ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the human personality is actually 'celebrated or sublimated' in a group of electroacoustic works. Since the inception of musique concrete in 1948, human presence in general and human body sounds specifically have haunted the soundworld. All music is functional. Whether to encourage productive movement, celebration, relaxation and entertainment, or serious attention and contemplation, challenge and engagement, critique and reassessment, music has a role which must articulate or support that function. A symphony in the pre-classical sense of sinfonia, the Symphonie pour un homme seul of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry originally consisted of 22 movements at its première in March 1950. Much has been written about a contemporary hybridization of possibilities, even genres of electroacoustic music, and how contemporary art music and popular music have restarted their discourse. The analysis of electroacoustic music in its high art form is still in its adolescence but with the slow emergence of a language which is fundamentally post-Schaefferian.
