Sasha Frere-Jones
Never the same experience twice for the ninety-three-year-old
French composer.
Alien Roots: EĢliane Radigue, edited by Charles Curtis and Lawrence Kumpf, Blank Forms, $25
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In his introduction to Alien Roots, a collection of interviews with and texts by and about the ninety-three-year-old composer Éliane Radigue, coeditor Lawrence Kumpf makes an important point. Radigue’s “sound propositions” are often perceived through lenses that distort as much as they clarify. Some of her glacially slow pieces have been filtered through what Kumpf calls a “Western pop-cultural understanding of Buddhism,” but this is not entirely reductive, as Radigue is a practicing Buddhist. Her music can also be mapped against the European classical tradition, and, again, this is not unfair. Radigue was trained, in part, as a harpist, even though her music sounds more like a submarine crying than anything a harp can produce. I have not spent as much time with Radigue as Kumpf and his coeditor, cellist Charles Curtis, but one long afternoon at her Paris apartment in 2019 made it clear that she enjoys many things (Mahler, for instance) that do not line up with her profile as a forbidding figure of the avant-garde. Radigue is one of the great twentieth-century artists because she embodies the optimism of modernism while using technologies like the oscillator and magnetic recording tape that obliterated the nineteenth-century approaches designed for stringed instruments and concert halls (things she also loves). Radigue is, more or less, the living dialectic of amplified music.
Éliane Radigue, ca. 1989. From Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue. Photo: Marc Moreau.
In a deep and wide interview with Bernard Girard in 2013—published for the first time here in English, as translated by Adrian Rew—Radigue retells a story she has told often, about living near the Nice airport in the ’50s. She describes one aircraft as a “a four-engine propeller plane that made noise of an intolerable violence,” which reminded her of “those concerts where there are too many decibels.” But another plane made a sound “which was so rich,” and she has often referenced that particular anecdote as an inspiration for what she does. Radigue still hates loud music—she had to stand outside the venue when her late friend Phill Niblock played his laptop concerts, because it was “too much, too much.” But that doesn’t mean her decision to ape the sounds of the gentler plane resulted in polite classical music. She has made tape works from feedback that are meant to shake a room built with a sunken coffin space (into which visitors were invited to hop) and has used both cellos and synthesizers to create long, stippled, and crenellated lengths of audio that reflect the world she pays such close attention to. As both Curtis and Kumpf make clear, she never wants any of her compositions performed in a way that renders the same experience twice, just as those planes did not create a single, discrete story for her.
Éliane Radigue, untitled sketch, 1971. From Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue.
If the home-stereo presentation cannot match the live “diffusions” (Radigue’s word) of her work, you cannot fault the consumer who has simply purchased what Radigue herself made available. The difficulties of amplification have never stopped both vexing and inspiring her. Her own one-page instruction sheet for diffusing the tape pieces (included here) begins like so: “No stereophonic effects, no frontal diffusion, but rather an all-over, all-around effect avoiding as much as possible direct projection from the loudspeakers onto the audience.” She is asking for speakers to do the opposite of what they are designed to do: throw sound. Radigue makes a kind of sound that bleeds into walls like water taken up by capillary action. That there is no reliable way to make this happen perhaps explains why she has spent the last twenty years writing for acoustic instruments, a kind of return to fundamentals that offers a moment of revolt. Curtis is one of the string players who knows how to use a bow to create Radigue’s overtones and resonant flutter, perhaps a more reliable kind of amplifier for her.
Spread from Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue. Verso: Éliane Radigue, notes for “Les bulles d’écoute,” 1970. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue. Recto: Éliane Radigue, notes for “Auditorium permanent,” 1970. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue.
Musician Daniel Silliman used spectral analysis to unpack Radigue’s Kyema (1988). His essay features an extremely good, plain-language explanation of analog synthesis, as well as a vast trove of technical details illustrating how Radigue’s harmonic approach works in that particular composition. Madison Greenstone’s examination of Radigue’s early feedback pieces offers us phrases that can apply to almost anything she’s done. Greenstone beautifully describes a key Radigue experience, “an apparent autonomy of sound, its development seemingly propelled from within and revealing some sort of inner life,” and also notices her “confounding durational mirages, in which the mind’s perceptive faculties are challenged by the inability to ground the sound’s duration in linear time.” Anybody who has gone through something like Adnos (1972–82) has felt the sober hallucinations that Radigue can induce, the impression that a barely audible source is getting louder and closer while your chair begins to transmit new responses to the sounds you no longer know how to identify.
Éliane Radigue’s studio at 22 rue Liancourt, Paris, ca. 1980s. From Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue. Courtesy Fonds Éliane Radigue.
It is the Girard interview, though, that I keep returning to. Radigue’s childhood story is a great setup: the controlling mother foiled by family friends who take in a teenage Éliane and give her room to breathe in Nice; the incompatibility of clammy hands and harp strings; and the role of Pierre Schaeffer and the musique concrète cohort, who could hear music in a locomotive. I am stuck on the bit where Radigue talks about going to the States in the ’60s and ’70s, eventually gaining extended access to a synthesizer. (“There were no synthesizers in France,” she explains.) They allowed Radigue “to better realize what I had previously been doing in a very rustic manner” (that manner involving manipulation of magnetic tape). “I immediately understood in working with my first wild sounds,” she told Girard, “that I had to stop thinking in traditional terms of pitch, of relationships of fourths or thirds, and that I had to accept the sounds as I managed to create them and as they spoke to me, as I heard them.” Radigue’s body of work is a long, slow love letter to the sounds of planes and ice-cream machines and burning cop cars and all the products of an industrial world that must, eventually, always, fade out.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a musician and writer from New York. His memoir, Earlier, was recently published by Semiotext(e).