''Symphonie pour un homme seul'' (''Symphony for One Man Alone'') is a musical composition by

Pierre Schaeffer Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (English pronunciation: , ; 14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995) was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). His inno ...

and

Pierre Henry Henry at his home (January 2008) Pierre Georges Albert François Henry (; 9 December 1927 – 5 July 2017) was a French composer known for his significant contributions to musique concrète. Biography Henry was born in Paris, France, and bega ...

, composed in 1949–1950. It is an important early example of

musique concrète Musique concrète (; ): " problem for any translator of an academic work in French is that the language is relatively abstract and theoretical compared to English; one might even say that the mode of thinking itself tends to be more schematic ...

. The ''Symphonie'' was premiered at a concert on 18 March 1950. Comprising twenty-two movements of music produced using

turntables A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound. The sound vibration Waveform, waveforms are recorded as correspond ...

and mixers, it was difficult to perform due to technical problems. The number of movements was reduced to 11 for a broadcast in 1951, and then to 12 for the revised 1966 version by Henry. The revised version was used for the ''Pierre Schaeffer – L'oeuvre musicale'' recordings. Its movements are as follows: # ''Prosopopée I'' # ''Partita'' # ''Valse'' # ''Erotica'' # ''Scherzo'' # ''Collectif'' # ''Prosopopée II'' # ''Eroïca'' # ''Apostrophe'' # ''Intermezzo'' # ''Cadence'' # ''Strette'' Schaeffer started developing the idea of a "symphony of noises" (''Symphonie de bruits'') soon after he established his studio ('' Studio d'Essai'') at RTF (now ORTF). He sketched ideas for sound materials in his journal. He later described the completed work as "an opera for blind people, a performance without argument, a poem made of noises, bursts of text, spoken or musical." In the 1952 work ''À la recherche d'une musique concrète'' he commented thus on the nature of the ''Symphonie'':

The lone man should find his symphony within himself, not only in conceiving the music in abstract, but in being his own instrument. A lone man possesses considerably more than the twelve notes of the pitched voice. He cries, he whistles, he walks, he thumps his fist, he laughs, he groans. His heart beats, his breathing accelerates, he utters words, launches calls and other calls reply to him. Nothing echoes more a solitary cry than the clamour of crowds.

Legacy

Excerpts of the piece were debuted in the United States on 14 June 1952 as a prelude to a

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

production of

Kurt Weil Kurt Weil (2 January 1932 – 12 December 2012) was a Swiss jazz vibraphonist. Weil was born in Zürich. He learned piano and trombone as a youth, but was playing vibraphone professionally by 1952, as a member of Rio de Gregori's ensemble. He m ...

and

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a p ...

's '' Threepenny Opera''. Reporting on the performance, ''

DownBeat ''DownBeat'' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm that it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1 ...

'' wrote that the piece "was played on a sound track compounded of an amazing variety of 'concrete' sounds from trains to the magnified beat of a cricket's heart and truncated cadences of the human voice. Audience reaction was at best bewildered, most agreeing it was certainly concrete, but wondering where the music was. Although most consider this "not music" many enjoy sitting down and listening to their hearts content."

Notes

References

* Bertrand, Loïc. 2021. Pierre Schaeffer et Pierre Henry : Symphonie pour un homme seul. Éditions Contrechamps * Chadabe, Joel. 1997. ''Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music''. Prentice Hall. * * Emmerson, Simon. 2007. ''Living Electronic Music''. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. * Schaeffer, Pierre. 1952. ''A la recherche d'une musique concrète''. Paris, Éditions du Seuil. * Schaeffer, Pierre. 1973. ''La musique concrète''. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. {{DEFAULTSORT:Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul 1950 compositions Compositions by Pierre Schaeffer Musique concrète