Radigue at 90

Issue Contents

I.	Rapport With the Uncontrollable

‘Radiguian Explorations’, by François Bonnet

‘Points of Balance and the Infra-Thin in Éliane Radigue’s Endless Music’, by Jo Hutton

‘Presence and Absence: Notes on Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 Synthesizer Technique’, by Daniel Silliman

‘The Radiant Exterior: Lionel Marchetti Performing Éliane Radigue’, an Interview with Lionel Marchetti by Cat Hope and Charlotte Mackay

II.	Inter/Listening

‘Listening to Éliane’, by Aura Satz

‘On the Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State’, by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

‘Reflections on Performing Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM Ocean I’, by Rhodri Davies

‘From Inside the Éliane Radigue Composer-Performer Circle’, by Cat Hope

‘Translating Silence: OCCAM X as a Radical Act of Catastrophe’, by Nate Wooley

‘Beyond the Audible: Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM Works and Inter/Listening’, by Louise Gray

‘Toward an Anti-Ideal: Radigue, Recording, and the Paradoxes of Representation’, a Conversation between Charles Curtis, Madison Greenstone, and Anthony Vine

Introduction

For over 60 years, the prolific French composer Éliane Radigue has crafted her own unique artistic voice, operating largely outside of official and institutional channels. Her extensive creative output spans the worlds of sound art, concert music, and recorded media. Beginning with her early electronic music created at the Studio d’Essai through to her recent practice of creating unscored collaborative works with internationally-renowned soloists and ensembles, Radigue has remained dedicated to the monumental task of exploring the impalpable aspects of sonority. And yet, despite the increasing popularity of her music in recent years and her sizeable catalogue of works, to date there has been no major English-language scholarly journal issue devoted to this critically-important compositional voice of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Our relationships with Radigue’s music began with our shared affinity for her slow, delicate, and constantly fluctuating sound world—‘jamais la même chose, ni tout à fait une autre’ or ‘never the same thing, nor quite another’ (Radigue et al. 2013). Our respective research projects examined the collaborative compositional processes of Radigue’s later instrumental works in the OCCAM Ocean series (2011–present). This series consists of a set of solo pieces, each of which Radigue creates with a different musician, as well as ensemble pieces mostly made up of combinations of these musicians. The combinatorial property of the project evokes the vastness of the sonic spectrum as well as the ocean. Each piece uses a water-based image as a conceptual starting point, and is created using a process of oral and aural transmission whereby musicians collaborate with Radigue at her apartment in Paris. We both explored different facets of this process, highlighting the ways in which Radigue’s mode of composition and oral transmission resists more expedient, transactional, and hierarchical approaches to music-making, giving rise to a mutable and always-changing work—a ‘living score’. Both of our projects were based on numerous interviews with Radigue’s OCCAM musicians—many of whom are contributors to this issue.

As we discovered, first during our early writing projects, and then while curating this issue, Radigue’s music poses a number of interesting challenges to music scholars. To describe her music, the way it sounds and unfolds using terminologies drawn from traditional Western music would fail to acknowledge the ‘ceaseless activity [flowing] through [her] compositions’ (Gray, 2024). François Bonnet suggests that Radigue’s music only reveals itself in the ‘fleeting space of the listening experience’ (Bonnet, 2024). These insights point to the liquid nature of Radigue’s compositions, which encompasses not only the gradually transforming sound worlds that her music inhabits but also the way her music encourages us to shift our perception between different states of attention. As such, any attempts to analyse her music using discrete and classifiable sonic elements would risk negating these fundamental qualities and forego investigating the most salient aspects of her work. And so, Radigue’s music invites us to practice new interdisciplinary modes of scholarly inquiry that engage with the sensual, experiential, and phenomenological.

Similarly, the collaborative creative process behind Radigue’s instrumental compositions as well as her sonic installations (what she calls propositions sonores) raise important yet challenging ontological questions around ideas of authorship, embodiment, identity, and the work concept. Where does a musical composition lie, if it is originally communicated through images, speech and sound, if it continually changes upon repeat performances, if it is potentially endless, and if it is transmitted orally/aurally from one performer to next? What elements of a collaboratively conceived work remain that of the composer? Can a work that is conceived as an ephemeral process of listening ever be effectively captured in an audio recording?

Radigue’s work, in its demand for non-traditional ways of approaching these ontological questions, presents opportunities for reimagining the way that we conceive of music and the creative process more broadly. In this issue, we have therefore chosen to present texts from a wide array of contributors—both practitioners and scholars—sometimes enmeshed—with the aim of providing first-hand accounts of the embodied experience of realising Radigue’s work, as well as critical perspectives on the composer’s electronic compositions and broader oeuvre. While contributions will mainly take the form of scholarly prose, this issue will also feature multi-voice conversations, interviews, and listener-reflections by a cross-disciplinary cohort of artist-thinkers guiding readers through their own close listening to Radigue’s work. This rich collection of multimodal scholarship will offer readers new pathways into a vast creative oeuvre and a greater understanding of Radigue’s expanding scope and impact.

The first section of the journal explores Radigue’s electronic music through the lens of her ‘rapport with the uncontrollable’ (Curtis et al., 2024). Throughout her career, Radigue has been drawn to technologies and techniques that invite acoustic instability into the creative process. In her early feedback works, she navigates between a number of different sensitive thresholds: the threshold of chaos and danger in the feedback between a microphone and loudspeaker; the threshold of audibility with slowed-down tape feedback and the threshold of the infinite through explorations of duration and combinatorial forms. In her subsequent work with the ARP 2500 synthesiser, Radigue famously rebuked the keyboard, favouring only to manipulate the dials and patches on the synthesiser’s main console. While Radigue had full control over the synthesiser’s interface, the sonic results of her explorations could be unpredictable and chaotic due to her use of techniques in which oscillators feedback into one another. Finally, Radigue’s approach to the diffusion of these works problematises many of the common practices surrounding the performance of electroacoustic music, destabilising sound with uncommon speaker placements and decentering the composer by removing herself from obvious view.

Bonnet’s ‘Radiguian Explorations’ (2024) serves as a foundation for all three papers in this section of the journal surveying Radigue’s electronic works. He contextualises Radigue’s musical practice by tracing several key listening experiences in her life: her musique concrète training with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, her exploration of feedback in her early works, and her use of the ARP 2500 synthesiser in her home studio. He argues that these experiences led her toward a phenomenological approach toward listening—one focused on exploring ‘between the folds’ (2024). Similarly, Jo Hutton’s essay ‘Points of Balance and the Infra-Thin in Éliane Radigue’s Endless Music’ (2024) utilises Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ‘infra-thin’ to analyse Radigue’s relationship to feedback in her endless music period (1968–1970). Hutton focuses on the space between the folds—between close beating tones, microphones and speakers and synchronised looping tapes—and uses her own studio practice to form a nuanced picture of Radigue’s endless music. In ‘Presence and Absence: Notes on Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 Synthesizer Technique’ (2024), Daniel Silliman provides an in-depth account of the techniques Radigue likely used to create her iconic synthesiser compositions, including both the development of materials and later the final mixing of these materials—a process which Bonnet refers to as Radigue becoming an auditor (2024). In doing so, Silliman proposes that a main theme of Radigue's synthesiser works is that of self-abnegation: a removal of the composer's hand. In the subsequent interview between Cat Hope and Lionel Marchetti, we see this concept of abnegation in the way Radigue preferred to obscure herself in the diffusion of her works. Marchetti, one of the primary diffusers of Radigue’s electronic works, speaks at length about his position as a diffuser as well as Radigue’s preference for unconventional speaker configurations that conceal the sound source—as he says, creating a sense of sound being ‘simultaneously everywhere and nowhere’ (Hope, 2024).

This ‘rapport with the uncontrollable’ is also found in Radigue's recent work with performers. A focus on these works marks the second section of the journal, entitled ‘inter/listening’. After 45 years of working almost exclusively with electronic sound, over the past 20 years Radigue has shifted her attention toward working with collaborating musicians. The most recent of these collaborations take the form of OCCAM Ocean (2011—present). Three reflective articles written by prominent collaborators—Rhodri Davies (2024), Cat Hope (2024), and Nate Wooley (2024)—provide first-hand accounts of the creative process, providing insight into three different areas: the technical, the social and the personal.

Louise Gray contextualises these reflective accounts with an examination of Radigue’s OCCAM works from a psychoanalytical perspective. In ‘Beyond the Audible: Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM Works and Inter/Listening’ (2024), Gray considers the OCCAM series in terms of sound, space, and relationships, arguing that these works give way to a new kind of listening. Gray’s concept of inter/listening highlights the coexistence of composer, performer, and listener in Radigue’s collaborative work, where sound becomes evidence of this complex network of relationships.

Situated in the centre of the issue are two reflective pieces aimed at conveying and interrogating experiences of listening to Radigue’s work. In ‘Listening to Éliane’ (2024), Aura Satz transcribes an audio collage of interviews between Radigue and collaborators Rodhri Davies and Julia Eckhardt. And in ‘On the Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State’ (2024), Lorena Munoz-Alonso provides a phenomenological account of listening to Radigue's seminal electronic work Kyema (1988).

The issue concludes with a collaborative conversation led by Charles Curtis, one of Radigue’s long-time collaborators. Curtis, composer Anthony Vine and clarinettist Madison Greenstone (2024) discuss the role of the recording in Radigue’s work and contextualise all the work mentioned in this issue. They outline the difficulty in considering the recorded artefact in relation to the concept of early endless music.

While this special issue seeks to paint a broad picture of Radigue’s electronic music and take a closer look at more recent collaborative practice, there is still much to be studied in Radigue’s creative practice. For example, as time goes on, secondary or tertiary transmissions of OCCAM pieces beyond their original creations may become more common, and this in turn will raise questions about Radigue’s collaborators. It is our hope that this special journal issue might shed light on Radigue’s extraordinary accomplishments, and open up conversations that place this prolific composer firmly in the canon of groundbreaking electroacoustic and instrumental music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I dreamt of an unreal, impalpable music appearing and fading away like clouds in a blue summer sky. Frolicking in the high mountain valleys around the wind and the grey rocks and trees, like white runaways. This particular music, that always eluded me. Each attempt ended in seeing it come closer and closer but remain unreachable, only increasing the desire to try again and yet again to go a bit further. It will always be better next time. (Radigue 2009)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Dougherty

William Dougherty (b. 1988) is an American composer, sound artist and writer currently serving as the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Engaging with elements of loss, decay and memory, his creative work explores the sounds of audio recordings and recording technologies. Emphasising collaborative and community-based composition models, Dougherty's work interrogates notions of authorship, agency and the concept of work itself. He has garnered recognition and awards from institutions such as the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Cité Internationale des Arts. His compositions have been performed internationally by ensembles including the Talea Ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Additionally, Dougherty has contributed articles and interviews to publications such as TEMPO, Music & Literature, and VAN Magazine, and he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Openwork.

Luke Nickel

Luke Nickel (b. 1988) is an award-winning Canadian interdisciplinary artist, composer and researcher currently living in Berlin, Germany. His works knot together themes of memory, transcription, translation, queer identity, technology, and impossible roller coasters. In addition to orally transmitted music compositions, he creates traditionally notated musical works, audiovisual performances, installations, videos and texts. He has created work with internationally established soloists and chamber ensembles such as Mira Benjamin, Heather Roche, Quatuor Bozzini and EXAUDI. He has created work with visual and multimedia artists such as Freya Olafson and Beth Frey. About his work, Jennie Gottschalk writes: ‘... there is an unusual quality of rawness. The players are participating in an oral, folkloric tradition without any sense of irony or flippancy’ (Experimental Music Since 1970).