Listening to a Liberated Paris: Pierre Schaeffer Experiments with Radio

Pierre Schaeffer has greatly influenced postwar sonic art by establishing the tradition of musique concrete and its corresponding theories of sound perception. This dissertation examines the extent to which his multifaceted early career as an author, a sound engineer, a radio artist, and a cultural administrator shaped his music and thought. Drawing on archival print and sound sources that document Schaeffer's writings, plays, radio dramas, training workshops, and the French institutions he founded, I embrace his interdisciplinarity and bring together aspects of his career that have otherwise been chronicled separately. His experiences with radio tie these stories together. For Schaeffer, experimenting with radio meant training new types of production teams, interrogating the specific characteristics of the medium to advance the cause of radiophonic art, and finding new ways to engage and orient listeners.;Adapting his work to meet the needs of shifting administrations and audiences, Schaeffer used radio to develop an interdisciplinary pedagogical practice to uplift French youth while serving as a cultural administrator for Vichy. During the Occupation, he experimented with radiophonic art, producing La Coquille a planetes (1943--1944). Drawing on his wartime lessons, Schaeffer marked the soundscape of the Liberation with his radio programs, and he quickly joined an international cultural network, producing such works as Une Heure du monde (1946), which was commissioned by the Paris Peace Conference. Listening to his radio art provides a rich context for understanding Schaeffer's musique concrete and its relationship to pedagogy, radio institutions, and postwar cultural diplomacy. Drawing appropriate attention to his music and ideas, this dissertation relocates Schaeffer, who is often relegated to the pioneering fringes of postwar music histories, in an intellectual network at the heart of institutionalized French culture.