Bernard Parmegiani

French composer Bernard Parmegiani was one of the pioneers of acousmatic music. Building on the earlier innovations of musique concrète composers like Pierre Schaeffer, he created rich, spatialized works designed for playback on multi-channel speakers. With recordings such as the spellbinding masterpiece De Natura Sonorum (1975), he reimagined how everyday sounds, fragments of pre-existing music, and electronic tones can be transformed into intense, captivating narratives. Apart from his electroacoustic music, Parmegiani composed music for films, wrote jingles and sound bites for French media, and performed with improvisational jazz ensembles. He received many awards throughout his career, including the Golden Nica at the 1993 Prix Ars Electronica (for his work Entre-temps) and the Grand Prix du Président de la République from the Académie Charles Cros (for the career-spanning 2008 box set L'Œuvre Musicale). Cited as a major influence by experimental electronic artists such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, Parmegiani's work received renewed attention during the 21st century, with several reissues as well as archival releases such as the soundtrack Rock (issued in 2017). A comprehensive digital reissue project of his complete discography was initiated in 2024. Bernard Parmegiani was born in Paris in 1927. Though his mother taught him to play piano as a child, he became far more interested in musique concrète when he heard pieces by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry at the end of the 1940s. He studied acting at the Lecoq & Decroux school between 1957 and 1961. He joined Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche Musicales in 1959, and became a sound engineer for Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), where he was named Director of the Music/Image Division. Parmegiani produced music for films and animations, as well as jingles for radio, television, and advertisements, in addition to sounds heard during PA announcements at the Charles de Gaulle Airport. Violostries, a work for tape and violin, was composed in 1964, and other major works such as L'instant mobile and the audiovisual composition L'Œil Écoute premiered during the next decade. Parmegiani worked with jazz musicians and improvisational ensembles, with some of this work later collected as Pop'eclectic. L'Enfer, based on Dante's Divine Comedy, was completed in 1972, in collaboration with François Bayle, who composed Purgatoire; both works were later released on CD as Divine Comédie. Parmegiani's pieces were issued on LPs such as Chronos (1972) and Chants Magnétiques (1974). INA-GRM released several of Parmegiani's most well-known works, including De Natura Sonorum, which premiered in 1975 and was first issued in 1978. Parmegiani began shifting to computer-based composition during the 1980s. La Création du Monde, an ambitious cycle in three movements, was released in 1986 and subsequently awarded a Victoire de la Musique contemporary music prize. Parmegiani left the GRM in 1992, and set up his own studio in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, though INA-GRM released some of his subsequent works, such as La Mémoire des Sons (2002). The expansive 12-CD box set L'Œuvre Musicale arrived in 2008, and Recollection GRM/Editions Mego began reissuing Parmegiani's key works on vinyl, starting with L'Œil Écoute/Dedans-Dehors (2012). Parmegiani died in Paris on November 21, 2013. Since his death, many more of his works have been reissued or unearthed for the first time, including the soundtrack Rock (2017) and two Mémoire Magnétique volumes compiling his music for film and television. In 2024, the Complete Works project was launched, digitally reissuing all of Parmegiani's compositions.
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