Luc Ferrari
French avant-garde visionary Luc Ferrari was a pioneer of musique concrète and modern composition. With works ranging from atonal pieces and group improvisations to tape compositions heavily incorporating ambient and environmental sounds, his music poetically interpreted and reflected the human experience, with a subtle sense of humor and a more overt interest in sexuality and intimacy than most other experimental composers. A co-founder of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, he taught experimental music and composed for television, in addition to creating seminal electro-acoustic works such as Hétérozygote (1964) and Presque Rien No. 1 (1970). In the '80s and onward, he received several awards for his work, including the Grand Prix National from the French Ministry of Culture. He performed at several retrospective concerts, residencies, and installations near the end of his life, and collaborated with experimental artists like eRikm and Otomo Yoshihide. Following his death in 2005, numerous reissues and archival works have appeared, including Complete Music for Films 1960-1984 and several vinyl releases by Recollection GRM.
Luc Ferrari was born in Paris in 1929. As a student, he studied composition with Arthur Honegger and piano with Alfred Cortot until 1950. Around 1953, he studied musical analysis and modal theory under Olivier Messiaen. In the mid-'50s, after hearing a live radio broadcast of Varese's Déserts for Tape and Orchestra, Ferrari visited New York to meet the composer, and talked of approaches for thinking about sound and the placement of sound objects, among other ideas. In the late 1950s, he began collaborating with the Groupe de Musique Concrete (a relationship which lasted until 1966) and helped Pierre Schaeffer found the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, a group and studio dedicated to the electronic medium where Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen could also be found. By the early '60s, Ferrari had created Hétérozygote, a musical tale told by ambient sounds.
From the mid- to late '60s, he was Professor of Composition at a music school in Cologne, after which he went to Stockholm and taught experimental music. Following this, he spent a year in Berlin and then served as music Director of the Cultural Center of Amiens. In addition to composing, Ferrari also produced invaluable television films during the '60s about the rehearsal processes of Messiaen, Varése, Stockhausen, and others. By 1970, he had finished the "musical photography" piece, Presque Rien No. 1 which made quite an impact when it was released (on Deutsche Grammophon LP), as there were no apparent "musical" sounds. Instead, it demonstrated that music was, indeed, all around us (as John Cage said) by using the ambient sounds of a Yugoslavian village, zooming in and out on particular sound sources.
Ferrari built his small electronic studio Billig in 1972. The end of the '70s found him teaching composition at the Conservatory of Pantin. In 1982, he made La Muse en Circuit, an electro-acoustic and radiophonic-friendly studio near Paris. It was also this year that he completed his musical theater piece, Journal Intime. The musical was successfully staged in Paris in 1989. By this time, Ferrari had won various awards, including the Prix Italia (1987; for a symphonic tale, Et si Toute Entiere Naintenant), the Karl Sczuca prize for a radio play (Je Me Suis Perdu ou Labyrinthe-Portrait), and the 1989 Grand Prix National from the French Ministry of Culture, for his body of work. In the '90s, Ferrari also received the International Kossevitzky Prize for his three-movement symphony Histoire du Plaisir et de la Désolation, which can be found on Luc Ferrari Matin et Soir. Recordings of Ferrari's work can be heard on various high-quality labels including BVHaast, Sub Rosa, and Tzadik, which released his Cellule 75 in 1998.
Ferrari performed at several events during the early 2000s. A retrospective of his electro-acoustic works and radio art pieces was organized by the Futura festival in Crest, France in 2001. Other retrospectives and installations took place in France and Switzerland, in addition to concert tours in Japan, including work with Otomo Yoshihide. In 2004, Ars Nova organized a Ferrari retrospective, and another celebration of his work occurred at Novelum in Toulouse. Ferrari died in Arezzo, Italy on August 22, 2005, at the age of 76.
Numerous posthumous releases of Ferrari's music have appeared, from late-period works and live collaborations to reissues and anthologies. Didascalies was released by Sub Rosa in 2007, with the posthumous premiere of Didascalies 2 following three years later. INA-GRM released the ten-CD box set L'Œuvre Électronique in 2009. Recollection GRM released seminal Ferrari works on vinyl, starting with Presque Rien in 2012. Sub Rosa issued Complete Music for Films 1960-1984 in 2017. Radiophonic works and music for dance pieces were released by Transversales Disques and included Photophonie (2019) and Solitude Transit (2022). An extensive digital reissue project was initiated in 2024.
© Joslyn Layne & Paul Simpson /TiVo
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