Éliane Radigue, a composer and electronic-music pioneer whose music paid meditative attention to the subtleties of sound, died on Monday at the age of 94. She was surrounded by family in Paris, according to Blank Forms, an organization that represents her electronic compositions for magnetic tape in partnership with the storied French enterprise Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Ina GRM).
Radigue was born in Paris in 1932 and started working in the 1950s with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who together developed the avant-garde movement known as musique concrète. Among their contributions was a stated prompt to consider sound as a sort of sculptural object, whether by way of tape that could be cut-up and spliced or other techniques through which musical and non-musical sounds could coalesce.
In the 1970s Radigue began working with electronic synthesizers on long-form music that would come to be her main mode for decades. Her works made with the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer followed long tones along lines of barely perceptible change, such that touchstones like Adnos I-III—a series of pieces created between 1973 and 1982, each more than 70 minutes long—develop and change in ways that are clearer in retrospect than when they are actually transpiring. In a poetic reflection of the work, Radigue wrote that “moving stones around in the river bed does not affect the stream, but alters the fluid shape.” Also: “In the conch shaped by the course of sounds, the ear filters, selects, favours, as would a glance set on the shimmering water.”
Trilogie de la Mort, her best-known work, is a three-part composition inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In an interview published by Purple magazine in 2019, Radigue said, “In the ’70s, I made a profound investment in the study of Buddhism. And ever since, it’s been a constant in my life. I can explain it through the metaphor of a train and its tracks: the two rails that constitute my life have been music and Buddhism. And the train, obviously, is what I do with my time. And these rails of music and Buddhism are what my life needs in order to roll forward.”
Radigue’s music has worked its way into numerous art world contexts, especially by way of recent efforts by Blank Forms, a New York–based curatorial platform that has presented concerts and listening events as well as Alien Roots: Éliane Radigue, an extensive book of writings, interviews, and archival materials related to her oeuvre published last year. In 2019 Blank Forms organized a series of listening events at Artists Space in New York and a performance of Radigue’s Occam Ocean at Pace Gallery in New York.
In 2024 Radigue’s Kyema (part of Trilogie de la Mort) figured in a presentation as part of Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition “Liminal” at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana in Venice. Later this year, starting December 4, Radigue will be the subject of an exhibition of installations and lives performances titled “States of Listening” at Dia Art Foundation in New York.
