Music Is Dying Now: Luc Ferrari

23 сент. 2012 г.

Luc Ferrari

Luc Ferrari (February 5, 1929 - August 22, 2005) was a French composer, particularly noted for his tape music.

Ferrari was born in Paris and studied the piano under Alfred Cortot, musical analysis under Olivier Messiaen and composition under Arthur Honegger. His first works were freely atonal.

In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet Edgard Varèse, whose Déserts he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in Déserts serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use magnetic tape in his own music.

In 1958 he co-founded the Groupe des Recherche Musicales with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio.

By the early 1960s, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds in "an organized and poetic, though non-plot oriented manner." The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language. (Tyranny)

Ferrari's Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach and, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of John Cage's idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this.

Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Ferrari composed works that have moved away, more or less, from purely musical preoccupations, some of which could be branches of the same tree - the problem being trying to express passing ideas, sensations and intuitions through different means, observing daily life in all its reality - social, psychological or sentimental - in the form of texts, instrumental scores, electroacoustical compositions, reports, stage works, etc.

Ferrari studied piano at "Conservatoire de Versailles" 1946-1948), then composition at "École normale de musique" with Arthur Honegger & Alfred Cortot (1948-1950), followed the courses of Oliver Messiaen (1953-1954). He joined "Groupe de Musique concrète" in 1958, remaining until 1966, and collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in setting up "Groupe de recherches musicales" (1958). In 1965 and 1966 he produced with Gérard Patris for ORTF "Les grandes répétitions", a series of television documentaries on contemporary music. He won several prizes as the Karl Sczuka Prize (1972) for "Portrait-Spiel" and for "Je me suis perdu" (1988 ). Ferrari also won Prix Italia 1987 for "Et si tout entière maintenant" and Prix Italia 1991 for "L'Escalier des aveugles". In 1990 he received the Koussevitzky Foundation Prize for "Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation". In 1972, Ferrari established his own studio ("atelier") named "Bilig". Ferrari also founded the studio/label La Muse En Circuit in 1982, eventually resigning in 1994. In 1996 he relocated his home studio, "Atelier post-billig".