Music Book Review: Luc Ferrari: Complete Works, edited by Brunhild Ferrari

Luc Ferrari: Complete Works

edited by Brunhild Ferrari (Music 786.75 Ferrari)

 

Luc Ferrari was a modern-era composer whose work has continued to receive more attention in recent years since his death in 2005. At that time, he had released around 23 albums between the years of 1968 and 2004, but more than 50 records of his music have come out posthumously as interest in his work continues to grow. The body of work that he left us is especially interesting in that he freely moved between several modes of contemporary classical music, from notated music for traditional instruments to musique concrete tape music, from electronics to recordings of natural environments, always finding his own voice in unique contexts. There is a recent book about his work called Luc Ferrari: Complete Works that we have here at the Polley Music Library, and it’s a great way to find out about the many approaches of this fascinating composer.

 

Complete Works was edited by Brunhild Ferrari, Luc’s spouse, who is both a composer herself and a steady advocate for his work. She’s been the force behind continuing to find avenues for the release of the many recordings in his archives, and as editor of this book, she’s combined autobiographical commentaries by Luc about all of his major works with interviews sprinkled throughout his career. Fantastic archival photos and ephemera such as pages of scores, film stills, and reproductions of Luc’s visual art are featured throughout as well.

 

After brief introductions by Thurston Moore (whose Ecstatic Peace Library published this book), musician and producer Jim O’Rourke, and Brunhild, the main body of the book starts with “Autobiography No 1” by Luc, a 1-page summary of his own life and work that serves as a kind of prelude to the basic structure of the book, which is simply an exhaustive list of his own works, usually described with a paragraph or two of his own thoughts about them. At the earliest point of the book, there are several early poems written between 1951 and ’58. These overlap and perhaps inform the earliest period of his musical compositions, which start in 1952 with three pieces for piano. He notes that he wrote many pieces before 1952, but these piano works mark the beginning of him feeling as through his own identity was properly represented in his work.

 

Some traditionally notated chamber works follow, including the “Visage” series of four pieces where Ferrari notes again that this “is the first series at the beginning of my life as a composer wherein I honestly expressed myself.” These early works, though, still reflect something of 20th century musical traditions — he notes elements of realism and serialism present in the series. By 1958, his earliest efforts with tape-based musique concrete begin to appear, and immediately overtake his previous focus on notated works. The “Visage” series even continues into this period with Visage 5, composed in 1958-9. This piece has a score, but it’s a graphic notation device, measuring various ranges of movement and timespans to be realized on tape.

 

Many composers who switched to working with tape music or electronics rarely went back to traditional notation, but Complete Works shows that Ferrari continued to draw from traditional instruments and notational approaches as he worked with modern ideas. Certainly traditional notation becomes more scarce further into his body of work, but one gets the sense that Ferrari evaluated musical ideas that came to him and allowed them to develop in whatever way seemed most faithful to the idea, rather than force them all into a singular approach. And we see him picking up new ideas along the way. “Tautologos I” from 1961, for example, is an early foray into electronic music, using frequency generators and picking up their output with suspended microphones that are swinging (this idea reminds me of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” later in 1968). In 1962, we finding him working with the idea of controlled improvisation using notated music in the “Spontane” series of pieces, giving a combination of written material and improvised moments that small ensembles of performers can interpret as they wish.

 

In 1963, Ferrari composed “Heterozygote” for magnetic tape, which marked a new direction in his work. Here, he used environmental sounds found taking a long walk, and then “compressed” them into a 27 minute work. He called this approach “anecdotal music,” “introducing realist sounds as concrete images, added to traditional abstract sounds and structures.” What is fascinating about this concept is his notion of expecting the audience to participate in the creation of the “anecdote” part of the equation: “The audience becomes active because they are implicitly asked to imagine their own anecdote. The use of realistic elements allowed me to tell a story and enables the listener to invent their own meaning.” From this point forward in his music, one finds a certain kind of cinematic perspective in his music, as though he is creating something akin to “movies for the ears.” This kind of approach has become much more common in electroacoustic music circles over the decades, and serves as an interesting contrast to the more abstracted listening pursuits of other electroacoustic composers and audiences. And frankly it just makes sense: our minds are always trying to make maps and models of what we perceive, and it’s only natural that we will look for narrative fragments even in the most abstract environments. In this sense, Ferrari’s approach simply recognizes the obvious and uses it to compositional advantage rather than rejecting the idea outright.

 

A small section of letters between Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer is included in the book. As Schaeffer was the leader of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris, these reveal Ferrari’s perceptions of his role among his musique concrete composing peers. The letters range from 1960 to 1968, the time period when Ferrari was affiliated with the GRM, and find him always polite, but often unhappy with the direction of the group. By the time of the penultimate letter in 1967, he was firm in a new direction that diverged from the “absolute music” or abstracted focus of the GRM to his “anecdotal music” concept that started with the Heterozygote piece. Considering that membership in the GRM helped to guarantee things like commissions and performances for member composers, his commitment to focus on his own musical needs was a brave career move.

 

And this only takes us up to about 1965 in a career that extended another 40 years, scarcely a quarter of the way into a book that documents the rich and varied works of a composer whose work tended toward inclusivity of new ideas and processes. Through the course of the book, we find Ferrari’s work involving aspects of improvisation, theater, field recording, film-making, photography, and visual art. Broadly speaking, Ferrari continued to compose for traditional instruments, incorporated musique concrete techniques (which he often referred to as segments of “memorized sound”), used field recordings to help establish settings for pieces, and often incorporated theatrical gestures into pieces, both composed and through guided improvisation. It’s hard to define the “style” of Luc Ferrari simply because he incorporated elements of nearly every contemporary music approach when he found them appropriate for his ideas, though the implied narrative elements of his “anecdotal music” carry through many decades of his work. The strongest impression this book leaves with me is that of pure adventure, forever adding new skills, new sounds, and new technology to his repertoire, while retaining his own voice. And his own voice celebrates the human condition at its best and worst. As he reflected in a 2004 interview toward the end of the book, joy and a sense of fear or revulsion at things like war and greed were the two polarities that dominated his thinking, and both are deeply considered in his music.

 

In all, this is an incredible document of an inspiring composer that I’d recommend to anyone interested in modern classical music, and creative music more broadly. The cinematic or literary feel of many Ferrari pieces comes even more alive when placed into this broad context.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try In Search of a Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice by Brain Kane or Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson.)

 

( Wikipedia entry on Luc Ferrari ) | ( biography on the official Luc Ferrari web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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