The Sound Before Sound: Éliane Radigue

In 1973, the American composer and new-music critic Tom Johnson wrote in The Village Voice of his experience of listening to Ψ 847, a new electroacoustic work by Éliane Radigue, during its New York premiere at The Kitchen. It was, Johnson said, as if sounds were “oozing” from the walls of the venue. Others seemed to be coming out of the ceiling. This strange, decentered sound—Radigue had pointed the loudspeakers toward the walls to create a web of sound waves that reflected from one surface to another—was for Johnson the source of a mesmerizing intimacy. How could Radigue, he asked of her compositional method, “accomplish . . . so much with so little”?¹

It is a good question, and one still worth asking fifty years later. Radigue’s music is characterized by sounds that come into audibility with a practiced slowness and then, at the end, fade away into nothingness. Between these poles, a composition occurs in which many musical events unfold in carefully structured ways. Often, because of the gradual transitions between one section and another, we do not hear them as such; instead, we’re captivated by the richness of the sonic coloration, the revelation of literally a spectrum of sounds. A visual analogy might be of “listening” to the shades of color on a Mark Rothko painting or of watching how changes of light act on our perception of an object. Radigue’s palette involves the meticulous use of fadings and cross-fadings from one tone to another. When multiple tones are operating at once, they set up an architectural, spatial sound.

Lasting eighty minutes, Ψ 847 is one of the French composer’s first works for synthesizer (in this case an ARP 2500, which, soon after buying the machine in 1971, Radigue nicknamed Jules) and magnetic tape. In four fluid sections, Ψ 847 reveals itself slowly: a steady, slightly wavering electronic tone comes into audibility, and bell-like sounds (they’re not bells) chime at regular intervals. The interplay of partials (or harmonics) is like a compositional sleight of hand: bells, piano tones, and the like are not there, we just imagine them to be because of the way acoustic frequencies interact and “beat” together in the work. This slow reveal is fundamental to Radigue’s music. “There is something air, and it becomes sounds,” she told me in 2016, explaining the attention she gives to the moment preceding the note’s strike, before the vibration of the note travels from its source to the human eardrum.² She asks us to listen to the sound before sound, and then to the harmonics—the sounds within sounds—that come into play as the notes interact and decay. This is why sound sources (in the case of Ψ 847, or of any of Radigue’s electroacoustic works, loudspeakers) are so important: the listener is bathed in a vibratory mass of sonic material.

Since the early years of this century, Radigue has worked almost exclusively with acoustic instrumentations. (The Golden Nica–winning L’île re-sonant [The re-sounding island] from 2000 was her last work with Jules.) Although her compositional tools have changed—she started out using acoustic feedback, then synthesizer, and, since 2011, acoustic instruments—her method has remained the same. Three Naldjorlak compositions (2005–11) were all acoustic works that explored a sense of unity and completeness between composer and player via an intermediary, the instrument itself. These three works were a gateway to the OCCAM compositions, which began in 2011 and of which there are now a dizzying number. Simply, the OCCAMs are acoustic works composed by Radigue and created in tandem with a given musician. The process is one of mutual discovery, closeness, and oral transmission, suggesting a secular master/disciple relationship. And as with all her earlier works, the OCCAMs bring sounds slowly into being and then gradually transform them, allowing those sounds to bloom in space before slowly exiting the room.

Such an esoteric method of working is at odds with Radigue’s early years. She was born in 1932 in Paris, the only child of a shop-owning family, and her initial musical education centered around school: she had a good voice and sang in choirs; she later studied the harp. Her induction into music—and music theory—came at an early age. Radigue still speaks of the importance of her childhood piano teacher, Madame Roger, who was the first person to reveal not simply an instrument but musical theory and its emphasis on the relationships between sounds. Marriage, in 1950, to the visual artist Arman, relocation to Nice in the south of France, and the birth of three children between 1951 and 1954 gave Radigue little time for developing her own voice, beyond studying harp and harmony at the Nice conservatory. (“Alas, I had moist palms,” she says of her inability to play well.)

But the twin catalysts to thinking of sound in a new way came in quick succession. The first was listening to the airplanes take off at the nearby Nice airport: there were few flights in those days and Radigue had a clear vantage to listen to the dynamic roar of the engines and the hanging harmonics they left behind as the planes streaked away. “I remember [listening to] a flight between Nice and Corsica,” Radigue says. “It was like a symphony!” The second was hearing Pierre Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer” (Railways study, 1948) on the radio. Schaeffer was an acoustic engineer and broadcaster closely associated with the French national radio; an interest in acoustic science led him toward composition and sonic research in his experimental workshop, which was conducted at his Studio d’Essai (Experimental studio) in Paris. “Étude aux chemins de fer” was one of Schaeffer’s Cinq études de bruits (Five noise studies, 1948), early musique concrète works that used sound collages—in this case tape recordings of six trains steaming in and out of Paris’s Gare des Batignolles—to construct a real (i.e. concrète) music. As a method, musique concrète constituted a radical reshaping of what a musical source might be and how its sounds might be manipulated. A chance meeting with a friend led Radigue to an introduction to Schaeffer, who took her on as an intern.

The technical skills Radigue learned at Studio d’Essai were to come in handy when Radigue embarked on her own compositions, feedback works made first with microphones and tape recorders, then with synthesizers. (She worked briefly on a Buchla, then on a Moog, before settling on Jules, a keyboardless ARP 2500.) Meanwhile Schaeffer’s emphasis on listening to the timbre of resonated objects, and to the shape of the sounds that they made, fed into her own sound world. Radigue was to learn about using acoustic feedback (no easy task) a little later through Pierre Henry, a composer she met first at Studio d’Essai, and then worked as an assistant at the latter’s studio, Apsome. Indeed, it was Henry who provided the conditions for Radigue’s first feedback works by installing in her flat the equipment she needed to edit his L’apocalypse de Jean (Apocalypse of Saint John, 1968).

Radigue’s first feedback works—among them Jouet électronique (Electronic toy, 1967), Elemental I (1968), and Usral (the title is a contraction of “ultrasons ralentis” or “slowed-down ultrasounds,” 1969)—date from this period. The prevailing feeling of these feedback works is of being inside a sonic cloud that pulses and crackles with a palpable auditory effect. All three are, for Radigue, relatively short, an average of twelve minutes each. Tones pulse in and out of sync with one another; spatially, they seem to move closer and then back away; and clear lines of rhythm can be discerned. For all the soft, ethereal tones of, say, Usral, which was made from slowed-down high frequencies and is used by artist Marc Halpern to accompany one of his kinetic sculptures, Radigue is never frightened of abrasive sounds. Elemental I’s four sections—earth, wind, fire, and water/sea—are at points ferocious, as waves of sound emulate the force of nature.

It is impossible to overestimate how important this technical apprenticeship under “the two Pierres” (Radigue’s term) remains to her music. She still describes herself as a concrète composer in the sense that she listens for a sound’s internal components—its partials—as a mode of practice. Because “classic” musique concrète is a product of studio technology, to Radigue it is easy to see how her electroacoustic compositions fit in this lineage. But what of the OCCAMs?

These compositions are acoustic works founded in simplicity.³ Each OCCAM comes out of a focused relationship between Radigue and a particular instrumentalist. They begin with a shared image (often a watery one) that Radigue supplies to the musician. There is no score or notation. From there, composer and instrumentalist work closely to construct a piece together, forming what might be termed a human feedback loop. As in the case of her electroacoustic works, each OCCAM begins as if with a breath of sound: the touch of a harp string, the vibration of air grazing a cymbal. In the case of OCCAM XXV (2018), for organ, the first sounds are below the threshold of human hearing: you feel the music first in light vibrations hitting the feet. In Aura Satz’s film OCCAM Delta XX (2023), featuring violist Julia Eckhardt and harpist Rhodri Davies, the viewer senses the anticipation of waiting for the bow to touch a string: that infinitesimal period before the sound is part of the work. “The music is simply there,” Eckhardt told her fellow “chevalier d’OCCAM,” the trumpeter Nate Wooley, in a 2021 issue of Sound American dedicated to the OCCAM works, indicating that this realization called for a complete rethinking of what music is and how it occupies time and space.

Eckhardt’s acknowledgment of the ubiquity of music is significant, for it points to the heart of Radigue’s sonic thinking. In 2009, she published her essay “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal” in Leonardo Music Journal; it includes an illustration, “Spectrum of Waves/Spectre des longeurs d’ondes,” a diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum and a picture of cosmological proportions, for it positions the range of human hearing inside just one tiny section of what Radigue refers to as an “immense vibrating symphony of the universe.” In other words, just because we can’t hear something does not mean it isn’t there. This chimes with Radigue’s practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Although her compositions sometimes touch on Buddhist themes (the two ARP 2500 works Jetsun Mila (1986) and, most important, the magisterial Trilogie de la mort [Trilogy of death, 1988–93], for example), Radigue insists that her music is secular. But the sonic transformations, the splitting apart of notes to reveal their ethereal materiality, the shifts of energy—that “now you hear it, now you don’t” process—between sounds, all have clear parallels in the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence and continuous transition.

As with Radigue’s electroacoustic works, there is a beautiful simplicity to Radigue’s OCCAM compositions. (The hint is in the name, a reference to the medieval theologian William of Ockham’s philosophical principle of parsimony, known as Occam’s razor.) It is, however, in these acoustic works that the fragility of sound and music is best encapsulated. Each OCCAM is embodied in its musician, which means that it exists for as long as that musician exists. This raises a difficult question: what happens next? Carol Robinson is a clarinetist, composer, and close collaborator of Radigue’s; she has played on numerous OCCAMs and is the only musician with whom Radigue has cocomposed. While the works are very much designed to be passed on, Robinson points out that to do so is a significant undertaking. “Passing on an OCCAM solo is more a question of transferring a performance practice than a simple exchange of a pitch structure,” she says. “Given the highly personal character of each piece, it sometimes takes years and repeated performances for the pieces to settle, for the technical demands to be understood and mastered.”

In a few cases this transmission from original musician to second-generation musician has already happened. OCCAM HEXA V (2021), a sextet coauthored by Radigue and Robinson, advances a method that is certainly Radiguean, even as it adds its own elements. “Cocomposing with Éliane is in itself a transfer of her trust,” Robinson adds. “In taking the active on-site role with an ensemble, I apply her way of working, together with my instrumental experience with this music. . . . I serve as a creative guide and reference as much as a composer. . . . It is not the content that is essential, but rather how the musicians produce the extremely delicate and ever-changing vibrations that interact as they offer their sounds.”

This is as it should be. The OCCAMs are many things: compositions, combinations (they exist as solos, duos, ensemble, and orchestral works), explorations in relationships among people, instruments, and spaces. But they are also, at their most wondrous, pure encounters with sound. There is an invitation there to regard sound as ending. They ask only that you listen, and to listen offers an encounter with a universe in which everyone, and every sound, plays its part.