‘Music can be a mirror of the mind. There is an analogy with the body, too. The way sound behaves reflects our interior rhythm, our nervous system.’ —Éliane Radigue
Just as I was preparing to write this essay, news broke of Éliane Radigue’s passing. What a sad day, but what a life. She is one of two composers who, for me, has produced a body of work that is the purest music I know. The other is Iannis Xenakis, but whereas Xenakis’ music comes closest to experiencing the workings of the cosmos, Radigue’s comes closest to experiencing the workings of the body (which is perhaps the same thing?). I have written about Xenakis’ work elsewhere (published in Vade Mecum) and, since that essay was published in 2015, I have discovered and been exploring Radigue’s work.
Radigue’s career is inextricably linked with the history of electronic music in France during the second half of the 20th century. Born and raised in the heart of Paris, she grew up during the occupation. Life, she said, was weirdly normal during those times – she attended school and had piano lessons. When she was 18, she met and fell in love with French sculptor Arman. They married and moved to Nice, where she joined a choir. She was still playing piano but she felt trapped by the twelve-tone technique of serialism, which was all-powerful in the classical music world at that time. In Nice, they lived very near the airport and Radigue developed an acute ear for the sounds of the five or six planes that passed overhead each day – ‘such a rich sound mass with an amazing range of harmonics!’ Although she didn’t realise it at the time, these sounds were her first inspiration for music of long duration.
Her eureka moment, however, was hearing Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux chemins de fer on the radio while in Nice and thereby discovering musique concrète. Back in Paris, she by chance met Schaeffer at a lecture and he, struck by her enthusiasm, invited her to join the Groupe des Recherches Musicales (GRM) studios as Pierre Henry’s tape assistant. She would remain there for the next three years, learning tape cutting and mixage et montage (mixing and editing) techniques. ‘Pierre Henry got me to cut up and glue tape. I learned to make long tape splices in order to produce correct fades, or else very short ones for the attacks.’
In 1963, Radigue and Arman moved to New York and lived in a loft on the Bowery at 6th Street for a year. There, Radigue found herself in the centre of a very active scene of artists and musicians. She attended happenings, concerts held in lofts, heard David Tudor and John Cage perform, she saw choreographer Yvonne Rainer dance at Andy Warhol’s Factory and she and her husband played chess with Marcel and Teeny Duchamp. In the performances she saw, she was hugely impressed with the minimalist feedback experiments with sustained multi-layered textures.
In 1967, Radigue accepted a position as composing assistant to Pierre Henry in his new studio. Henry gave Radigue two Tolana tape machines, which she took home and used to set up her own studio. She began to make her own pieces in her own time. Just as she had rejected serialism, so she realised that she did not want to follow in Schaeffer’s footsteps and create musique concrète. Inspired by what she discovered while in New York, she wanted to create something new. The sound Radigue sought was one of absolute stillness.
These early tape pieces were experiments in using reinjection feedback in closed systems, the last, and finest, of which is the truly remarkable Opus 17 (1970). The first part (of five), “Étude”, is a recording of a Chopin solo piano prelude that is played through the speaker of one tape machine and picked up by a microphone connected to a second tape machine. This recording is then looped into the first tape machine and so on. This method of creating audio feedback between a microphone and a loudspeaker is called larsen, named after a Danish engineer who discovered the effect in the early 20th century.
The original Chopin loop in “Étude” is about two minutes and 40 seconds long and is repeated eight times. As the tape loops and loops, so the original Chopin piece is submerged deeper and deeper into the atmospherics of the room. The effect is absolutely hallucinatory and hypnotic. What starts as a recognisable piece of music gradually becomes more and more ethereal and immaterial. The drift is perpetual and, by the end of the piece, the Chopin piano prelude is no longer recognisable. All that is left are the sounds of a space devouring itself into a mise en abyme.
In 1970, on one of her many trips to New York, she bought an ARP 2500 synthesizer, with its innovative pin matrix, and returned to France with it, deliberately leaving behind its conventional keyboard so as to find her own way of using it. Tired of the unpredictability of tape feedback, she decided to seek pure electronic sound sources. Thus began a long period of focus on extended works for ARP.
The first masterpiece of this new adventure was Adnos I-III (1974-82). Each of the three pieces piece is around 72 minutes long and starts with a sound energy slowly emerging. Radigue then treats these frequencies with a forcefield of mechanical, spatial and electronic stresses. Radigue sets this play in motion but doesn’t control it. She has said that she ‘learned not to try to bend the sounds to my liking, but rather to give them a framework.’ This means that each of the three pieces starts with the same oscillation but ends up in a different place. The form of her pieces is of a continuous ‘going-away’ from their starting point. It is a music that never returns, or repeats.
The harmonics and microtones in her electronic pieces are ever-shifting. There is no surface or depth or centre, but the centre is not the place you’re aiming for as the listener. This foreground-to-background relationship has to be reassessed, which requires a continual process of reorientation. But Radigue comes to our aid about this – a piece by Radigue is a presentation of both the composer’s material but also a lesson in how to listen to it. And that’s the key, you have to really listen. Radigue’s music is music that amounts to the sum total of the listener’s close attention to it. In Radigue’s work, the sense is that any change is imperceptible and the ear only recognises it once it’s happened but, by then, our perceptual experience is unrepeatable. Radigue herself described the process as like ‘moving stones in the river bed [which] doesn’t affect the course of the water, but modifies the liquid shape.’
The experience of listening to Radigue’s work is very close to understanding the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s notions of duration. Bergson distinguished two versions of time – the measured, which he defined as ‘clock time’, and the experienced, which he defined as ‘duration’. But what exactly is ‘duration’? Bergson says it is, ‘A qualitative multiplicity with no relation to number; an organic evolution that may not be quantified.’ Clock time is spatialized and highly calibrated and dominates contemporary life. Duration, on the other hand, is much harder to experience, but it is only duration that is authentic. It is ‘the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths.’
Although he never explicitly made the connection himself in his writings, Bergson’s ideas about time and duration are very close to certain beliefs in Buddhism. One of the central Buddhist concepts is samsara, meaning ‘incessant motion’. According to Buddhists, everything in the universe is fluid, dynamic, constantly changing. Eastern thought always puts process before substance.
In 1974, Radigue discovered Buddhism. After a concert of the first Adnos at Mills College in the US, three young French music students who were Buddhists introduced themselves to her and said that she wasn’t the one who made her music. They gave her the address of a Buddhist Centre in Paris, which Radigue attended as soon as she returned. ‘It was the most important experience in my life, and still is,’ she has said. ‘For about four years I was almost a recluse. It was my Tibetan master who brought me back to music, saying that I should consider it as my way of making an offering.’
Radigue’s Buddhist beliefs became the subject of her electronic music thereafter and found its fullest expression in her three pieces, Kyema (1988), Kailasha (1991) and Koumé (1993), collectively known as Trilogie de la Mort. These deeply spiritual pieces are all infused by death. The first piece, Kyema, came about when Radigue’s Buddhist master told her to study the Bardo Thödel, the Tibetan book of the dead. The piece is made up of six parts evoking the Buddhist notion of the six intermediary states that constitute being: birth, dream, contemplation, death, bright light, crossing and returning. Radigue had just started the second piece, Kailasha, when her son died in an accident. It is the only piece of her music that she could never listen to again once she had finished it. By this time, her now elderly Tibetan master had returned to Kathmandu, where he died soon after. Radigue went to Kathmandu to attend the cremation ceremony and made Koumé in response to her experiences there. To listen to these ravishing electronic works is to be aware of how closely entwined and embodied in each other spirituality and music can be.
Radigue’s final piece for the ARP 2500 synthesiser is L’Île re-sonante (The Re-Sounding Island, 2000), which is, for this listener anyway, the jewel in her crown. It is another of Radigue’s explorations of slowly evolving tones and sound masses. The fact that it could just as well have been created at any time during the previous 30 years is a testament to the uniqueness of depth of Radigue’s vision. Some time into the piece there gradually emerges the distant sound of soprano voices and a single, massive, shimmering chord of a pipe organ. The piece then develops into a series of cavernous flutterings and detunings, before resolving itself into a single, didgeridoo-like oscillation that gradually fades. If any one of her electronic pieces qualifies for the term ‘transcendent’, this is it. It won her the Golden Nica prize.
Radigue is unique as a composer in the sense that no one explored new technologies more than her but she was entirely dedicated to organic forms. All her work grows out gradually from the seed of a single tone. She has described her music as being like a plant, in the sense that we never see a plant move, but it is continually growing. It evolves organically. This analogy does get across very well the sense in her work of slow growth and gradual change, but I think an even better analogy is that her electronic pieces are like the deep swells of a vast ocean. A plant is a delicate organism that eventually bears fruit or flowers, but an ocean is incomprehensibly enormous, ever-shifting, without end.
Listening to Radigue’s work is the swelling, constantly moving ocean, but it is also, finally, a tuning into ourselves. Her music is our brain patterns, our nervous system. After Radigue’s purely abstract, highly visceral music, there is nowhere else to go. You’ve reached the end point, or maybe a kind of beginning, the start of an infinite penetration into the absolute essence where there is, and can be, no end.
‘I think the relationship of spirituality and ritual can be compared to that between sound waves and music. We live in a world comprised of waves; they are there, they don’t need to be invented. On the other hand, the issue is knowing to catch them and how. Similarly, the spiritual dimension doesn’t need to be invented, it’s just there. Rituals are a way to get closer to it.’—Éliane Radigue
