| Even if his art is historically linked to the musique concrète school, Luc Ferrari (born in Paris in 1929) is above all a man with a freedom of spirit rarely equalled in the history of music, who has repeatedly left what he excelled at for new territory still unexplored; thus he is par excellence the composer of new fields of investigation.
Ferrari joined the Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1958 and remained a member until 1966; he collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in setting up the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (1958). By 1963-4 he had begun Hétérozygote, an extended tape piece in which ambient sounds unfold in narrative form, suggesting a dazzling variety of incidents, all unexplained. He was Professor of Composition at Cologne's Rheinische Musikschule from 1964 to 65. In 1965 and 1966 he produced Les Grandes Répétitions, a series of television documentaries with Gérard Patris on the subject of contemporary music, specifically Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hermann Scherchen and Cecil Taylor.
Luc Ferrari's diverse work and aesthetics continue to have a singular impact on the young generations of electronic musicians and artists. The corpus of his work is immense and includes hundreds of compositions of all kinds. Les Anecdotiques -- his last composition -- is a vast sound-film of more than an hour who explores in 15 steps the intensity of re-composed sounds from his continual travel around the world -- with electronic additional structures. |