The French composer Bernard Parmegiani has died aged 86. Born
in 1927, both his parents were piano teachers, though, as
Parmegiani related to Rahma Khazam in The Wire 176, "I
worked quite hard at the piano with my mother, but my musical
tastes were more orientated towards musique concrète [even
though] that type of music was relatively unknown at the time…
I used to listen to the first pieces by [Pierre] Schaeffer and
[Pierre] Henry on the radio every Sunday, and I was very
excited by what I heard."
Parmegiani initially studied mime, and then worked as a
television sound engineer, but decided to work under Schaeffer
at his then newly formed musique concrète research group, the
Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), in Paris. While there he
worked with Iannis Xenakis, François-Bernard Mache and many
other early experimental composers. If the start of his career
was overshadowed by Schaeffer and other GRM luminaries, his
later work has proven to be widely influential on subsequent
generations of electroacoustic and electronic music composers,
including Aphex Twin, Autechre, Keith Fullerton Whitman and
many others.
About one of his most widely known compositions, 1975's De
Natura Sonorum, Parmegiani said: "[In it] I distanced
myself from the power of sound, from what I call the power of
Orpheus. Orpheus charmed the plants and animals with his lyre,
and in the pieces I composed prior to De Natura
Sonorum I was under the spell of the sounds: I created
sounds that evolved and that I found satisfying and I left it
at that."
Read Rhama Kahzam's interview with Bernard Parmegiani here.
