Luc Ferrari
Almost nothing....
I must find a way to let people be free, without their becoming free-ish. So that their freedom makes them noble.
-John Cage
We described our music as 'concrete' because it is created from pre-existing elements taken from any sound material, whether it's noise or musical sound, then composed experimentally through direct construction, so that ultimately we could fulfill our desire to compose without the security—which becomes impossible—of ordinary musical notation.
-Pierre Schaeffer
I have never been to Gruene Hall down in Texas, but I’d like to go there someday. It’s the oldest continually run dance hall in Texas and not much has changed there since it was built in 1878.
Interestingly, in 2001 French composer and musique concrète pioneer Luc Ferrari went down to Texas to do some field recordings and ended up at Gruene Hall. The song Promenade Du Dimanche Dans Un Village (Harley Davidson, Texas) is on his 2004 Les Ancedotiques album.
Writing for Wire magazine in 2004, Phil Freeman reviewed Ferrari’s Les Anecdotiques:
Initially, Les Anecdotiques seems rather a thin proposition. After all, isn’t some guy walking around, and taping what he hears for later consumption by others? And thus, isn’t the old question (dating back at least to Marcel Duchamp) being raised once again - just how ordinary can something be, and still be transformed into art by recontextualization?
He made a similar point recently for udiscovermusic.com in a nice review of Deutsche Grammophon’s The Avantgarde Series. In the review, he brings up an important argument:
Around this time, electronic instruments and tape manipulation began to become more important in avant-garde composition, and it’s readily apparent in the third set, released in 1970. It could be argued that Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien No. 1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer doesn’t even qualify as music, as it is a carefully sculpted collage of field recordings made between four and six AM in a small Croatian village over a period of weeks.
These are important points when considering the music of Luc Ferrari. This week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll follow Ferrari’s journey from serialism into almost nothing.
Luc Ferrari was born in France in 1929 and some of his earliest memories were listening to his parent’s radio. In particular, he remembers hearing Honegger’s Pacific 231. He pointed out in a 1998 interview: “Honegger’s Pacific 231 really had an effect on me: it was absolutely astounding, noise-music.” That’s when he became interested in the contemporary music programs played over the radio. He continued, “I was 15 years old and followed the programs passionately - the first things I heard by Webern and Schönberg were about that time, just after the war.”
He studied piano at the conservatory and started composing in 1946. He trained under Honegger and Messiaen but found them both exhausting. Then in 1952, he went to Darmstadt, where his compositions were accepted and performed. At Darmstadt, he met everyone from that generation who redefined post-war music. “They were ideological times,” he recalled. “It was a time when we wanted something strong, a strong structure. We were coming out of a total mess, emerging from violence... Darmstadt was in ruins. It really disturbed me to see a country like that, demolished to such a degree. Terrifying. The great musical encounter was with Cage, who exploded all those ideas which were already starting to get a bit institutionalised.”
He met John Cage in Darmstadt in 1957 and recalled, “That was wonderful. He was someone who stepped outside norms and he showed us that serialism was already academic.” So it was not Boulez, Berio, nor Stockhausen he admired most, it was Cage. It was also Cage who helped him make an important decision.
In 1942, Cage challenged the boundaries of traditional music with his seminal 4’33”, which premiered in New York. He hoped that the piece would break down the wall between music and noise. But it begged the question: “Is it music?” In 1991, using traffic as an analogy, Cage answers this question in a way that makes sense to me:
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking and talking about his feelings or about his ideas of relationships.
But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on 6th Avenue, for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound…. I don’t need sound to talk to me.
When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything... And they say, these people who understand that finally, said: “You mean it’s just sounds?” Thinking that for something to just be a sound it is useless. Whereas I love sounds - just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are:
It was Cage that helped Ferrari realize his attraction to noise. He felt serialism was too confined and rules-based and felt more at home with the freedom of musique concrète. Therefore, he quickly moved away from contemporary and electronic music to Pierre Schaeffer’s side.
In 1958, Ferrari joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), founded that same year by Schaeffer. In a 1998 interview, Ferrari makes a clear distinction:
Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology. Whereas Schaeffer and (Pierre) Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn’t be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character. I was very interested in that. My first attempt with musique concrète was in 1958, with Etude aux sons tendus… Schaeffer had done studies with noise, I did studies with sounds in motion, repetitive sounds….
Etude aux sons tendus was recorded in 1958 by the GRM at the RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, the French public broadcaster). It was released in 1959 and appeared on this album:
...and the song:
About the work, Ferrari later commented: “The Etude aux sons tendus is one of my first experiments of concrete music, also this piece seems to me filled of awkwardness today. My principal curiosity, by composing it, was the rhythmic possibility that the magnetic tape allowed, as well by sound cutting as by the natural movement of the employed objects, and also their superposition.”
Between 1965 and 1968, Ferrari collaborated with Gérard Patris on Les Grandes Répétitions (The Great Rehearsals) on a series of filmed portraits under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer of great musicians, which were broadcast on French TV. It was the first time contemporary music had appeared on television. The final series was on Cecil Taylor. According to Ferrari, “We rented a big apartment in the Places des Vosges in Paris. It was empty and a bit dirty, but we put a piano in there and that’s where we made the film. it lasted about 35 minutes. What he played was fantastic, and nothing to do with contemporary music.”
Here is that film:
By the time Ferrari left GRM in 1966, he had already started to move beyond Schaeffer’s approach. Ferrari’s 1970 seminal Presque rien No1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer helps show where he was going and marks an inflection point in his work. He described the piece as “a sort of anti-music.” It was a radical step in that he dispensed with electronic sounds altogether and started to mix sounds and field recordings.
In the summer of 1967, Luc Ferrari went to Korčula, a small fishing village on a Dalmatian island surrounded by the Adriatic Sea.
As dawn breaks, the ambiance of daily life quietly filters through an open window – the braying of a donkey, footsteps on cobbled streets, the hushed chatter of villagers, and the rattle of a tired engine as a truck rumbles past. As the sun rises, adult voices shout out to playing children before the day’s work begins; once quiet returns, a solitary voice sings the refrains of a folk tune, accompanied by the incessant rattle of cicadas.
In an interview 30 years later, Ferrari recalled the stillness of Korčula: “It was very quiet. At night the silence woke me up – that silence we forget when we live in a city. I heard this silence which, little by little, began to be embellished….” Waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning, Ferrari recorded all that could be heard from his window every morning, keenly observing the daily repetition of certain sounds. This is wonderful.
These recordings would form the foundation of Presque rien No1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Almost Nothing No1, Daybreak at the Seashore) (1967-70). Ferrari assembled fragments of his daily recordings into a complete whole, a sonic tapestry woven from the recurring rhythms of daily life - as you listen, think of yourself in Korčula, pictured above:
Incidentally, the pianist on this recording is Gérard Frémy, who also plays piano on Pierre Mariétan’s Initiative 1 "Systèmes" on the BYG Records Actuel series #27. You can read more about Pierre Mariétan here:
Interestingly, when Ferrari played this for Pierre Schaeffer and his peers at GRM they said stone-faced, “It wasn’t music.” Again, we ask ourselves, “Is it music?” Well, Cage said, “Everything we do is music.” So, in the end, that question can only be answered in the ear of the behearer.
Into the 1980s and 1990s, Ferrari’s work took on perhaps a more cinematic approach, which I like. For example, in 1989 he recorded Presque rien avec filles, which was not released until 2012:
In 2017, Sub Rosa released Didascalies, perhaps my favorite Ferrari album. It was recorded in the Summer of 2005 at La Muse en Circuit in a Paris suburb. Here is the title track:
Didascalies is an interesting track. According to Ferrari, “The Didascalies (stage directions) are particularly important (hence the title), since they play a central role within the score, all the while being external to it. They remain, however, as I was saying earlier, out of reach. But, rest assured, very much present, since what is confided to the performers, or, might one say, re-creators, is an intimate secret.”
Didascalies is one of three Sub Rosa albums all planned while Ferrari was still alive, but near the end of his life. Didascalies, in fact, was released only two weeks before his death on August 22, 2005.
What I admire most about Luc Ferrari is his commitment to freedom - his early courage to turn away from contemporary electronic music and walk against the grain toward musique concrète. I admire his freedom of spirit, rarely equaled in the history of music.
Here’s one more for the road. After hearing Edgard Varèse’s Déserts on the radio in 1954, Ferrari went to the U.S. to meet him. The taped part of the music impressed him and inspired him to use magnetic tape in his own work. On December 2, 1954, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Hermann Scherchen conducted the premier of Déserts. The tape portion of this composition was recorded by Ann McMillan, a young American composer and music editor at RCA Red Seal, whom Varèse met in 1953 in New York City. She became his student and assistant. For the score, she recorded the sounds of factories and percussion instruments.
McMillan did not record much, but she was at the forefront of electronic composition in New York in the 1970s. Her debut album was Gateway Summer Sounds, released by Folkways in 1978. From that album, here is the title track:
McMillan was an electronic music pioneer. As with many of her American female contemporaries, like Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel, her work was overshadowed by her male counterparts; however, her work was no less revolutionary and important.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of the Sisters with Transistors - the untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers.
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Until then, keep on walking….
I’m glad you wrote this: I have a bunch of Ferrari recordings and haven’t really dug into them yet. I’m checking out some that you mentioned here.