Andre Schaeffner

The French musicologist, ethnologist, curator, and critic Andre Schaeffner (1895 - 1980) studied music with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum and sociology with Marcel Mauss at the Institut d'ethnologie de Paris of the A0/00cole Pratique des Hautes A0/00tudes. He was intellectually connected with influential thinkers of his time in many domains, including Georges Bataille, Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Marcel Griaule to name only a few. In his work as ethnologist,...See more

The French musicologist, ethnologist, curator, and critic Andre Schaeffner (1895 - 1980) studied music with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum and sociology with Marcel Mauss at the Institut d'ethnologie de Paris of the A0/00cole Pratique des Hautes A0/00tudes. He was intellectually connected with influential thinkers of his time in many domains, including Georges Bataille, Alfred Metraux, Michel Leiris, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Marcel Griaule to name only a few. In his work as ethnologist, Schaeffner was closely associated with Curt Sachs during the latter's Paris exile from 1933 to 1937. Schaeffner was the director of Musical Ethnology at the Musee de l'Homme (Paris), a department that he founded in 1929. Schaeffner worked to catalogue the Musee de l'Homme's vast instrument collections until his retirement in 1965. Although scholars of Western music may know him best for his writings on Debussy and Stravinsky, his published correspondence with Boulez, or as the author of one of the first important studies of jazz, Schaeffner's influence was perhaps greatest in the developing field of comparative musicology. His work grew naturally out of his first organological studies of the history of Western classical instruments in the late 1920s and came to be encapsulated in his monumental and wide-ranging Origine des instruments de musique, the fruit of labour in Paris and in the field between 1931 and 1936, the year of its publication. See less