Éliane Radigue (born 1932)
Éliane Radigue is a French composer of electronic music who has recently been composing for traditional acoustic instruments. She was born in Paris and studied piano, but her growth as a composer began when she became a student of electronic-music composer Pierre Schaeffer, and later an assistant to Pierre Henry.
The early compositions of Éliane Radigue make use of microphones and tape loops. In the 1970s she began experimenting with the Buchla and Moog synthesizers, and then switched to the ARP 2500. In the mid-1970s, she took a hiatus from composing for three years to study Buddhism. Much of her focus during the latter part of the 20th century was devoted to her meditative composition Trilogie de la Mort based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which lasts nearly three hours:
In 2001, Éliane Radigue began composing works for traditional acoustic instruments but in a way that makes them sound peculiarly like electronic music. Since 2011, Éliane Radigue has been composing works in a series she calls Occam named after the 14th century friar William of Ockham (or Occam) of “Ockham’s Razor” fame, who recommended simplicity as a guiding principle.
This is her Occam Ocean XVI for solo harp, which sounds like no other harp music you’ve ever heard:
This is her Occam Ocean Hepta I for a sextet of instruments: