The Universe of Éliane Radigue

Her pieces are subtle and calm, and draw on a profound compositional complexity – anyone listening to Éliane Radigue’s work will soon appreciate that her eminence as one of the foremost pioneers of electronic music is certainly deserved. In the 50 years that she has been writing music, she has created a rich and ambitious repertoire that is both consistent and constantly reinvents itself. Her oeuvre, influenced by a variety of musical trends and her own intransigence, consists of three phases that mark the development of her career and life during which she used first magnetic tape and feedback technologies, then analogue modular synthesizers and finally – most recently – acoustic instruments to explore the interior life of sounds and how these develop through the hearing process.

To mark her 90th birthday on 24 January, MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues will devote a special programme to Éliane Radigue, highlighting the many facets of the composer’s work.

Éliane Radigue was born in Paris in 1932 where she grew up during the war and the German occupation. Her passion for classical music was awakened at an early age by her piano teacher, Madame Roger. She then moved to Nice, where she studied music theory and the harp at the Conservatoire and married the visual artist Arman, with whom she had three children. During her studies, she became aware of aesthetic ideas from a range of new developments then emerging in post-war European contemporary music, such as serialism. However, Radigue wasn’t interested to generate much enthusiasm or inspiration from the rational and unemotional aesthetic of these contemporary composers. She was far more interested in the musicality of sounds and noises surrounding her – such as the different types of airplanes that flew over Nice, which she could distinguished by encountering their sonorities. She was fascinated when she heared “Étude aux chemins de fer” for the first time on the radio in 1952 – composed by Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of ‚musique concrète‘, which incorporated such everyday noises and concrete sounds.

Following a chance meeting with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris, in 1955 she started an internship at the Studio d’Essai that he had founded for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF), where he conducted his sonic and theoretical experiments. During her residency, Radigue was able to learn how to use electronic instruments, recording equipment and microphones and acquired the indepth skillset of editing and mixing by means of usage of magnetic audiotape on which early electronic music was created.

Later on, she met contemporaries such as Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari and Pierre Boulez and acquired a deeper knowledge of the sonic experiments, newly developed instruments and ongoing rivalry between musique concrète based in Paris and electronic music based in Cologne. During this time, Radigue travelled to Cologne to visit the Studio for Electronic Music, and attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, one of the most important of the new music scene and places to exchange ideas. In the early 1960s, Éliane Radigue made her first extended visit to New York with her family, where she explored American art, which has become a new inspiration in her career. There she crossed paths with the likes of James Tenney and John Cage.

Éliane Radigue created her compositions after a ten-year career break that she devoted to bringing up her children. After her divorce from Arman in 1967, she began working in Paris as Pierre Henry’s assistant at the Apsome Studio. In solitude, she developed her unique take on composition while working late at night in the studio – but her efforts encountered rejection from Schaeffer and Henry.

In her first pieces, Radigue experimented with protracted loops, electronic feedback – where sound is repeated between a microphone, loudspeaker and tape – using tape manipulation to slow sounds down: by doing this she created slowly unfolding, delicate sound transformations in which she enabled listeners to hear the inner life of the sounds and their complex spectrum of tonality and sub-harmonies. Her pieces became a gentle, meditative experience marked by their expansive, unhurried nature, challenging listeners’ ability to hear barely noticeable changes in her works. Between 1967 and 1970 she composed the works “Jouet Electronique” (1967) and “Elemental I” (1968) at the Apsome Studio. After that, she finished working for Henry and – notably as one of the few female composers at that time – she set up her own small studio at home with tape machines, a mixer, loudspeakers and microphones, where she continued to explore and expand her compositional techniques. This was the space in which she created pieces such as “Usral” (1969), “In memoriam ostinato” (1969), “Stress Osaka” (1969), “Opus 17” (1970), “Omnht” (1970) and “Vice-Versa” (1970).

In 1970 Éliane Radigue returned to the USA for a residency at the New York University School of Arts and for the first time composed a work using modular synthesizers, a key moment in her career that would launch a new phase of her work as a composer. She composed the first piece “Chry-ptus” (1970), using a Buchla synthesizer that Morton Subotnick had set up in a studio at New York University, and which she shared with Laurie Spiegel and Rhys Chatham. However, shortly after this, Radigue fell in love with the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and was so drawn by its tone colour that it would go on to feature in most of her electronic pieces for the next 30 years.

In New York in the 1970s, she met James Tenney, Steve Reich and David Tudor, while exploring avant-garde music in the USA. For the first time she heard about minimalist music, happenings, Fluxus, performances and encounters other interdisciplinary art forms. It seems that Radigue resonated with such environments, musical ideas and concepts of working with sound, more than she had previously been enountered in France. Upon her return to Paris from New York, she brought her own ARP 2500 with her, which she lovingly named Jules, and she used it to compose many of her works: the “Adnos” trilogy, “Geelriandre” (1972), “Ψ 847” (1973), “Biogénésis” (1973), “Transamorem-Transmortem” (1974), “Les Chants de Milarepa” (1983), “Jetsun Mila” (1986) and the “Trilogie de la Mort” (1988-1993).

In 1975 she converted to Tibetan Buddhism and at about the same time she was diagnosed with partial deafness. Radigue then retired for several years. She resumed her career again in 1979 and carried on working with the ARP 2500, allowing Buddhist philosophy and spirituality to flow into her music, which continued to deal with themes such as death and rebirth.

“L’île re-sonante” (2000) would become her final electronic piece with the ARP 2500, before the instrument had to move out of her studio indefinitely and she devoted herself to acoustic instruments and collaborations with musicians – a practice she continues to this day.

Since 2001, Radigue has composed exclusively for acoustic instruments. She combines the precise observation and procedural generation of sounds with the exploration of collective creation processes. Her pieces for instrumentalists are not notated – they are communicated orally and are co-composed with the musicians through conversation and through an extensive search for just the right sound for each work.

After decades of working on her synthesizer alone in the studio, where she was able to make all the musical decisions herself, she has now become involved in collective processes and exploring the relationship that connects musicians and their instruments. In a comprehensive interview with Julia Eckhardt (“Intermediary Spaces”, published in 2019) Éliane Radigue talks about the margin of imprecision which occurs in oral transmission as well as in the musical score. She declares that in both cases there is the necessity of mental projection: “Naturally, there is always a margin of imprecision and I am interested precisely in what happens within this margin, this little space that remains open to interpretation.”

Since 2011, Éliane Radigue has continued her Occam series, a constantly growing cycle that she develops through intensive encounters with musicians from all around the world. So far she composed more than 25 Occam pieces, with a variety of either solo, duo or small ensemble line-ups which she – depending on the combination of musicians involved – describes as “OCCAM Rivers”, “OCCAM Deltas”, “Occam Heptas” and, in the case of the orchestral version, “OCCAM Océan”.

Initial sound ideas are developed in personal conversations and through playful experiment until she arrives at a piece tailored for the respective musician(s). While the process dispenses entirely with a score, the exchange is always based on an image connected to the sea, which acts as a source of inspiration and communicator of ideas for the flowing, unbroken musical forms that merge into each other like waves, constantly allowing new forms to develop.

As well as during the process of composition, the musicians are also required to show considerable virtuosity when playing. Particularly when several instruments are playing together, the musicians need to listen to each other very intently and react to tiny changes without interrupting the flow of sounds. The extreme simplicity of the constantly expanding, quiet notes and the emphasis of the minimal movements of their microtonal inner life reveal their underlying complexity.

Radigue makes use of intensive listening she cultivated in her electronic music, taking advantage of the way sound slowly unfolds in space, and applies it to her collaborative work with musicians. The evolution of the pieces is always in flux: there is no final point at which the piece is complete: instead, Éliane Radigue decides when the process of development is finished and the piece can be performed. After that, she hands it over to her musicians who will continue to work on it. Her first orchestral piece, “Occam Océan”, was devised for and with the Paris ensemble ONCEIM – Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales. It took two years to develop before it was performed for the first time in Paris in 2015. (text by Katja Heldt)