Asymptote Versatile is the earliest surviving music by French composer Éliane Radigue. It precedes the French composer’s work with electronic means, first feedback and later the ARP synthesizer, which began in 1960s and ended around the turn of the century, when she retired from making electronic music. When Radigue wrote it, she had limited access to resources that would have enabled her to have it performed, so she filed it away until harpist Rhodri Davies took on the task to assemble some musicians to play it at the Huddersfield Music Festival in 2023, a full sixty years after she first conceived it. This CD is a recording of that performance.
Davies and several other members of the twelve-piece ensemble are part of the community of musicians for whom Radigue has developed new pieces, known collectively as the OCCAM series. Most, but not all of them have been performed on acoustic instruments. While it might be tempting to consider Asymptote Versatile to be a foreshadowing of OCCAM, because it is played on acoustic instruments, it is methodologically quite different. Each OCCAM piece is developed collaboratively and transmitted orally. This music, on the other hand, employs notation, albeit idiosyncratically. Radigue developed a series of mathematically determined curves, which she placed on transparent acetate sheets, which were in turn laid upon pages containing notation. As with OCCAM and her electronic works, Asymptote Versatile is made up of long, patiently changing tones. But these tones are fashioned into arcing passages which swell and contract as instruments are added and removed. The resulting music has a harmonic component that is absent from Radigue’s other music, and changes come at a quicker rate than in her later work. It is also a bit less demanding, although that’s a relative statement when made about a piece that lasts three quarters of an hour. A listener can easily lay back and let this stuff wash over them, unlike Radique’s subsequent music, whose subtle rate of change demands close attention.
This album’s packaging is, like the music it contains, austere and beautiful. The double-gatefold digipak opens up to reveal excerpts from the score, and the booklet contains texts by Davies and violist Julia Eckhardt that explicate the music’s methods.
