Opus 17 (1970), 96'
Processed tape recorder feedback
Realized in the author's studio in Paris.
Premiered on May 23 1970 at the Centre Artistique de Verderonne, for the “Fête en blanc” (“Party in White”), a happening curated by Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra.
In 5 parts:
- Étude
- Maquette
- Épure
- Safari
- N°17
“Opus 17”, a major turning-point in the musical course of Éliane Radigue, was finished in 1970, and consistes of five distinct scenes. It was the last work composed with feedback materials. It is also the one in which Éliane Radigue returned to definitive time-frames, after several years of building “Musique sans Fin” (Endless Music) intended for ad libitum broadcast in a specific space (gallery, museum), an approach which intuitively joined music and the visual arts.
From that experimental period “Opus 17” preserves the plastic character : a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. Its vibrations structure the air surrounding the listener with densities, thicknesses, indeed with palpable movement.
And yet one must recognize that Éliane Radigue has given her life to an essentially artificial material. One so very simple from which she has known how to draw out colours, tastes, and unheard-of intensities. Her procedures, of feedback and slowed-down by working with magnetic tape, are intrinsically animated: they have their own voice, lyric quality, “expressive force” as Éliane Radigue tells us. In other words, before she began composing she learned how to produce sounds which live and sing and touch us.
Her compositions are frames which let us hear these phenomena, open frameworks from the sonic installations of her “Musiques sans Fin” (cf. “Feedback Works 1969-70” double LP) and here reinserted in the five scenes making up “Opus 17”. Éliane Radigue probably feels that the infinite can nest itself in a reduced time-scheme, which she will work on her whole career.
In 1970, in her studio of very rudimentary means, she developed personal techniques for a completely unique body of work. She defines this work as being centered on sounds produced by feedback. “Opus 17” has the quality of showing off the sum of the achieved techniques and methods. Éliane Radigue’s music has never been rooted in ideas but in practice, the intimate experience of things in the wild which she has known how to tame. This dialog both intense and poetic which she keeps up with the solid matter of sound finds a remarkable concretization in “Opus 17”.
This work starts off with a surprising “Étude” : several notes played on the piano flow from the speakers, it is something by Frederick Chopin…! The fragment, as a loop of a few minutes, comes back again but never completely identical; it is inexorably transformed until becoming unrecognizable after some repetitions. Éliane Radigue used a procedure to alter the loop which has become famous through Alvin Lucier’s masterpiece “I am sitting in a room”: played into a room and picked up by a microphone from the speakers, which recording becomes in turn played-back and recorded, to be done again, and so on… until the original signal ends up by being swallowed up by the room resonance. The result is a tranquil flux articulated by the original forms inscribed on the tape.
Knowing the biography of Éliane Radigue, from the piano lessons of childhood taken in secret from her parents, to her passion for certain works from the classical repertoire, it seems to me evident that this “Etude” contains a selfportrait both intuitive and prescient in a certain sense: we are slowly directed from her first lessons to the large electronic waves which will make up a large part of the work to come.
Intrigued by what could have led to the choice of such a technique, I asked her if she had been inspired by the work of Alvin Lucier. To which she replied :
“No….when I wrote that piece I did not yet know Alvin Lucier, only after did I get to meet him…..His piece is magnificent and I remember being struck when I saw ‘I am sitting in a room’ because it was the same technique!
You know, it was one of those studio techniques of the time, well known to all who worked in electronic studios. We did not yet have all these electronic effects—you had to have imagination to get something. And the possibilities were not infinite, so sooner or later you came across something used by someone else. I remember calling that technique “electronified erosion”. I think you can understand what's going on this way, isn't it?”
The second piece, “Maquette”, uses the same technique, but only exposes the point where the original signals are already altered. Éliane Radigue has for a long time made a mystery of the source material for that piece, but finally admitted what was the original music:
“I took an extract from ‘Parsifal’, I think the transformation scene… the theme at that moment could be correctly made into a loop. I worked it over a bit by mixing and electrerosion in order to keep only those parts transformed by the process. It was my homage, my ‘thank you Mr. Wagner!’”
Unrecognizable, to tell the truth, the original source transforms into a phenomenal swell, of a climate heavy, slow, and imposing. There is something magical, immemorial even, which is in play in this “Maquette”.
“Épure” follows, built on the astonishing sonorities which ER knew how to make from the feedback of two tape recorders: electro-organic pulsations, vast currants of thick and lively soundwaves. “Épure” as the name indicates, is a very simple piece: Pulsations a little like agitated heartbeats slowly change into a homogeneous enveloping flux, a progressive passage from an artery to a river… A minimalist structure harking back to her first work, “Jouet électronique”, written in 1967 at the Apsome Studio when she was Pierre Henri’s assistant.
The fourth piece, “Safari”, really deserves its name! After opening with a groan which could be that of a fabulous dream creature, the piece develops in a stupefyingly polyrhythmic dance, a whole world of percussion and chant… you would think to be hearing the striking of wood and skins, voices, and wind instruments! While here too feedback is the only material.
The work ends with “N°17” which is composed with sound sources coming from the entirety of the techniques introduced in the four preceding “études”. It is to be underlined that here Éliane Radigue inaugurates a technique of composition which will be her footprint, her trademark: “imperceptible transformations”. For that she has developed a technique of meticulous mixings, based on the slow passage from one section to the next. Imperceptible, all during the piece, we pass, ceaselessly and without noticing the changes, from one frequency flux to another. Time is suspended, smoothed out, stretched…
It is this technique which ER will be essentially using for all the electronic works to come and which she will never cease to refine and render always more subtle.
“Opus 17” is the great panoramic voyage through material sound, its electronic phenomena detailed as if in a microscope. Could feedback really contain such a universe? “Yes”, the work of Éliane Radigue answers, but that exploration was not that easy: one had to learn to “listen”. It required Éliane Radigue’s great demands on listening which led her to the discovery of such treasures. Unknown riches in a material often rejected as trivial.
Emmanuel Holterbach, June 2013
Éliane Radigue (1932-)
Éliane Radigue was born in Paris. She studied Musique Concrète techniques at the “Studio d’Essai” of the RTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1956-57). She was married to the painter and sculptor Arman and devoted ten years to their three children. She then worked with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio APSOME (1967-68). She was in residence at the New York University School of Arts (1970-71), the University of Iowa and the California Institute of the Arts (1973) and Mills College (1998). She has created sound environments using looped tapes of various durations, gradually desynchronising. Her works have been featured in numerous galleries and museums since the late 60s and from 1970, she has been associated to the ARP 2500 Synthesizer and tape through many compositions from “Chry-ptus” (1971) up to “L’Île re-sonante” (2000). These include: “Biogenesis”, “Arthesis”, “Ψ 847”, “Adnos I, II and III” (70s), “Les Chants de Milarepa” and “Jetsun Mila” (80s) and the three pieces constituting the Trilogie de la Mort (1988-91-93). Since 2002, she has been composing mostly acoustic works for performers and instruments. Her music has been featured in major international festivals. Her extremely sober, almost ascetic concerts, are made of a continuous, ever-changing yet extremely slow stream of sound, whose transformation occurs within the sonic material itself.
