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.
I’m here to share my new piece “Opuestos” (Opposites in two consecutive movements) for Percussion Trio. It would be awesome if you could tell me what you think about it!
“When one walks through the city listening to Wandelweiser, it’s not that the music soundtracks the city, it’s the other way around. The city enters the music. There is no mediation because there are not two distinct states to mediate between. Or, seen another way, the question of mediation becomes absolutely primary; as in Pisaro’s field recordings or in the occasional sounds that Wereder’s date pieces introduce into a space, the content of the musical sound is almost beside the point.
What we primarily here is the otherness of a (musical) sound in relation to our (nonmusical) surroundings. Like a veil over our eyes, it is not the particular qualities of the veil that we see (the pattern or density of the weave, the thickness of the threads), but the general state of “veil-ness” that it casts on what we see through it.” - Tim Rutherford-Johnson in Music After the Fall (2017)
“With recording, sound is stored for use. How do you use a recording like Stones [Christian Wolff]? Do you just listen to it like anything else (perfectly possible in this case) or do you find ways of listening to it that suit the recording in other ways: say playing it all day at low volume (so that it can be forgotten, except for those very few moments when a sound rises to the surface, reminding you it’s still there). Or play it so loud that you hear everything.
In other words, the recording can be viewed as open, something like an instrument - a particular instrument that makes a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a variable relationship in the environment in which they are played” - Michael Pisaro from Wandelweiser, appearing in Music After the Fall
Taken at the Trevor Wishart sound diffusion of Encounters In The Republic Of Heaven (and other more recent works) at the music department of Montreal U, Friday Feb. 2nd 2018. Amazing 32-speaker sound system, and the UK composer present at the controls. Fantastic. Organized and presented by the CIRMMT.
The very beginning of a new photo/sound project. Exploring the birth, life and death of the saguaro cacti. Nature influences composition, photos capture moment, analysis of the moment creates the path for sound...
