# Éliane Radigue



## Albert7

Now you will never be forgotten.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89liane_Radigue


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## cheregi

Bumping because I'm currently really excited about Radigue and wondering if anyone else here feels similar. A while ago I had heard and enjoyed some of her ARP 2500 pieces - and I do really love the idea of a composer dedicating three decades to the same instrument, to explore its every nuance at as deep a level as can be imagined - but now I am listening to her OCCAM series for various acoustic soloists/ensembles and I am again blown away! Conceptually I love the idea that these are each collaborative works created and passed down orally, works composed not 'for cello' or 'for organ' but for the specific musicians she has befriended; musically I feel that her handling of overtones fills my 'aural sense' like nothing else, a kind of superhuman comfort... she seems to have discovered her own world and seems content to inhabit it. I hope she ends up like Carter, living and composing past 100!











https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/sqrm/2017-v18-n1-sqrm04586/1059794ar/ <- a truly fascinating article about the Bozzini Quartet's experience working with Radigue.


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## Mandryka

cheregi said:


> Bumping because I'm currently really excited about Radigue and wondering if anyone else here feels similar..


There's a huge amount of music which is basically an immersive exploration of tones and their partials. Composers to explore - without thinking too hard about it - are Phil Niblock, The Hafler Trio (9 Great Openings), John Lely (The Harmonics of Real Strings), James Tenney (Arbor Vitae), some music by Iancu Dumitrescu, lots of stuff by Alvin Lucier, maybe Jean Claude Eloy (Shanti, Gaku-No-Miki)) . . .Scelsi too.


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> There's a huge amount of music which is basically an immersive exploration of tones and their partials. Composers to explore - without thinking too hard about it - are Phil Niblock, The Hafler Trio (9 Great Openings), John Lely (The Harmonics of Real Strings), James Tenney (Arbor Vitae), some music by Iancu Dumitrescu, lots of stuff by Alvin Lucier, maybe Jean Claude Eloy (Shanti, Gaku-No-Miki)) . . .Scelsi too.


Thanks, a number of names there I haven't run across (and I have Niblock, Lucier, Tenney, and Scelsi already marked for further exploration at some point). Do you think these composers are largely treading similar territory? Do some of them excite you much more or less than others, or Radigue?


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## Mandryka

cheregi said:


> Thanks, a number of names there I haven't run across (and I have Niblock, Lucier, Tenney, and Scelsi already marked for further exploration at some point).


Niblock is a complete closed book for me, so let me know if you manage to see anything interesting in what he does, he's an "important" composer, in some sense.



cheregi said:


> Do you think these composers are largely treading similar territory?


In some of their work, they have explored music which consists of a drone and the partials of that drone. I should say that the daddy of this stuff is probably either Tony Conrad (Four Violins) or Lamont Young. The "Deep Listening" movement is also very relevant - Stuart Dempster (In the Great Abbey of Clement VI) and Pauline Oliveros (Deep Listening)



cheregi said:


> Do some of them excite you much more or less than others, or Radigue?


I like Radigue's electronic music. The Occam series I haven't really appreciated yet. With this sort of thing I have to be in the mood, and ready to submit.


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> Niblock is a complete closed book for me, so let me know if you manage to see anything interesting in what he does, he's an "important" composer, in some sense.


This probably isn't my last word on Niblock, but I'm listening again and reading about him, and he just strikes me as one of those pseudo-anti-intellectual types that I typically have no patience with. I'm not inclined to explore further.

One thing about Radigue I remember reading somewhere (and you've likely seen this too...) is that she is adamant about her music not being drone music, because none of the 'voices' are ever static, nothing is repeated, everything is just changing slowly. Another thing I say with less certainty is there's this feeling in many of these other composers that they are interested in exploring 'the fact that overtone drones exist', and their recordings demonstrate the many different combinations of instruments/sounds that result in overtone drones, whereas Radigue is actually 'composing using overtones' or 'within the space of overtones', or in another sense her music is not experimental, the experiment has already been conducted and now she is refining and applying the results...

What this adds up to for me is that I find Radigue especially 'meditative', not in the generic 'quiet/introspective' sense but in the rigorous sense of 'lulled, as though to sleep, but instead into a state of extremely focused hyper-awareness of the present moment and only the present moment'. So in this sense Radigue is one of the most accessible composers for me, both in terms of 'listenability' and in terms of the ideological/spiritual dimension to her music.


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## Mandryka

There's a lot of Radigue, and a lot of variety of styles. This thread I started on her may be of interest

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,29616.msg1346616.html#msg1346616

And indeed possibly this

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,29778.msg1285623.html#msg1285623


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> There's a lot of Radigue, and a lot of variety of styles. This thread I started on her may be of interest


Thanks - lots to dig into here. And by the way I agree with you on Trilogie de la Mort.


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> There's a huge amount of music which is basically an immersive exploration of tones and their partials. Composers to explore - without thinking too hard about it - are Phil Niblock, The Hafler Trio (9 Great Openings), John Lely (The Harmonics of Real Strings), James Tenney (Arbor Vitae), some music by Iancu Dumitrescu, lots of stuff by Alvin Lucier, maybe Jean Claude Eloy (Shanti, Gaku-No-Miki)) . . .Scelsi too.


I've been going through this list, and there's much that excited me, but also a lot that illustrates what I think can be frustrating about 20th-century music... everywhere you turn there is this, maybe 'post-Cage', sort of pseudo-removal of compositional ego or intuition, or compositional ego or intuition is recused to a formal/structural level rather than gestural - Harmonics of Real Strings has the performer perform a constant unchanging glissandi up the entire string; Arbor Vitae is algorithmically-generated; I Am Sitting In A Room of course is just that same process repeated... according to this aesthetic sensibility it would be absurd, say, for Lely to instruct the performer to stop partway up the string, or reverse direction a few times at specified points, unless it was exactly halfway up the string, or at a point corresponding to louder resonance, or in some other way pseudo-mathematically or pseudo-rationally justified - i.e. nothing can happen 'just because I [the composer] felt like it should happen', except for the one little kernel that generates the piece in the first place... I don't think this kind of thing is bad per se, but I think it might reflect a specific set of ideas about what makes art serious or real or worth doing or worth paying attention to... and when you say in other threads 'maybe we don't need much more of this kind of droning music', I say 'maybe we don't need so much more of this rigorous process/concept-type music'...


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## Mandryka

cheregi said:


> 'maybe we don't need so much more of this rigorous process/concept-type music'...


A couple of processes pieces which have caught my attention recently -- at least, I think the Cassandra Miller is a sort of process piece based on a Kurt Cobain song, I once glimpsed at the score for about 10 seconds and that's what it looked like to me.











Algorithically composed music can be very good IMO, especially this






These days I've got less and less tolerance for music made up of big gestures -- I can't abide Rebecca Saunders any more, or Liza Lim. These things are just taste I suppose, and mine are always changing.


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> A couple of processes pieces which have caught my attention recently -- at least, I think the Cassandra Miller is a sort of process piece based on a Kurt Cobain song, I once glimpsed at the score for about 10 seconds and that's what it looked like to me.


The Miller piece I am really enjoying the experience of listening to, I came back several times to something else of hers (a string quartet?) that was posted in another thread too. She seems enamored of a sort of roundabout way of getting an actually sort of tonal type of expressiveness out of her performers which makes room for all those nice slides and such, like, this really reminds me of the early-20th-century string quartet recordings I spent so much time studying.

I'm not really sure what you mean by big gestures exactly, but then I haven't much heard either Saunders or Lim.


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## Mandryka

cheregi said:


> The Miller piece I am really enjoying the experience of listening to, I came back several times to something else of hers (a string quartet?) that was posted in another thread too. She seems enamored of a sort of roundabout way of getting an actually sort of tonal type of expressiveness out of her performers which makes room for all those nice slides and such, like, this really reminds me of the early-20th-century string quartet recordings I spent so much time studying.
> 
> I'm not really sure what you mean by big gestures exactly, but then I haven't much heard either Saunders or Lim.


I'm not sure about _tonal expressiveness_, I think it's more than Miller was interested in exploring sounds made by instruments which effected the listener like singers use their voice to effect the listener. Here's her doctorate

http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34998/1/FINAL THESIS - Miller.pdf

I remember it lead to another Huddersfield doctorate on the idea of instrumental vocality, which is also online.

By music with « big gestures » I mean music which is theatrical and sentimental, like 19th century music.


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## cheregi

Mandryka said:


> I'm not sure about _tonal expressiveness_, I think it's more than Miller was interested in exploring sounds made by instruments which effected the listener like singers use their voice to effect the listener. Here's her doctorate
> 
> By music with « big gestures » I mean music which is theatrical and sentimental, like 19th century music.


Thanks for the link. And, yes, in retrospect 'tonal expressiveness' is pretty far from the right way to describe that...

As for big-gesture music - I can't remember how much I've talked about this on TC, but I recently read this fascinating study of early recordings and the history of performance. From this I gathered that actually the model of performance of 19th-century music in the 19th and early 20th centuries was actually totally the opposite of big-gesture-oriented, as in, totally and entirely about creating affect through small moment-to-moment gestures, basically counting on the idea that audience awareness is totally present-oriented, extending backwards only a few moments, and all sense of 'structure' would be contained within this frame... And, sure, if it helps composers to think in terms of larger structures, that's fine, but it's not what anybody is paying attention to in performance... And it's actually a distinctly 20th-century idea, and rather pseudoscientific, that audiences can 'hear', maybe 'subconsciously', larger structural elements, without an intimate knowledge of, or a copy of, the score itself... So, not to be nitpicky, but I think 'big-gestures', 'theatricality', and 'sentimentality' are separate ideas which we only group together for historically contingent reasons...


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