The Shadow and the Self in Contemporary Music

In the 1940s and 1950s, noise was a source of inspiration to contemporary musicians. But it introduced a number of heterogeneous elements which forced them to resort to other conceptions of form and length. Certain composers adopted the archetypal model of the mandala-self to lend unity to a number of disparate elements. The human model (gait, respiration, etc.), which had long served as a compositional reference, was abandoned by these composers of the immediate post-war period, faced with the idea of human sadism and inhumanity. Pierre Schaeffer, who adopted an empirical approach similar to Jung’s to write a notational theory of sound objects, is a proponent of this radical “extroversion” of the listening process.