A passionate love affair that lasted nearly forty years. This is how Éliane Radigue describes her relationship with the one she caressed for all these years and whose vibrations gave birth to her greatest musical works: the ARP 2500. She encountered this imposing synthesizer at an exhibition in 1971 while she was living in the United States. She immediately fell in love with this instrument with such a unique “voice”: “you either have a voice or you don’t,” she confided, mischievously, to France Culture in 2020.
Unlearn to relearn
For fear of ease, she decides not to take the keyboard provided with the machine, preferring to confront her new traveling companion alone. She takes him with her to her cabin on the liner France, on the way to new musical adventures in Paris. Describing in words the sound pieces that Éliane produces with her experimental accomplice is almost mission impossible. Listening to them is a meditative experience, a complex, almost metaphysical foreign language.
You have a voice or you don’t
Like Picasso: “When I was twelve, I painted like Raphael. It took me my whole life to learn to paint like a child.”, the composer had to unlearn and relearn how to listen before finding “her little music” as she calls it. With a new ear, freed from the familiar sounds of classical instruments and preconceptions, she opened herself to these new electric, “wild” sounds that she learned to tame, to extract a singular musicality from them.
Before the ARP, it was the harp that Eliane touched. And the piano, which she played as a young girl at the home of a certain Madame Roger, who taught her music theory and trained her. No one in the family was a musician, but, Eliane felt, she had to practice music.
A new world of sound to conquer
The only daughter of a merchant from Les Halles, at the age of 19 she left her neighborhood of Beaubourg where she grew up to settle in the Baie des Anges. There, she met the man who would become her husband, a sculptor from Nice who made compressions his trademark: Arman. In 1951, she married this renowned artist and close friend of Yves Klein, with whom he practiced judo on the tatami mats in Nice sports halls.
Together, they will have three children. She continues music in her corner and composes dodecaphonic pieces like others play sudoku or do crosswords. As a “wife of”, the exercise of her music is considered by her husband’s entourage, the group of artists of the New Realists, as a feminine hobby and does not interest many people.
It is as if they bring us a message from a world unknown to us.
The artist is not her. On the radio, she hears a piece by Pierre Schaefer, a French engineer who is carrying out innovative research. Thanks to the invention of the tape recorder, he captured concrete sounds, offering a new musical vocabulary, an alternative to classic music theory. From his experiences was born what he calls musique concrete: “The miracle of musique concrete, which I try to make my interlocutor feel, is that during the experiences, things begin to speak about themselves. themselves, as if they brought us the message of a world that would be unknown to us. »
Eliane wants to discover this unknown world. Through a friend, she meets Pierre Schaefer at a conference and becomes his student. With him, she discovers new techniques, cuts magnetic tape, learns editing and mixing and becomes an ambassador for concrete music by hosting conferences on the subject.
She abandons her master to create, finally, in complete autonomy
In 1967, her marriage ended abruptly. Arman’s works a few years earlier, his Colères (1961), a ransacking of musical instruments that he then collected, foreshadowed its sinking. Eliane returned to Paris. There she became a “volunteer” assistant to another precursor of electroacoustic music, Pierre Henry. The musician was macho and not very friendly, but he let Eliane experiment with all sorts of techniques and manipulate equipment that she could not have afforded. The composer took flight and left her master to create, finally, in complete autonomy.
From the frenzy of New York to the serenity of Dordogne
Separated from Arman but not yet divorced, she used the family reunification as a pretext to get the famous Green card and move to New York where her husband was exhibiting. The atmosphere there was electrifying at the end of the sixties. “Our only problem was knowing where to go and what to do in the evening,” she says. At the avant-garde parties in the Soho lofts, she rubbed shoulders with Pop Art artists and became friends with the great composers John Cage and Philippe Glass.
Unlike in France where she suffered sexist remarks, – she says in particular that a technician arrived in the studios and declared that what was good when she was there was that it smelled good… – she received the admiration of her peers and exchange with other women composers. Eliane was a feminist. But rather than committing to the cause, she preferred to act through her musical practice, subversive in itself.
My music is very ambivalent and I want it to be ambivalent, that is to say, everyone can hear what they want in it.
With her partner, the ARP 2500-7101 – Éliane likes to proudly say that it was the first in the series – she experiments with feedback. These sounds obtained by bringing a microphone close to a loudspeaker, without control, can be extremely violent, but Éliane, with gentleness, obtains musical material to modulate. She separates from it in the year 2000 after 40 years of creation which will produce nearly twenty sensory musical pieces made of slow pulsations.
Harmonies that some cannot help but consider as meditative, undoubtedly in reference to her conversion to Tibetan Buddhism in 1974. A religion that she practiced in self-sufficiency with her master in Dordogne for almost three years. In 2001, bassist Kasper Toeplitz commissioned a piece for electric bass from him. An unexpected return to the instrumental.
Today, her pieces are reinterpreted by renowned instrumentalists, undoubtedly a way for Eliane to transmit to others her creation born from her long flirtation with electronics: “My music is very ambivalent and I want it to be ambivalent, that is to say, everyone can hear what they want. »
