LUC FERRARI

        Luc Ferrari

Luc Ferrari is a remarkable electronic music pioneer. As director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales from 1959 to 1960, he worked closely with Pierre Schaeffer, who coined the term "musique concrète".

One of Schaeffer's ideas was that a sound should be characterized by its morphology, by which he meant that a sound should be characterized by the way its structure changed in time, as something "abstract" and independent of any reference to the real world. Schaeffer's Traité des Objets Musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects), published in 1966, included a taxonomy of sounds that Schaeffer called a "Solfège", a term that suggested a scale of sounds rather than notes. When Ferrari worked with the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, he assimilated the basic ideas and concepts of musique concrète. As in his early works on this CD, his sounds were mostly abstract.

In the 1960s, however, he began to move in a different direction. Hétérozygote, a tape piece he finished in 1964, was the first composition that he referred to as "anecdotal music", by which he meant music that tells a story. But that was the beginning of another chapter in Ferrari's life. The compositions on this CD are the first chapter and the subject is his starting point with musique concrète.