Éliane
Radigue (b. 1932) is a pioneering French composer of undulating
continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible
transformations that purposefully unfold to reveal the intangible,
radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics
and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to
musique
concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the ‘50s
and
‘60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the
creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic
dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist
composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970,
eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use
exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With
remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each piece, painstakingly
assembling series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed
meticulously into hourlong suites of precise, perpetual mutation,
including masterpieces
Trilogie de
la mort and
Adnos I-III.
In 2001,
Radigue adapted an early feedback work to live performance on electric
bass,
Elemental II, and in
2004, with the encouragement of ongoing
collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for
acoustic composition, beginning with
Naldjorlak
for solo cello,
composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue has
maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her
dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades
and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our
time.
Occam
Ocean is an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces composed
by Radigue for individual instrumentalists in which a performer's
personal performance technique and particular relationship to their
instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. The
“knights of the Occam,” as Radigue refers to the performers
participating in the project, are therefore musicians who have
developed individualistic, creative approaches to their instruments;
and the resulting compositions are not transferable to other performers
on that instrument. Citing the ocean as a calming antidote to the
overwhelming nature of our vibratory wave-filled surroundings, Radigue
has named the tributary components of her Occam series with the image
of fluid water in mind. Solo pieces are Occams, duo pieces Rivers, and
larger ensemble pieces Deltas. The process of combining or over-laying
the solos as small ensemble pieces, with only minor adjustments in the
solos themselves, recalls Radigue's procedure in the early feedback
works made as sound installations, in which individual feedback loops
are to combined freely in slight non-synchronization such that
combinations of loops rarely or never repeat. With the extreme
simplicity of Occam’s razor, continuous pieces that are iridescent on
their own achieve a new radiance of interacting pulsation in their
River and Delta configurations. The Occam series began in 2011 with a
solo for harpist Rhodri Davies and has continued steadily to the
present, counting now well over fifty individual solos and ensemble
pieces.
Acknowledged internationally as a performer of new and experimental
music, cellist
Charles Curtis
has been associated with minimalist
pioneer La Monte Young and Marina Zazeela since 1987, their intimate
working relationship having yielded retroactive recalibrations of
pieces like Young’s 1958
Trio for
Strings. Curtis
is also the first performer to collaborate with Éliane Radigue on a
work for an unamplified, acoustic instrument without electronic support
or accompaniment. This work,
Naldjorlak,
composed in 2004 and premiered
in December 2005, is an hour-long, exhaustive enquiry into the inherent
resonating properties of the cello.
Rhodri Davies
is an improvising harpist who confronts traditional
concepts of the harp through his use of preparations, detuned, bowed,
and e-bowed strings. One of the most prominent members of the London
reductionist school of improvised music, new pieces for solo harp have
been composed for him by Philip Corner and Yasunao Tone, in addition to
Éliane Radigue.
Robin Hayward
is a tuba player and composer who has introduced radical
playing techniques to brass instruments, initially through the
discovery of the ‘noise-valve’ and later through the development of the
first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the
Hayward
Tuning Vine, partly out of a desire to visualise the harmonic
space
implicit within the microtonal tuba, and began working on a solo tuba
piece with Éliane Radigue, which became Occam XI. Other composer
collaborations include Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier.
Occam Ocean
is part of Éliane
Radigue: Intermediate States
, a
retrospective curated by Lawrence Kumpf and Charles Curtis and
developed in collaboration with Éliane Radigue for Blank Forms in New
York. The retrospective seeks to present Radigue’s practice in a richly
contextualized, holistic manner to draw out important connections
between her early and late periods of work, examining the breadth of
her practice and juxtaposing her compositions with new interpretations
and experimental re-stagings by contemporary composers. The
retrospective will continue in New York with more programs into 2020.
Éliane Radigue: Intermediate States has been made possible with
generous support from Wales Arts International, the Goethe-Institut,
and through the New Music Fund, a program of FACE Foundation, with
generous funding from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in
the United States, Florence Gould Foundation, Fondation CHANEL, French
Ministry of Culture, Institut francais-Paris, and SACEM (Société des
Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique).