1946–60) with its Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC, 1951–58) as forebears of the GRM. The fundamental principle, which lies in working with sonic material directly on the recording media through a precise listening to recorded elements, led Schaeffer to affirm that there is another way to access music other than from notation.

He used this powerful idea as the fixed point on the compass for all his research. Linked from its origins to the broadcasting services – RTF until 1964, ORTF up to 1974, then INA ever since – the GRM has constantly adapted its theories and its ideas to successive technological developments: smooth disks (shellac records), magnetic tape, computer memory. A fruitful period at the Service de la Recherche (1960–75) allowed Schaeffer and his team to systematically examine the world of sounds from their own listening experience. The Traité des Objets Musicaux (Treatise of Musical Objects) bears witness to this research. Since 1975 another adventure has been under way: that of the preservation and making available of works and discoveries gathered over the years – an exceptional heritage which continues to grow and interest an ever larger public.

When studying the history and evolution of the GRM, one of its outstanding features has been its continuous energy dedicated to developing machines, systems and, in recent years, software that would better serve composers' views and intentions. Unique discoveries were made that have become the fundamental concepts of sound manipulation and have influenced researchers and developers in the conception of new, but always somehow faithful to the original, tools for composition. Many steps pave this road, some are known and recognised, others were necessary failures that permitted inventors to re-focus and realise their thoughts.

The technological changes of the twentieth century obliged research institutes to rethink their role in society. A place for invention and reflection, and a centre for the preservation of our musical heritage, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales must open its doors from now on and increase its collaboration with other bodies in an enlarged form: an extended ‘group’, extramural, which shares its tools and thoughts with others.

Among the questions regularly put to me, those that recur most often touch upon three aspects, three things to consider that are, truth to tell, unending within the domain of organised sounds. Those questions that take the lead are usually concerned with space – the representation of space as well as the production of space. Then come those that deal with listening, active or passive. Last are those relating to tools for making and for listening. Together, these approaches run through the stages that are very natural in position problematics: where, when, how, for whom, why? I would like, in formulating these repeated questions once more, to make myself re-orientate them in such a way to show that by bringing to bear forty years of experience, I have tried to reply to them as much through practice as through theory, putting forward the idea of a family of operational concepts linked together through the perceptual radical ‘acous’: acousmatic, acousmonium, acousmographe, acousmathèque.

The ‘technological revolution’ that took place in music during the twentieth century is equivalent to the revolution that took place between the twelfth and fourteenth century, which transformed musical notation into applications of technology related to creation. This second revolution, as well as the first one, concerns not only musical form, but also the social organisation related to music. The aesthetic of sound is the key factor (in all the genres of contemporary music), which is a major challenge for musical analysis. Society is reorganising itself, favouring the appropriation and amateur practices within musical creation. Musical research institutions – and particularly the GRM – develop new forms of collaboration with their audience and contribute to the constitution of a ‘horizontal’ society, based on exchange, in frank opposition with the ‘vertical’ society, based on a reduced number of producers and a large amount of consumers.

It is a habit to invoke Aristotle when dealing, within the arts, with ‘Nature’ – that the Man–Artist (and not only the musician) would be, he says, ‘inclined’ to imitate. It is true, the history of music clearly attests to the temptation and of the ‘pleasure’ (as Aristotle also says) found in mimesis. We know that very lately in history musique concrète gives a new perspective to this question as well as to other questions, and changes the deal: because the sound objects of the world, of the whole world – the ‘noises’ – that needed to be imitated, can now be easily captured through technology, almost in a photographic way, and then they can be gathered, kept, and finally be composed. Hopefully Pierre Schaeffer, its genial inventor, has, concerning the question of nature within new music, a position that tears him apart, which is paradoxical, uncomfortable, fundamental: that the nature that is so easily captured, he does not want to exhibit; to understand the lessons, the hidden musical lessons, he only wants to examine it. This almost heroic model will only be partially followed by the composers (concrète, electroacoustic, acousmatic, anecdotical composers) who have been working during the last sixty years in this passionate domain. At the end of this article, the sketch of a typology, based on musical examples, tries to clarify the way nature is dealt with, when it appears in musique concrète.

This article presents a detailed analysis of Christian Zanesi's work, Arkhéion, Les voix de Pierre Schaeffer. The main structuring ideas as well as a description of the materials used is presented, thus stressing the opposition between horizontal and vertical trends in time. The presence of the voice of Pierre Schaeffer gives the work a particular introspection through its relation to the life of Schaeffer and his ideas.

An interview is a strange format for a research review; however, it is sometimes a quick and effective way to present a problematic. In this case, Christian Zanési interviewed by Évelyne Gayou gives a perspective of the future activities of the GRM from an institutional perspective as well as in relation with the new electronic tendencies, thus answering the major question of the social function of a research and production institution today.

In order to understand through the original writings the evolution of ideas and technology in the history of GRM, a recommended bibliography is proposed here.