Eliane Radegui, French composer and music legend, dies at the age of 94. Music

French composer W Concrete music Major Eliane Radigi has died at the age of 94.

“It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Eliane Radiguet at the age of 94,” the Paris-based experimental music center INA GRM posted on Instagram. “A prominent figure in musical creativity has left us.”

Born in Paris in 1932, Radegui learned to play the piano as a child, but heard the electro-acoustic compositions of Concrete music On radio in the early 1950s, godfather Pierre Schaeffer revealed something new, paving the way for her own studies in sound. After meeting Schaeffer by chance in the French capital, she worked as the composer’s assistant.

“I was just cutting the tape, tying it and editing it,” she told The Guardian in a 2011 interview. “Of course, at that time, the world of electronic music was quite masculine, but I was happy to do anything they asked of me. I was there to learn, and I was learning by doing, like an apprentice. It wasn’t electronic music that I was really studying. The studio was against electronic music in favor of ‘tangible’ music: the simple idea of ​​taking real sounds and manipulating them by cutting, splicing, editing, slowing down and so on.”

In the early 1970s, Radigue was introduced to the synthesizer and the instrument would go on to define the next thirty years of her work. “I just dug under her skin,” she said, and used the ARP 2500 synthesizer to create much of her meditative, shape-shifting music that incorporated feedback and tape hiss. Outside France, she caught the attention of American composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, who were impressed by her innovative approach to sound.

“What my generation did was not a revolution,” Reich said. “It was restoring harmony and rhythm in a completely new way, but bringing back those fundamentals that people wanted, that people were craving, but in a way that they had never heard before.”

In her popular Occam Ocean series, Radigue collaborates with solo musicians and bands to create drone soundtracks inspired by the vastness of the sea and as an antidote to hectic modern life. “She blazed her own trail with unparalleled freedom and vision,” INA GRM wrote. “Our thoughts are with her family, friends and collaborators.”