“Perhaps I was influenced by Morton Feldman a few years ago when he wryly mentioned that, since this is the Jet Age, everyone thinks that we ought to have Jet Age music to go with it. […] quite a bit of the music written today is still oriented toward speed, loudness, virtuosity, and maximum input, Eliane Radigue’s music is the antithesis of all that.”
Tom Johnson, The Village Voice¹

In Search of the Infinitesimal

Éliane Radigue dedicated – and is still dedicating – her career to the discovering, and above all listening to, the minutest activities of the world of sound. Each of the composer’s works has been written on this quest, which has as its central goal to create a framework in which it is possible to contemplate the natural micro-oscillations that exist between frequencies. A form of creation in which the play between overtones somehow replaces all forms of organization exterior to the sound itself. This is composition starting from the sound material, in which temporality ceases to be seen as an external structure to be imposed by the composer and instead is made into something inherent to, emerging from, and indissociably connected to the inner life of sound.

Radigue’s catalogue is easily divided into three periods; however, this division is far more technical than creative. In her “sonic propositions” of the late 1960s – as Radigue called her first works, built by using feedback and reinjection between two tape recorders – or her large-scale and pioneering work for modular synthesizers, which began in the 1970s and continued through the 2000s, or her more recent collaborations with performers, Radigue has maintained a single aesthetic goal: to listen to the internal activity of sound. However rich with possibility, feedback techniques and modular synthesizers were only means to that end: behind the technique was always the same sonic dream world.

There are myriad arguments in favour of placing both Radigue and her work at the margins of the main aesthetic currents of the second half of the twentieth century. Essentially a self-taught composer, Radigue followed a course that travelled between (and sometimes circumvented) multiple spheres dominated by men and by institutional hierarchies. While this marginalisation is undeniable, one must not neglect the fact that for Radigue, there was nothing more important than the pursuit of sound: for more than six decades, Radigue kept her sights fixed on her own aesthetic horizon. For this reason, it would be more accurate to qualify her musical career as extraordinary, and even obstinate, rather than as marginal. If, as composer and critic Tom Johnson notes in the epigraph, Radigue’s music seemed at times to exist in direct opposition to certain currents, it is nevertheless more accurate to describe the various ways in which Radigue’s music was received as motivated by a certain element of surprise, by discovery, among all the artistic “statements” of the time, a music emerging from who knew where, headed always in the same direction, and seeming, in this way, to have always existed.

In terms of sound research, Radigue can be linked to some of her minimalist colleagues in the United States, or even to those of the minimalist diaspora. In particular, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock, and above all La Monte Young come to mind: Young, it may be argued, participated in the establishment of a musical minimalism that sought to explore the inner life of sound². Nevertheless, it is important to limit comparisons between Radigue’s work and minimalism to a shared interest in intrinsic sound activity. Harmonically, Radigue distanced herself from the stasis of drone-based music. Politically, Radigue’s practice was not motivated by any active rejection of the academy or of any particular aesthetic current. While minimalism was at times considered to be “a weapon with which to challenge the hegemony of postwar serialism³”, such a definition hardly offers a satisfying portrait of the artistic goals and social positions of this composer. In parallel – rather than in opposition – to all these different aesthetic outlooks, Radigue, year after year, followed her own path, ignoring, as much as possible, anything that might keep her from her quest. For a quest it was: each work of Radigue’s is a part of an experimental process that leads back to what she considers to be the basis for thinking about sound. Listening, according to this process, focuses on a sound’s traits, independent of its cause or its possible meaning⁴. With Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, Radigue found affirmation of the potential she perceived in this “reduced listening.” In addition to the techniques of classification, mixing, and premixing that she used throughout her career, this insight into sound is perhaps the most important legacy of Radigue’s time with her first mentors. Listening is primordial – a form of listening that also resembles what Pauline Oliveros called “deep listening,” or what John Cage portrayed in his celebrated “Silence.” Attention to sound activity as it occurs, without turning it into a vehicle for a theory or for the expression of human feeling. An apprenticeship in the freedom of sound.

Playing with interference, Part I: gesture and listening

Without necessarily describing it as pre-spectral, certain aspects of Radigue’s music are comparable to the work of Scelsi. This is true in the sense that their work – largely intuitive – plunges both listener and performer into the very heart of a sound. Intensively, at a microscopic scale, the music plays with nuance, modulation, variations in energy, and changes in texture. While most of Radigue’s works undeniably have a fundamental, that pitch is rapidly forgotten, overcome by the natural harmonics that emerge from it. For performers of her music and for Radigue herself, the sound material therefore comes mostly from working with overtones, micro-beats, and pulsations, which come to resemble precarious – even wraithlike – lacework that can only be obtained by sustained sounds, played between pianissimo and piano. From time to time, a mezzo forte appears, placed with great care: if the fundamental is played too insistently, it overpowers the musical discourse and in one fell swoop it wipes out the whole filigreed world – the impalpable micro-beats that are the very soul of Radigue’s work.

Underpinning any execution of the composer’s work is the fragility of the sound material. The fruit of accidents and of patterns of interference, the sounds of her first works with feedback are extremely difficult to control, and can only be produced with the lightest of touches, a tactile pleasure to which Radigue would later return when she encountered modular synthesizers, and which she transmits to the musicians collaborating with her today. Patient gestures are required to perform any of her works – but even more than that, patient listening: sounds must be taken as they appear. In Jouet électronique (1967), the potentiometers (for recording and/or playing) must be controlled using the barest of manipulations, extraordinarily precise and delicate gestures that make it possible for beats to emerge from a reinjection loop between two tape recorders. Similarly, to produce the purring sound of the Larsen effect, Radigue had to find the proper distance between the tape recorders and then make miniscule adjustments at exactly the right time; if not, the “untamed” sounds might self-destruct. Later, the greater stability of modular synthesizers allowed her to make imperceptible changes to the oscillations of sustained sounds. In Chryp-tus (1971), her first piece for synthesizer on tape, composed with a Buchla synthesizer, one hears Radigue playing with the whole panoply of variations within a sound. The piece captures the composer’s encounter with an object that finally gave her the pleasure of playing with harmonics, something that was only possible very exceptionally when using feedback techniques. Producing low pulsations, all the way to the tiniest of beats, required utmost delicacy of touch – and tremendous patience was needed to move the potentiometers by no more than a hair. Radigue actually never used synthesizer keyboards – which were available for the ARP 2500 – out of a fear Don Buchla himself had expressed, of falling into the habits of piano, and in this way losing the sensory pleasures of gesture and listening unique to the instrument.

Éliane Radigue with her ARP 2500 synthesizer, Paris, 1972, ©Yves Arman

From her earliest collaborations with performers, Radigue took pains to teach the gestural virtuosity required for her compositions, which she had until that point been developing in isolation, in front of a synthesizer, for more than forty years. Specifically, beyond the technology being used, it was the fragility of the sound material (more than the composer herself) that demanded this kind of gestural and auditory patience. For example, in Occam Delta XV (2018), an instrumental piece Radigue wrote for the Quatuor Bozzini, the musicians essentially play the same pitches, but a few cents apart. When held, these “out of tune” pitches produce patterns of interference, or beats, that can sound like a distinct note. The resulting music can form what clarinettist Carol Robinson has described as a large sound balloon floating through the performance. The metaphor is perfect: as in Radigue’s feedback work, the shock of an overly abrupt attack might propel the sound material of these instrumental pieces back into the abyss from which it emerged. Moreover, during the performance, the inevitable accumulation of these independent frequencies renders vastly more complex the distinction between the notes actually being played on the instrument and the notes that result from these frequencies as they brush together. A paradox emerges from the playing of these compositions: they require a tremendous degree of instrumental precision to create a music that “makes itself,” escaping the control of its performers. In other words, the composer’s music does not so much do away with all forms of control as it pushes its performers to adopt a very specific type of mastery of the sound. It requires virtuosity, to be sure, but one that is above all anchored in listening and respect, to achieve a kind of sound performance that appears to come alive just beyond the boundaries of the instrumental performance itself. Performers of her music, like the composer herself, devote their energy to creating a space in which the sound’s interiority can deploy itself, and exist on its own terms.

Perceptions

Just as the eye must adjust to drastic changes in luminosity, it can take some time for the listener’s ear to perceive the detail that exists at this scale of sound. “Is this still the silence of the auditorium? Has the piece already begun?” certain audience members seem to wonder at the beginning of a Radigue concert, slightly perplexed to observe others, who, already familiar with her style, have settled in with eyes closed in intense concentration. This polarizing effect, which has always been a trait of Radigue’s work, is the result of a singular phenomenon: musical events that take place at such a micro-level can only be made to happen in “macro” time; that is, at a rate so extremely slow that it falls beyond the perceptive capabilities of hearing. If, at a given moment, the hearer perceives that a modulation has indeed occurred, it is nearly impossible for them to know precisely where and how the change took place.

Some people have compared this phenomenon to experiences of contemplation or of observing nature. A river and its currents come to mind, swirling, bubbling, and eddying, creating a surface that is, to cite a Verlaine poem Radigue loves, “each time not quite the same, nor yet completely other.” More drastically, some have evoked a flower or a tree whose growth cannot be perceived in situ. Radigue has maintained many ties to the world of the visual arts, and in that arena, one might compare her work to the Wandarbeiten (wall works) of the artist Mauser, who is a member of the Wandelweiser collective. Made from translucent paper, the works are glued to the white walls of the exhibit space, so that at first glance the room seems completely empty of art. One’s perception of the space changes with the light: at certain angles, it is captured by the paper, seeming to appear and disappear almost ineffably.

Mauser *Wandarbeiten*. Kunstraum Düsseldorf, 2006, ©Elmar Engelbertz

Radigue’s work invites a tremendous degree of sensory acuity; it requires a certain sensory resilience, even a letting go; this is the space into which the porous boundary between silence and music can unwind. Listening thus becomes an immersive experience at two levels. It is a dive down into the minuscule and maze-like world of sound itself, and, simultaneously, a melting together of the imperceptible developments in the sound, which in turn melt into the silence and the size of the performance space. Radigue’s music often steals forth from silence as if it had always been there.

Moreover, and in another parallel to the Wandarbeiten, certain sounds in the composer’s work seem at times to be emanating directly from the walls. This was quite literally true at the premiere of Omnht (1970). As in Usral (1969), one of her earlier feedback pieces, the three long asynchronous tape loops of Omnht overlap and interfere with one another, creating a music that transforms impalpably, filling the space. For the premiere, Radigue hid Rolen Star loudspeakers behind the partitions of an installation by the artist Tania Mouraud. Even at this early point, it was already crucial to her to make the space “resonate”, investing great care in its acoustic response in order to create a sound that could not be traced back to a specific source, in this way creating a pervasively interesting story.

Tania Mouraud installation for which Omnht was composed, Galerie Rive Droite, 1968, © Pariscope

Nearly all of the pieces from this “feedback” period (among them ∑=a=b=a+b [1969], Usral [1969], Opus 17 [1970], Vice-Versa, etc. [1971]) were composed for art galleries or similar spaces. Because of their material and the spaces in which they were premiered, these early Radigue works can be defined in hindsight as precursors of the sound installation. Immersive environments, in other words, in which Radigue was playing not just with interference at the material level (recorded feedback, superimposition of different tapes), but with the resonance of the space itself. Tom Johnson, in his review for the Village Voice, was one of the first people to note this. Writing about Psi 847 (1973), which was composed with an ARP 2500 synthesizer, he observed that he had heard certain patterns emanating from unexpected corners:

They were all produced by the same loudspeakers, and many of them seemed to come directly out of the loudspeakers. But some of the sounds seemed to ooze out of the side wall, and others seem to emanate from specific points near the ceiling⁵.

While this phenomenon does not belong exclusively to Radigue, it is correct to affirm, as Johnson did, that the composer’s work succeeds in drawing attention to this play with acoustics, which go completely unremarked in a great deal of other music. There is a fairly simple explanation for this peculiarity: space, to Radigue, is literally a core part of the development of the sound material, since this material is formed by a natural accumulation of frequencies throughout the work. Musical motifs and textures emerge from sustained pitches, and almost always from the silence of the room, slowly filling it. For this reason, it is a music that makes space resonate in and for itself. This approach places Radigue among the “aural architects” described by Barry Blesser: in diametric opposition to acoustical engineers that transform a space by creating directed, optimized listening areas, Radigue “focus[es] on the way that listeners experience the space⁶”. This attention to the aural experience was something Radigue prioritized throughout her career. She even shocked certain sound engineers when, for the broadcast of a work for synthesizer recorded on tape, she insisted on placing her loudspeakers in a “completely anti-acoustic fashion”. Radigue’s music does not guide the ear toward a narrative and does not impose any specific timbre; instead, it exposes the listener to a kind of sound play. The non-directionality of this proposal, which is not addressed to the intellect so much as it is intended for the whole body, can be startling. Immersed, the ear filters, selects, finds its own slipstream among the swirling eddies of undulating sound. A music that, in the words of Michel Chion, “demands a great deal of presence, and beside which all other music appears to be tugging at the listener’s sleeve⁷”.

Playing with interference, part 2: modular generation

Larsen effects, reinjection, Tartini tones: from Radigue’s earliest feedback pieces, the material was filled with sounds that, in a way, generated themselves and proliferated on their own. Through interference, Radigue’s music forms a whole that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Moreover, with Accroméga (1968), Radigue began exploring this self-generating effect beyond sound recording, experimenting with different lengths of tape loop. Juxtaposed, the tapes feel imperceptibly out of synch throughout the performance, playing with the ways in which the recorded beats rub up against each other, only returning to their initial synchrony after several hundred hours. In 1970, she presented ∑=a=b=a+b. Engraved on two 45s, the piece can be played in different combinations, at different speeds. Similarly, the two stereo tracks of Vice-versa, etc… can be played together or separately, at different speeds, forward or backward, on several tape players. The pulsations, obtained with feedback and recorded on two tracks, interfere with each other through juxtaposition, according to the wishes of the person playing them.

Vinyl recording of ∑=a=b=a+b, © Julia Eckhardt

The duration and structure of these first works were therefore already organized according to modular logic, in the sense that the piece’s essence was defined by a certain combinatory potential. As on a modular synthesizer (whose independent modules can be connected in order to add different effects to a given sound-producing signal), ∑=a=b=a+b and Vice-versa, etc… allow the performer to select parameters for speed, direction, and number of tracks used from among a variety of possible groupings. Even before it is played, the work is ontologically multiple.

Because of the tools she adopted for their composition, Radigue’s pieces for ARP, Buchla, Moog, or Serge synthesizers inevitably have a modular dimension, but it is perhaps in her most recent project with performers, Occam Océan— a large-scale project created by fusing several pre-existing pieces – that Radigue can be seen returning to her early love of combination. The cycle’s twenty-seven solos, made-to-measure for each musician, are assembled to form duets, trios, quartets, and quintets, all the way to a large ensemble, Occam Océan. The work is by definition incomplete, in that it cannot be completed; in it, one hears the culmination of nearly sixty years of sound searching. The material places the performers – even more than the audience – in the role of the listener. Radigue proposes applying the principle of parsimony – Occam’s razor – to what they hear, and that is what sets the length of each performance. This reasoning is both a performance guide for the musicians, and a decisive factor in the structuring of the work. For example, if, in concert, a section does not achieve the desired intensity, the musicians are supposed to move on to the next one immediately, rather than struggling to hold something that does not come naturally. By contrast, when a section sounds magnificent, the musicians are encouraged to hold it for as long as they can, to maintain the pleasure. Thus, the length of each section of the work is determined by what seems to be the simplest option for the performer in the heat of the moment. Broadly speaking, Radigue’s music resists all forced behaviour: the musicians are not to execute the sound so much as they are to keep its activity in balance. Their role is to maintain a space in which the inner life of the sounds they are holding can emerge. Communicated orally by Radigue, the cycle’s pieces, in addition to their potential combinations with already existing pieces, can be passed on again. As of this writing, only one such expansion has taken place, but it was enough to make one thing clear: learning a work by Radigue is not a matter of creating a faithful reproduction that can be passed from one instrumentalist to another. Rather, it is a matter of shared sensibility, anchored above all in listening, that seeks to set free the inner life of sound, the key to all of Radigue’s artistic searching.

Since the 1960s, Radigue has been building a catalogue whose function as an aesthetic whole cannot be denied. The composer herself describes this, declaring that she has been composing essentially the same music her entire life. In this sense, the image of a towering, permanent “installation,” erected by Radigue over the course of her career is tempting in its monumentality. But that would not do her justice: while certainly marked by the determination of her unitary and single-minded quest, Radigue’s catalogue cannot be limited to the static space evoked by the idea of an installation. More fluid, and lighter, it makes itself beyond the grasp of performers at the sound level – and, in its play with combinations, beyond the grasp of the composer herself. Radigue’s work is, quite literally, free and alive.

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1. Johnson, Tom, “Minimal Material: Eliane Radigue”, in The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982, Eindhoven, Het Apollohuis, 1973. Available online at https://charliemorrow.com/pdfs/TheVoiceOfNewMusic.pdf (accessed on 16 December 2021).
2. Potter, Keith, “Minimalism (USA),” in Grove Music Online, 2019.

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2257002 (link verified on 23 January 2020).

1. “Minimalism (USA).”
2. Chion, Michel and Claudia Gorbman, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York, Columbia University Press, 2019.
3. The Voice of New Music.
4. Blesser, Barry and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak: Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2007.
5. Chion, Michel and Guy Reibel, Les musiques électroacoustiques, Aix-en-Provence, INA GRM edisud, 1979.