A Million Keys

On the occasion of a major retrospective in London, Paul Schütze talked to pioneering composer Eliane Radigue about her 50-year career, which spans electronic music, Tibetan Buddhism, musique concrète and ‘anti-acoustics’

Born in Paris in 1932, Eliane Radigue occupies a unique place in the 20th-century musical avant-garde. Trained first in classical piano, she became a student of musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer and an assistant to composer Pierre Henry. Drawn to the American minimalists, Radigue availed herself of the newly developed synthesizer technology at New York University in the early 1970s. While many of her European contemporaries were slicing, splicing and shattering sound into recombined shapes and montages, she teased and caressed it into forms so large and tremulous their edges were seldom even glimpsed. Radigue has developed a sound world of infinitesimal delicacy, languorous duration and psychoacoustic daring. In the late ’70s she encountered Tibetan Buddhism and, soon after, the influence was expressed through a cycle of works based upon the Book of the Dead. This summer, Sound & Music presented an extensive retrospective of concerts in London, premiering Radigue’s first works for acoustic instruments and transmitting a language, honed over decades working alone in electronics, to a new generation of collaborating performers.