Towards an Anti-Ideal: Radigue, Recording, and the Paradoxes of Representation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The last two decades have seen two simultaneous shifts in Éliane Radigue’s music. One, her music for magnetic tape has become widely available as commercially released CDs and LPs. Two, she has stopped working in electronic media, and concentrated exclusively on composing for instruments and live performers. Commercial recordings, however, were never the intended format for the dissemination of her tape music. This conversation begins with the suggestion that the encounter with Radigue’s music mostly through recordings may have created a skewed or problematic image of her work. If recordings render the music as a seemingly uniform and replicable object—obscuring the dynamic processes informing its making—the question arises as to whether this experience might have determined the character of much of the new work for instruments. The new work sometimes seems to function as a smooth sounding surface, evocative of the atmosphere and audible features of the older music, but derived as a purely sonic imitation of Radigue’s own laborious, direct-to-tape making process. In a three-way exchange, we will identify the constitutive forces at work in a Radigue piece, especially the involved process of resolving seemingly unresolvable mismatches in acoustics, the attraction to uncontrollable situations and the tendency to make performances highlight exceptions, rather than habits or rules.