Éliane Radigue facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Éliane Radigue
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Éliane Radigue
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| Background information | |
| Born | January 24, 1932 Paris, France |
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| Years active | 1950s–present |
| Labels | Lovely Music Ltd, Important Records, shiiin records |
Éliane Radigue (born January 24, 1932) is a French composer known for her unique electronic music. She started making music in the 1950s. Her first pieces were shared with the public in the late 1960s. For many years, until 2000, she mostly used a special electronic instrument called an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer and tapes. Since 2001, she has mainly written music for regular instruments.
Contents
Éliane Radigue's Life Story
Éliane Radigue grew up in Paris, France. Her family were merchants. She later married artist Arman and they lived in Nice, France, raising their three children. They moved back to Paris in 1967.
Éliane had learned to play the piano and was already composing music. Then, she heard a radio show by Pierre Schaeffer, who created a type of music called musique concrète. This music uses recorded sounds from the real world. She soon met him and became his student in the early 1950s. She worked at his studio, the Studio d'Essai, when she visited Paris.
In the early 1960s, she helped another composer, Pierre Henry. She created some sounds for his musical works. As Éliane's own music grew, Schaeffer and Henry felt her style was different from theirs. She used audio feedback (when a sound system picks up its own sound) and long tape loops. This was heard in her early works like Vice-Versa and Feedback Works 1969-1970.
Her Musical Journey
Learning Musique Concrète
Éliane Radigue first learned about electroacoustic music from Pierre Schaeffer. She heard his music on the radio and was very interested. After meeting him, she began studying with Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in 1955. This was at the Studio d'Essai in Paris.
There, she learned many techniques for tape music. This was part of her education in musique concrète. Éliane found it amazing that any sound could be used to make music. However, her teachers preferred musique concrète over electronic music.
Exploring Tape Feedback
Éliane left the Studio d'Essai to support her children. She no longer had access to the special studios. So, she studied classical composition, harp, and piano. In 1967, she reconnected with Pierre Henry. She became his assistant at Studio Apsome.
During this time, she became very interested in tape feedback. This technique creates sounds by feeding the output of a sound system back into its input. It fit her idea of sounds slowly changing over a long time. After a year, Éliane started her own music career. She mostly worked with tape editing.
Experiments with Synthesizers
Around 1970, Éliane made her first music using a synthesizer. She shared a studio with another musician, Laurie Spiegel, at NYU. This studio had a Buchla synthesizer. Her goal was to create sounds that slowly "unfolded" using synthesizers and tape. She felt her results were more like the "minimal" composers in New York. These were different from the French musique concrète composers she had worked with before.
She tried different synthesizers like the Buchla and Moog synthesizers. Then, she found the ARP 2500 synthesizer. This became her main instrument for the next 25 years. She used it to create her unique sound, starting with Adnos I in 1974. After this piece was first played, some French music students told her about Tibetan Buddhism. She found it very interesting and started learning about it when she returned to Paris.
Buddhist Influence on Her Music
After learning about Tibetan Buddhism, Éliane became a follower. She spent three years focusing on its practices. Her teacher, Tsuglak Mawe Wangchuk, then told her to go back to her music.
She returned to composing, using the same methods as before. She finished Adnos II in 1979 and Adnos III in 1980. Then came a series of works about Milarepa, a famous Tibetan yogi. He was known for his "Hundred Thousand Songs." Éliane composed the Songs of Milarepa and Jetsun Mila. The French government helped fund these works.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she worked on one long piece. This three-hour work, Trilogie de la Mort, is considered her masterpiece. It was released in 1998. The first part, kyema Intermediate states, explores different states of consciousness. This work was inspired by the Bardo Thodol (also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and her meditation practice. It was also influenced by significant life events.
Creating Acoustic Works
In 2000, Éliane made her last electronic work in Paris, called L'Ile Re-sonante. She won the Golden Nica Award for this piece in 2006.
In 2001, an electric bass player named Kasper T. Toeplitz asked her to create an instrumental work. This was her first piece for regular instruments, called Elemental II. She later worked with The Lappetites, a group that uses laptops for improvisation. She was part of their first album, Before the Libretto, in 2005.
Since 2004, she has focused on music for acoustic instruments. She worked with American cellist Charles Curtis on Naldjorlak. The first part was played in New York in 2005. The second part, for two basset horn players, was created in 2007. The three musicians finished the third part in 2009.
In 2011, her piece for solo harp, Occam I, was played in London. Many other solo and group pieces in the OCCAM series have followed.
Selected Works
Éliane Radigue has created many important musical works throughout her career. Here are some of them:
- Jouet électronique, 1967
- Chry-ptus, 1971
- Adnos, 1974
- Trilogie de la Mort (includes Kyema, Kailasha, and Koumé), 1998
- L'île re-sonante, 2005
- Naldjorlak for Charles Curtis, 2008
Occam Series
The Occam series is a large collection of works for various acoustic instruments and ensembles. Each piece in this series is named "Occam" followed by a Roman numeral. Some examples include:
- Occam I for harp
- Occam II for violin
- Occam V for cello
- Occam X for trumpet
- Occam River I for birbynė and viola
- Occam River IV for tuba and cello
- Occam Delta I for birbynė, violin, viola and harp
- Occam Delta XV for string quartet
Discography
- Vice - Versa, Etc... (1970)
- Songs of Milarepa (1983)
- Jetsun Mila (1987)
- Mila's Journey Inspired by a Dream (1987)
- Kyema, Intermediate States (1990)
- Biogenesis (1996)
- Trilogie de la mort (1998)
- Adnos I–III (2002)
- Geelriandre / Arthesis (2003)
- Elemental II (2004)
- L'île re-sonante (2005)
- Chry-ptus (2007)
- Naldjorlak for Charles Curtis, (2008)
- Triptych (2009)
- Vice Versa, etc. (2009)
- Jouet electronique / Elemental I (2010)
- Transamorem / Transmortem (2011)
- Feedback Works 1969–1970 (2012)
- "Ψ 847" (2013)
- Naldjorlak I II III (2013)
- Occam XXV (2022)
The triple-CD recording Trilogie de la mort includes Kyema, Kailasha and Koume. The two-disc recording Songs of Milarepa includes Mila's Journey Inspired by a Dream.
With The Lappetites
- Before the Libretto (2005)
See also
In Spanish: Éliane Radigue para niños
