I am sitting in a large room at the 2018 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Bozzini Quartet are playing Occam Delta XV by Éliane Radigue. Sound emerges from the players’ strings as invisible gossamer threads, almost inaudible at first, interweaving in the air around the audience, who are seated around the players.

The minimalism is entrancing; you can’t help but concentrate very intensely on the emerging textures between the players. I have seen and heard Radigue’s music in churches, and in small and large venues, and it always has the effect of focussing the listener completely. Wire writer Louise Gray, who has written extensively on Radigue, speaks for many in Radigue’s audiences as she explains, “It was Éliane who taught me how to really listen to music, its shapes and space. Éliane profoundly reshaped our sonic world.”

Radigue began composing in the 1950s. From a non musical family, she attracted the attention of a local music teacher who gave her piano lessons as a child. She later learnt harp at Nice conservatory, always interested in the slow adagio movements of the classical repertoire. The French sculptor Arman and teenage Radigue fell in love, and they had their first child in 1951. They moved to Nice, near the airport, where the multi-frequency sound of planes flying overhead was her first inspiration for music comprised of super-extended detuned complex waveforms.

In 1955, Radigue encountered Pierre Schaeffer in Paris, who invited her to join the Groupe des Recherches Musicales (GRM) studios as tape assistant. She learnt tape cutting, ‘mixage et montage’ (mixing and editing) techniques, and embraced Schaeffer’s and Pierre Henry’s new philosophy of electroacoustic sound – creating music from any sound recording of urban or natural environments, alongside early experiments in multi-loudspeaker spatialisation techniques. Radigue was, however, fixed on a type of music that proved anathema to Schaeffer’s ‘TARTYP’ (‘Tableau Récapitulatif de la Typologie’) theory of music. The GRM sound at the time was busy, multi-sourced, exotically manipulated. The sound Radigue sought was one of absolute stillness.

Radigue and Arman moved briefly to New York in 1963 where Radigue found herself at the heart of a scene of artists, musicians and conceptualists, including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Steve Reich, and James Tenney, whom she described as her mentor. Influenced by their minimalist, just intonation and feedback experiments with sustained multi-layered textures, Radigue returned to France in 1967 and accepted a position as composing assistant to Pierre Henry in his new APSOME studio. She worked on his seminal Apocalypse De Jean (1968). Henry gave Radigue two Tolana tape machines with which to work from home. These gave way to Radigue’s home studio and a series of tape feedback works which she called Sound Propositions. These experiments in sound, feedback and spatialisation included Vice Versa (1970) for two tape machines operated by audience members, and two works for gallery exhibition, Usral (1969-70) and OMNHT (1970), where three long, slowed down tape loops of slightly different lengths gradually desynchronised over time, constantly evolving for the duration of the exhibition.

Radigue returned to New York in 1970 on a composer residency at Morton Subotnick’s NYU electronic studios. Tired of the unpredictability of tape feedback, she sought pure electronic sound sources. She struggled to navigate the Buchla synthesiser, the patch cords of which she likened to composing with spaghetti. Nonetheless, a first pure electronic Buchla composition emerged in 1971, Chryp-tus. That same year she bought an ARP2500 synthesizer with its innovative pin matrix replacing patch cords, and returned to France with it, deliberately leaving behind its conventional keyboard so as not to be distracted by Western harmony. Thus began a long period of focus on extended works for keyboard free ARP.

A 2012 IMA Portrait documentary film on Radigue reveals her delicate haptics in operating the ARP controls with infinitesimal lightness of touch and slow changes to the sound. The very long form works that she composed with the ARP include 7th Birth (1971), performed with Philip Glass’s PA equipment, Les Chants De Milarepa (1983), and her Trilogie De La Mort (1986-1993), all underpinned by Radigue’s developing interest in Buddhism, in particular the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book Of The Dead).

I was privileged to be among an ever growing number of musicians, journalists and scholars invited into Radigue’s home to explore and discuss her music, a group which expanded with her extraordinary generosity over many years. She called the musicians who accepted the exceptional virtuosic challenge of sustaining single notes steadily for extended periods, her ‘chevaliers’.

They include Charles Curtis, Rhodri Davies, Carol Robinson, Julia Eckhardt, Dominic Lash, and violinist Angharad Davies, who told me, “Working with Éliane was a real lesson on how to slow down and allow each string to speak with as little intervention from me as possible. Every performance of her pieces is so specific to place, circumstance and acoustics.”

Radigue invented a way of composing that, in place of a written score, conjured a visual image which was rigorously interpreted by her musicians through intense disciplined rehearsal with the composer. Filmmaker Aura Satz observes, “Her living scores continue to live not only in the people she worked with but in all of us who were touched by her music.”

Radigue is a pioneer of electronic music, especially for her singular way of composing for the ARP. But it is perhaps for her later acoustic works, for strings, harp, solo cello, woodwind, brass, and electric guitar, that she has become most well known. The most recent Occam Ocean series of 25 different compositions since 2011 is based around the philosophical principle of Occam’s Razor that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest number of elements.

Louise Gray identifies Radigue’s music as an experience not just of listening to but of profound inter-listening within, in which composer, musicians and audience play an equal role. Radigue was an artist, composer, sound designer, who relentlessly pursued her own style, never wavering from her dedicated exploration of the fine balance between sound and silence. Her legacy is as far-reaching, inclusive and ethereal as her music.

Éliane Radigue’s music has been covered extensively in The Wire over the years. In particular she was interviewed at length in issue 260 and again in the Invisible Jukebox feature in issue 312, on both occasions by Dan Warburton, while in issue 456 Julian Cowley contributed an extended Primer guide to her recordings. Wire subscribers can read these articles and others in our online archive.