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Given the contradictions of Schaeffer's text and the absence of any true explication [2] of it, one could ask to what extent an "after Schaeffer" (après Schaeffer) might be anything other than an "according to Schaeffer" (d'après Schaeffer) in disguise. Yet, Ouïr, entendre, écouter, comprendre après Schaeffer holds surprises: with welcome sobriety, the Xenakis expert Makis Solomos places Schaeffer's phenomenology under the aegis of Merleau-Ponty rather than Husserl in its existential bent; the composer Régis Renouard Larivière brings to a close his inquiry into Schaeffer's conception of musicalness [3] with an outstanding exegesis; Marcel Frémiot illustrates the relevance of Schaeffer's research to semiotic analysis; and the semiologist Jean Molino reduces the Sound Object to the far-famed poietic/esthesic/neutral tripartition only to find fault with Schaeffer for not fitting into this all-purpose scheme.

Table of Contents
 

INTRODUCTION, by Jean-Christophe Thomas	11
I. MUSICIAN-PHILOSOPHERS
Phenomenologist Schaeffer, by Makis Solomos	53
Pierre Schaeffer: Sound as a Phenomenon of Civilization, by Hugues Dufourt	69
The Sound Object or the Environment Held in Abeyance, by Jean-François Augoyard	83
Object, Song, by Régis Renouard Larivière	107
Music and the Object, by Jean Molino	119
II. PHILOSOPHER-MUSICIANS
Phonogène Schaeffer, by François Bayle	139
Pierre Schaeffer: Music and Radio Research and Creation, by Jean-Claude Risset	153
Dynamics of the Freezing of the Image, by Francis Dhomont	161
Establishing Relational Frameworks for the Analysis of Post-Schaefferian Music, by Denis Smalley	177
Organized Noise, by Lelio Camilleri	215
From Sound Object to Temporal Semiotic Units, by Marcel Frémiot	227
V. EPILOGUE
Hybrids, by Pierre Schaeffer	245
The Travels of Orpheus, by Sylvie Dallet	247
GLOSSARY	265
CONTRIBUTORS	275

[1] "To understand" is admittedly an inadequate rendering of Schaeffer's entendre. In the French language, "hearing", "listening", "understanding" and "comprehending" all are lexicalized acceptations of entendre, by semantic derivation from the etymological sense, "to tend to", and hence, "to turn one's attention towards". This allows Schaeffer to construe entendre as "to hear", "to listen", "to understand" and "to comprehend" in mindfulness of one's intention. To approximate Schaeffer's entendre, the reader is requested to construe "to understand" as "to stand under the influence of (a particular intention [of listening])". "To listen for" and "to listen out for" might as well have been used.

[2] On "explication", see Barbara Stanosz  in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics v. 1, pp. 246 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986).

Giving an explication for (or explicating) an unclear concept (one that is vague, ambiguous or simply lacking in definition) consists in replacing it by a new, exact, and well defined concept that is close enough to the former one to take over its role in scientific (philosophical etc.) discourse. The earlier concept is called the explicandum, the new one an explicatum of the former. The condition of adequacy of an explication (that makes clear the sense of the expression "to be close enough" as used above) goes as follows: the concept C' is an adequate explicatum of the concept C if and only if no important proposition containing C changes its supposed truth-value (the property of being true or false) when C is replaced in it by C'. Thus, the adequacy of an explication depends upon the set of contexts of the explicandum that are taken to be important.