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www.parmegiani.fr
La Création du Monde (Complete) : www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM1lKdt5KYA
L'oeil Ecoute / Dedans-Dehors
**A super rare vinyl outing for one of the 20th century's most revered electro-acoustic composers, housed in debossed jacket designed by Stephen O'Malley and cut to vinyl by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering** Editions Mego's unarchiving of the unparalleled INA GRM catalogue reaches a momentous double header by Bernard Parmegiani - one of the 20th century's most revered and important electro-acoustic composers. Born 1927, Parmegiani started as a sound engineer for French TV in the early '50s, establishing a connection between sound and vision which he would explore to the deepest degrees after joining Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de recherches musicales in 1959 for a two year masterclass. With his first works composed in 1962 and released in 1969, he essentially headed up the 2nd wave of sonic pioneers, following the foundational musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry into a brave new world of electro-acoustic (or acousmatic) sound. Here we find two of his seminal works, pieces of ultra-vivid, immersive, visceral and shocking sound organisation marking the generational distinctions between his tutor's creations, and those of the next generation, now ready to inform future musical explorers. We've lived with Parmegiani's incredible 'L'Œuvre Musicale' CD box set for a few years now and it has offered us something new every single time - it's a real treat to finally have some of this work on vinyl, making this one of the most crucial of all of the concréte reissues of recent years. Simply put - it's a must-have. - Boomkat
Bernard Parmegiani (1927) is a French composer of musique concrete who trained (1959) under Pierre Schaeffer in person.
Originally a sound engineer and a mime, his first major composition was the theater piece Violostries (1964), compiled on the double-disc Violostries (Ina-GRM, 1992), that also contains Pour en Finir Avec le Pouvoir d'Orphee (1972), Exercisme 3 (1986), Le Present Compose' (1991), etc. Violostries is a three-movement suite. The first movement, aiming for a delicate balance between noise and silence, juxtaposes multi-faceted electronic drones and dissonant violin tweets (the violin parts were provided by Devy Erlih). The second movement is the "allegro" of the suite: chaotic and convulsed. The third movement is an agonizing deconstruction of the violin parts.
Pop'eclectic (Earphone, 2001) collects material from 1966-73, in particular the collage of musical snippets Du Pop A l'Ane and the free improvisation of a jazz combo versus electronic tape of Jazzex (1966), a piece conceived with saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps.
La Memoire Des Sons (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains three pieces from three decades: Capture Ephemere (1967), the 21-minute Sons-Jeu (1987), the lyrical and varied 24-minute La Memoire des Sons (2001).
Another ambitious project was the "imaginary concert" La Roue Ferris (1971).
Meanwile, Le Diable a Quatre (1971) was a collaboration with Michel Portal's jazz combo.
After a brief parenthesis in the USA, and three musical videos (L'Oil Ecoute, 1973; Jeux d'Artifices, 1978; L'Ecran Transparent, 1973), Parmegiani began to "jam" with jazz and rock groups, juxtaposing their improvisations to his electronic compositions.
Chants Magnetiques (Fractal, 2007), composed in 1974, consists of nine abstract vignettes that straddle the border between Musique concrete, psychedelic music and Brian Eno's Before And After Science.
La Creation du Monde (Ina-GRM, 1986) contains his masterpiece, La Creation Du Monde (1982-1984), a phantasmagoric mythological suite of electronic collage that evokes an hyper-kinetic version of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The extreme rarefaction of Moins L'Infini, evoking microsounds of quantum lattices, the terrible storms of Instant 0, the contrasting android and organic flows of Premieres Forces, evoking the emergence of form out of chaos, establish a form of art which is interior as much as exterior. Lumiere is a catastrophic composition that creates a highly dynamic soundscape by employing a broad spectrum of timbres. Cellules mimicks the first moves by the first living things, and Polyphonie evokes the way they multiplied and become frantic communities: suddenly the world is filled with angst. The crescendo of tension leads to Expression 2, where the confusing concert of voices self-implodes. The whole "symphony" stands as a powerful statement about the emotional power of musique concrete, equal if not superior to the means of the symphonic orchestra.
The two lengthy suites of De Natura Sonorum (Ina-GRM, 1990), derived from De Natura Sonorum (1975), added live instrumentation to his abstract electronic soundscapes, frequently combining the droning sounds emitted by the instruments with the dense and wild textures spun by the machines. Accidents is just that: a flow of accidental disjointed noises over a layer of dirty drones. More accidents but this time of a percussive nature and with prolonged echoes populate Dynamique De La Resonance. Etude Elastique is a more complex collage of sounds that at the beginning seems to imitate rodents and towards the end mutates into industrial music ante-litteram (music that evokes work in a factory). Natures Ephemeres piles up more of those funny fat fast-moving electronic sounds that work equally well to evoke animals or to parody machines. The elegant Matieres Induites is another "elastic study" whose object morphs from a crackling fire to running water and to wind chimes, and is also his quintessential hybrid of natural and artificial sounds.
The atmospheric fresco of cosmic drones that is Geologie Sonore belongs to a different kind of music. Conjugaison Du Timbre complicates the idea by toying with a deep rumble that first sounds like a trombone, then like harbor's sirens and finally blossoms into the equivalent of a lively didjeridoo improvisation. Ondes Croisees is a duet between a jazz bass and a gritty buzz. Points Contre Champs is the most subliminal and Zen-like piece of the cycle: a majestic crescendo of hissing drones that is disturbed by naive and very un-majestic chirps.
The double-disc Divine Comedie (Magison, 1995) contains a disc with Parmegiani's L'Enfer (1971), another peak of his oeuvre, and Paradis (1974); and a disc for Francois Bayle's music. L'Enfer, that includes a poet reading Dante, is, in turn, made of a number of sub-suites. After the overture of La Decouverte De L'Ombre, whose drones display the threatening quality of a swarm of wasps, The five-movement Les Portes Ou 1ere Contrainte recites Dante (in French) and complements the words with an electronic "soundtrack". The four-movement L'Impouvoir Ou 2eme Contrainte creates a musical background that is much more profound psychological and pathological, almost a sonic representation of a nervous breakdown. The bombastic two-movement Mal Mort Ou 3eme Contrainte is a melodramatic peak. The four-movement Les Monstres Ou 4eme Contrainte toys again with silence, but it still manages to unleash some extreme hissing (Metamorphoses) and rumbling (Cerberes). The three-movement Les Abysses Ou 5eme Contrainte metamorphes from the apoalyptic winds of Le Styx to the flickering mirage of Le Reve Du Reve. The three-movement Ou 7eme Contrainte consists of three narrative vignettes: the shrieks, blows and gallops of Bataille Des Dragons, the galactic flames Le Noeud Ardent, a the starry silence of Le Crepuscule De L'Aube. The "descriptive" use of electronic sounds is not Parmegiani's forte. Too often this sounds like the high-brow equivalent of a Disney cartoon.
The sounds interactor with an actor in pieces like Trio (1973), Des Mots et Des Sons (1978), Mess Media Sans (1979) and Demons et Des Mats (1988).
Sonare (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains the dreamy five-movement suite Sonare (1997), which opens with a few bars from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Other compositions include: L'Echo du Miroir (1980), Rouge Mort (1988), Entre Temps (1992), etc.
JazzEx (Fractal, 2005) collects some of his earliest works: JazzEx (1966), Pop Eclectic (1969), musique concrete with natural sounds, Du Pop a l'Ane (1969), a collage of pop and classical music, Et Apres (1973), a tango for bandoneon.
Here you will find our recording of the event made with the Zoom H4 (source: mp3 -128 kBits/s, location: CENTQUATRE - Atelier 4, date: 15th March 2009)
Some excerpts from the interview by Évelyne Gayou, published in full in the book "Portrait Polychromes: Bernard Parmegiani":
From Le Figaro:
Bernard Parmegiani (1927) is a French composer of musique concrete who trained (1959) under Pierre Schaeffer in person.
Originally a sound engineer and a mime, his first major composition was the theater piece Violostries (1964), compiled on the double-disc Violostries (Ina-GRM, 1992), that also contains Pour en Finir Avec le Pouvoir d'Orphee (1972), Exercisme 3 (1986), Le Present Compose' (1991), etc. Violostries is a three-movement suite. The first movement, aiming for a delicate balance between noise and silence, juxtaposes multi-faceted electronic drones and dissonant violin tweets (the violin parts were provided by Devy Erlih). The second movement is the "allegro" of the suite: chaotic and convulsed. The third movement is an agonizing deconstruction of the violin parts.
Pop'eclectic (Earphone, 2001) collects material from 1966-73, in particular the collage of musical snippets Du Pop A l'Ane and the free improvisation of a jazz combo versus electronic tape of Jazzex (1966), a piece conceived with saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps.
La Memoire Des Sons (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains three pieces from three decades: Capture Ephemere (1967), the 21-minute Sons-Jeu (1987), the lyrical and varied 24-minute La Memoire des Sons (2001).
Another ambitious project was the "imaginary concert" La Roue Ferris (1971).
Meanwile, Le Diable a Quatre (1971) was a collaboration with Michel Portal's jazz combo.
After a brief parenthesis in the USA, and three musical videos (L'Oil Ecoute, 1973; Jeux d'Artifices, 1978; L'Ecran Transparent, 1973), Parmegiani began to "jam" with jazz and rock groups, juxtaposing their improvisations to his electronic compositions.
Chants Magnetiques (Fractal, 2007), composed in 1974, consists of nine abstract vignettes that straddle the border between Musique concrete, psychedelic music and Brian Eno's Before And After Science.
La Creation du Monde (Ina-GRM, 1986) contains his masterpiece, La Creation Du Monde (1982-1984), a phantasmagoric mythological suite of electronic collage that evokes an hyper-kinetic version of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The extreme rarefaction of Moins L'Infini, evoking microsounds of quantum lattices, the terrible storms of Instant 0, the contrasting android and organic flows of Premieres Forces, evoking the emergence of form out of chaos, establish a form of art which is interior as much as exterior. Lumiere is a catastrophic composition that creates a highly dynamic soundscape by employing a broad spectrum of timbres. Cellules mimicks the first moves by the first living things, and Polyphonie evokes the way they multiplied and become frantic communities: suddenly the world is filled with angst. The crescendo of tension leads to Expression 2, where the confusing concert of voices self-implodes. The whole "symphony" stands as a powerful statement about the emotional power of musique concrete, equal if not superior to the means of the symphonic orchestra.
The two lengthy suites of De Natura Sonorum (Ina-GRM, 1990), derived from De Natura Sonorum (1975), added live instrumentation to his abstract electronic soundscapes, frequently combining the droning sounds emitted by the instruments with the dense and wild textures spun by the machines. Accidents is just that: a flow of accidental disjointed noises over a layer of dirty drones. More accidents but this time of a percussive nature and with prolonged echoes populate Dynamique De La Resonance. Etude Elastique is a more complex collage of sounds that at the beginning seems to imitate rodents and towards the end mutates into industrial music ante-litteram (music that evokes work in a factory). Natures Ephemeres piles up more of those funny fat fast-moving electronic sounds that work equally well to evoke animals or to parody machines. The elegant Matieres Induites is another "elastic study" whose object morphs from a crackling fire to running water and to wind chimes, and is also his quintessential hybrid of natural and artificial sounds.
The atmospheric fresco of cosmic drones that is Geologie Sonore belongs to a different kind of music. Conjugaison Du Timbre complicates the idea by toying with a deep rumble that first sounds like a trombone, then like harbor's sirens and finally blossoms into the equivalent of a lively didjeridoo improvisation. Ondes Croisees is a duet between a jazz bass and a gritty buzz. Points Contre Champs is the most subliminal and Zen-like piece of the cycle: a majestic crescendo of hissing drones that is disturbed by naive and very un-majestic chirps.
The double-disc Divine Comedie (Magison, 1995) contains a disc with Parmegiani's L'Enfer (1971), another peak of his oeuvre, and Paradis (1974); and a disc for Francois Bayle's music. L'Enfer, that includes a poet reading Dante, is, in turn, made of a number of sub-suites. After the overture of La Decouverte De L'Ombre, whose drones display the threatening quality of a swarm of wasps, The five-movement Les Portes Ou 1ere Contrainte recites Dante (in French) and complements the words with an electronic "soundtrack". The four-movement L'Impouvoir Ou 2eme Contrainte creates a musical background that is much more profound psychological and pathological, almost a sonic representation of a nervous breakdown. The bombastic two-movement Mal Mort Ou 3eme Contrainte is a melodramatic peak. The four-movement Les Monstres Ou 4eme Contrainte toys again with silence, but it still manages to unleash some extreme hissing (Metamorphoses) and rumbling (Cerberes). The three-movement Les Abysses Ou 5eme Contrainte metamorphes from the apoalyptic winds of Le Styx to the flickering mirage of Le Reve Du Reve. The three-movement Ou 7eme Contrainte consists of three narrative vignettes: the shrieks, blows and gallops of Bataille Des Dragons, the galactic flames Le Noeud Ardent, a the starry silence of Le Crepuscule De L'Aube. The "descriptive" use of electronic sounds is not Parmegiani's forte. Too often this sounds like the high-brow equivalent of a Disney cartoon.
The sounds interactor with an actor in pieces like Trio (1973), Des Mots et Des Sons (1978), Mess Media Sans (1979) and Demons et Des Mats (1988).
Sonare (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains the dreamy five-movement suite Sonare (1997), which opens with a few bars from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Other compositions include: L'Echo du Miroir (1980), Rouge Mort (1988), Entre Temps (1992), etc.
JazzEx (Fractal, 2005) collects some of his earliest works: JazzEx (1966), Pop Eclectic (1969), musique concrete with natural sounds, Du Pop a l'Ane (1969), a collage of pop and classical music, Et Apres (1973), a tango for bandoneon. - ww.scaruffi.com/
Read an interview with the late composer Bernard Parmegiani, by Rahma Khazam. First published in The Wire 176, October 1998.
Bernard Parmegiani is not the first name that springs to mind when the talk turns to musique concrète. Yet along with Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Francois Bayle and other courageous pioneers who rallied to Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in the 1940s and 50s, Parmegiani led the way in transforming the early, crude experiments in sound manipulation into the rich and creative genre now known as acousmatic music.
Ever since those heady early days, Parmegiani has been expanding the limits and possibilities of Schaeffer's revolutionary invention by building bridges to other musical genres and forms of artistic endeavour: his extensive body of work comprises collaborations with jazz musicians, film makers and dance companies, as well as a number of groundbreaking pieces that have gone down in the history of electroacoustic music. Like the work of the other composers making up the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the musique concrète research group founded by Schaeffer), his pieces perpetuate Schaeffer's legacy, a legacy that has become all the more valuable since the latter's death in 1995. As Parmegiani puts it: "Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were the pioneers of musique concrète, and we are discovering its possibilities: we are engaged in the ongoing exploration of [their] invention."
His latest work, Sons/Jeu, carries on that mission: this powerful, superbly crafted piece, which was premiered last June [1998] at the GRM, commemorates the 50th anniversary of musique concrète. Pursuing a brilliant, meteoric course, punctuated by pregnant silences, train noises and dramatic vocal sequences, it shows that Parmegiani's passion for music remains unabated, despite his retirement from the GRM six years ago. For although he now lives in the south of France, he is still a frequent visitor to the sprawling Radio France building in Paris that has been the home of musique concrète since 1975, and in whose studios he composed many of his most important works.
Parmegiani's passion for musique concrète dates back to his early years, even though he grew up in an environment that was dominated by classical music. Born in Paris in 1927, he was exposed to the sound of the piano throughout his childhood. His mother was a piano teacher and taught beginners in one room of the family home, while his stepfather (his own father died when Parmeglani was six months old), who was a piano virtuoso, gave lessons to more advanced pupils in another room. But musique concrète, which emerged at the tail end of the 40s was to have a far greater impact on him. "I worked quite hard at the piano with my mother, but my musical tastes were more oriented towards musique concrète [even though] that type of music was relatively unknown at the time," he explains. "I used to listen to the first pieces by Schaeffer and Henry on the radio every Sunday, and I was very excited by what I heard."
The young Parmegiani was also attracted to the art of photomontage, a leaning that was to stand him in good stead later in life."I used to cut bits of photos out of magazines, faces or arms or whatever, and create collages, which were sometimes very surrealistic," he says. "So I already had a taste. Then there was my musical background and my training as a sound engineer, which meant that I had all the elements I needed for a career in musique concrète."
Parmegiani spent three years working as a television engineer and it was during that period that he acquired his first hands-on experience of musique concrète in a small Paris studio. Pierre Schaeffer came to listen to his work, and in 1959 Parmegiani joined the GRM as a sound engineer, working with Iannis Xenakis, Francois-Bernard Mache and other early musique concrète composers. However, the world of musique concrète had its own hierarchies, which precluded him from taking part. "There was a lot going on," he recalls, "but I couldn't participate because I didn't have experience of musique concrète, apart from which I had a terrible complex with regard to the composers – they knew a lot about music."
For the young and diffident Parmegiani, however, Schaeffer's presence made up for this sense of exclusion, and even now, he breaks out of his usual cautious reserve when the conversation turns to the GRM founder. "He was someone who had a great deal of presence and personality," says Parmegiani. "Whenever he was around he radiated a kind of charm. Some people weren't sensitive to it at all, and could even be hostile, whereas others, like me, were completely taken by him, even though he was a difficult person to work with. He frequently contradicted himself, and sometimes it could be difficult to follow his line of thought. But he was very stimulating, he was definitely a leader."
But Parmegiani's inferiority complex was soon to pass. He went on to attend the GRM training course for two years, alongside fellow student Francois Bayle, and was finally invited by Schaeffer to join the GRM as a composer. It was the early 60s, and although the GRM was sorely under-funded, it was bursting with ideas and creative energy. One of Parmegiani's most vivid memories of that early period is the Concert Collectif, an event organised by Xenakis and Schaeffer, for which eight composers were asked to create a sequence five minutes long. Each of them then prepared a piece based on their own and each other's sequences, and these pieces were presented in public on the day of the concert. The Concert Collectif also gave Parmegiani an opportunity to expand his working methods even further: "A violinist who attended the concert asked me if I would like to do a piece for tape and violin, and although I wasn't particularly keen on working with the violin, I agreed because I was curious to see what the outcome would be: Devy Erlih duly provided the solo violin passages, while Parmegiani created the tape section using violin sounds The result was the haunting Violostries, which took him two years to create and was to launch his career.
During this period Pierre Schaeffer would organise encounters between the composers, painters and film makers who gravitated around him, and Parmegiani soon had the opportunity to create music for films. As time went by he composed scores for feature films and shorts by Vladimir Borowczyck, Rene Lapoujade and a number of others, which enabled him to hone his style and experiment with the sound processing techniques that he was to use in his subsequent works, such as L'lnstant Mobile and Capture Ephemere.
The 60s were a period of all-out exploration and discovery for Parmegiani. He took part in experiments with a number of French free jazz musicians. For his mixed piece Jazzex, he created a piece of tape music for a jazz group using recordings of their music which the group then improvised over to form the final work. A collaboration with the British group Third Ear Band followed. This piece, entitled Pop Secret, was performed In London in 1970. Then there was his highly theatrical adaptation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which dates back to the early 70s. On this occasion, Parmegiani divided up the workload with his long-time colleague Francois Bayle. The episode he chose, entitled Hell, conjured up a supernatural, phantasmagorical universe, rising at times to peaks of melodramatic intensity.
Innovative though these pieces may have been at the time, Parmegiani's masterpiece remains his 1975 work De Natura Sonorum. It took a rigorous, almost scientific approach to sound, associating, in 12 brief movements, different instrumental, electronic and concrete sounds. A simple enough exercise on the face of it, yet in Parmegiani's hands, it's carefully layered textures took on a magical, musical life of their own. As its title suggests, De Natura Sonorum was an attempt to investigate the nature of sound by opposing natural and artificial sounds, and it marked a turning point in Parmeglanl's approach to sound: "In De Natura Sonorum I distanced myself from the power of sound, from what I call the power of Orpheus. Orpheus charmed the plants and animals With his lyre, and in the pieces I composed prior to De Natura Sonorum I was under the spell of the sounds I created. Sounds that evolved and that I found satisfying and I left it at that. People always used to to compliment me on the beauty of my sounds in my first pieces! But beautiful sounds don't necessarily constitute interesting beautiful or interesting pieces of music. Whereas in De Natura Sonorum I set myself many more constraints: I placed the sounds as you do letters, one after the other, so as to create forms and sequences," he says, adding almost apologetically, "That piece has since become a classic of electroacoustlc music."
By the 70s electroacoustic music was drawing larger audiences and the number of composers and studios was on the increase. Parmegiani's career too was entering a more mature phase. Ensconced from 1975 onwards in the Radio France building, where he was to work for the next 17 years, he went on to compose more future classics. His 1977 work, Dedans-Dehon (available on the 2CD set Wolostries), was conceived as a sequel to De Natura Sonorum. It highlighted what he calls "the metamorphosis of sound", which a a preoccupation that recurs in many of his works. In Dedans-Dehors, the sound of waves mutates into the crunch of footsteps or the crackle of fire, while a creaking door is transformed into a chattering insect. But then Parmegiani has always been noted for the sheer range of his sounds: his sound palette covers the entire spectrum, and over rary of sounds, obtained from a wide variety of sources.
"I have a huge collection of sounds, and I'm a little bit like Pierre Henry in that I work a lot with old sounds. I can rework them and transform them into something completely different," he remarks, adding, "Of course, there are sounds that resist all forms of treatment. You can torture them any way you like, but you'll still be able to identify their origin. It's like a fragment of Mozart: you can reverse it, halve its speed, or add echo to it, but it will always be recognisable as Mozart."
The works that followed Dedans-Dehors reflected the trend towards digital technology: as the 80s took their course, Parmegiani began to rely increasingly on computers. "It took me time to move from magnetic tape over to computers, but now I feel very comfortable with them," he observes. The suggestive power of his music remained unchanged, however, as he showed in his 1987 work Rouge-Mort. Commissioned by the Opera de Nice ballet company, its ominous soundscapes recreated the successive episodes of the tragedy of Carmen with terrifying intensity. Other works followed, ranging from Au Vif De La Memoire, a piece composed on Xenakis's UPIC (a computer-based system that transforms graphic shapes into sound), to Exercisme 3. This six-part piece opened wlth the eerie cry of a bird flying over a desert, which set the tone for what was to follow: a rich blend of whistles, gurgles and delicate, ever-shifting textures. Here, preset synthesizer sounds were treated so as to lose all trace of the origin, forming a new sonic language. "The first time it was performed, people said, that's not Parmegiani," the composer explains. "But as far as I was concerned, that meant I had been successful and that I still had something left to say."
Bernard Parmegiani's interests extend beyond music. In the 70s he spent some time in the United States conducting research into video art, and on his return to Paris he made a number of music videos including the memorable L'Ecran Transparent, which was inspired by the writings of Marshall McLuhan and broadcast on German television. More surprisingly, Parmegiani also enjoyed a successful, if short career as a mime artist early in his life: he studied under the celebrated Jacques Lecoq for three years and made several film and television appearances as he had to choose between mime artist still impacts on his approach to sound: "Sometimes, in order to analyse a sound, I act it out by means of gestures before giving it its definitive form. It enables me to diagnose sounds and see if I'm comfortable with them."
Equally fascinating were his incursions into performance art. The most recent of these whimsical and absurdist "actions musicales", as he calls them, dates back to 1988: "These were performances of electroacoustic music with actors. Michel Chion [the noted French electroacoustic composer and writer] took part in one of them: he played a type of flute and did a performance on stage in which he responded to the sounds coming out of the loudspeakers. I also staged another one in which the actors were dressed up in costumes fitted with a loudspeaker. They had a little amplifier and they could make sounds themselves by scratching their microphone. And these sounds [appeared] to emerge from their bodies! I must have done about five of these 'actions musicales'. I found it really interesting."
Musique concrète set out to emphasise the intrinsic value of sounds, effacing their symbolic or musical significance. However, a number of composers have given an added dimension to their work by participating in the intellectual developments of their time. In Parmegiani's case, contemporary philosophical and scientific thinking play an important part in his work. "I am not interested only in music, but also in ideas that can be grafted onto it. These are the influences that nourish my pieces," he observes. For instance, he has used the stylised, poetic writings of the eminent French philosopher Gaston Bachelard as a starting point for several of his pieces: Le Present Compose explores the notion of time in musical terms – its dreamlike atmosphere is punctuated by distant hums, sudden silences, abrupt clicks and dramatic bursts of sound. But his most inspired large-scale piece is La Creation Du Monde, an epic work composed between 1982–84, which tells the story of the creation of the world. Drawing its inspiration from astrophysical phenomena as described in the works of Carl Sagan and Hubert Reeves, this visionary work is divided into three sections, "Black Light", "Metamorphosis Of The Void" and "Sign Of Life". It takes as its starting point the time before the Big Bang, and moves on to the first glimmerings of light and the earliest manifestations of life on earth, conjuring images of fiery comets, distant stars and mysterious galactic phenomena.
Parmegiani's reserved demeanour and cautious, occasionally pedantic conversational style no doubt go some way towards explaining why his name means little to the public at large. However, that hasn't prevented him from influencing a host of younger electroacoustic composers, not to mention several current Electronica producers. He is genuinely surprised when I tell him that his work has had an impact on groups such as Autechre (who summed up their year in the The Wire 167 with the words: "Bernard Parmegiani - fuckin' 'ell!"). "I must admit that I don't listen to Techno or pop music," he replies. "I know that there were a few interesting experiments a while back, by German groups such as Kraftwerk, and at the time of Pink Floyd, but I don't know how these groups have evolved. A certain type of music can be interesting at a certain period in time, but then it can stagnate and three years later it will no longer be of any interest."
He is less dismissive of contemporary classical music: "It is undeniable that it has influenced electroacoustic music and vice versa, because you find composers of instrumental music whose method of writing bears similarities to electroacoustic music, even people like Boulez, or younger composers like Dusapin. I sometimes feel close to classical music, but it's really an entirely different world. Their ideas are different, and so is their very conception of music."
Parmegiani nonetheless borrows freely from these genres. In Du Pop A L'Ane he superimposed or followed up selected extracts from classical composers such as Messiaen with fragments of jazz or pop music. "For instance, I superimposed a fragment of Pink Floyd over an extract from one of Stravinsky's works, and it really worked – you'd have thought they were made for each other!" he enthuses.
His own approach to music is intuitive, in as much as he uses neither sketches nor diagrams: "When I create sounds for a work I am improvising in a way. But it doesn't remain improvisation, because afterwards I go over what I have done and touch it up. Whereas when Michel Portal [the French jazz musician] improvises, that's it, he can't do it over again." Such experimentation nonetheless plays an important part in Parmegiani's work: “It can make you change direction all of a sudden. You set out to do something and then you end up with something [else] which is really interesting but doesn't fit in with your original idea. And that can be a problem because you have to choose [whether] to keep it or set it aside. It happens to me all the time, which means that I end up with sufficient material for another three pieces."
Prolific as ever despite his age, Parmegiani is bursting with novel ideas, but at the same time he has never wavered in his attachment to musique concrète unlike Schaeffer, who subsequently turned away from his momentous discovery, claiming that it was not music. Today, Schaeffer's brilliant, if domineering personality continues to overshadow his disciples at the GRM, Parmegiani among them, but it's no small thanks to their patient, unrelenting labour that musique concrète and electroacoustic music have become the vibrant and powerful musical force that they are today.
Parmegiani now has his own studio in the south of France, in which he composes the greater part of his pieces. He is currently toying with the idea of creating an electroacoustic version of the Faust legend, as well as what he calls an "operap": "It would be an opera with words and texts [as in] rap," he explains. "But it would have to be done creatively and not just be an adaptation of rap, because it's a genre that doesn't evolve." - thewire.co.uk/
Bernard Parmegiani, who passed away on the 21st November, was a major figure in the development of electronic music in the post-war period, working at the GRM (Groupes de Recherches Musicales) studios of RTF (Radiodiffusion-Television Francaises), the French national broadcasting station. He had long been an admirer of GRM’s founder, head and the inventor of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer. After 3 years of working as a sound engineer for television he finally gained entry to the hallowed, tape-bedecked halls when Schaeffer invited him to join in 1959. The hierarchies in place at GRM, plus the two years training course he was obliged to take, meant that it was some time before he could get down to any serious work of his own, however. One of his first significant pieces was Violostries, which he composed in 1962 for the violinist Devy Eplih. It set Eplih’s playing against his own tape manipulations of violins sounds, and set the pattern for his fascination with the electroacoustic blending of natural and synthetic or transformed sounds. This early work shares the stringency of much post-Webern modernist music of the time. But Parmegiani was to develop a more natural and sonically sensual approach as his style matured. Lengthy pieces such as De Natura Sonorum (1975) and La Creation du Monde (1982-4) evoke the sounds of the natural world or of the cosmos, and have passages which create a sensation of rapid movement or kinetic, molecular flux.
De Natura Sonorum is an encylopaedic collection of sounds which are subjected to microscopic study, but the music never becomes dry or clinical. The eleven sections are like a taxonomical division of sounds into distinct compartments. There are the struck sounds of cymbals and bells; echoing sounds and sounds with little reverberant afterlife; high pure pitches and low bass rumbles; whispering, susurrant sounds and squelchy or fiery ones. These sounds are subject to transformations and metamorphoses which highlight hidden connections between seemingly wholly disparate qualities. The division between the natural and the artificial becomes difficult to distinguish, and the nature of the sounds analysed, compared and reconfigured frequently end up resembling the sounds of nature. We hear the sonorities of air, fire, water and rumbling earth. A rich drone is filled with the humming pulse of abundant life and the final section is composed of the descending whistles of electronic tones sounding like birdsong (some birds indeed having the uncanny ability to produce calls which sound electronic).
La Création du Monde sets out with the modest ambition of creating a sound picture of the formation of the universe, the Earth and the emergence of life. It’s a creation story informed by Carl Sagan and his popularisation of cosmology rather than by any religious origin myths. But there is something distinctly mythic about its poetic evocation of cosmic forces and the poetic language used to cue us to the stages of creation we’re witnessing: Lumière Noire (black light), Moins L’infini (before the infinite?). Métamorphose Du Vide (transformation of the void) and Jeux De Configurations (play of forms). This grandly Romantic programmatic narrative makes it clear that Parmegiani saw his music in terms of creating vivid, widescreen pictures in the listener’s head. The section headed Instant 0 (ie the big bang) presumably lent its name to the Instant 0 studio which Stereolab set up in France, where they recorded their Instant 0 in the Universe EP. The music of La Creation du Monde is full of the sounds of rushing, colliding objects and roiling, elemental motion which whirl around and create a sense of space and expanding dimensionality, placing the listener at the very heart of the unfolding cosmic processes. It’s a great headphone experience, and would be amazing with a corresponding planetarium show, or something resembling one of Iannis Xenakis’ Polytope arrangements of light and ritualistic spectacle.
The same could be said for Chronos, which comprises three separate pieces created for the RTF, and which uses a more familiar palette of electronic sounds. The title of the lengthiest piece, L’Oeil Écoute (the eye listens), hints at the synaesthetic effects which the music can induce in the mind’s eye. The train sounds with which it opens could be seen as a tribute to Pierre Schaeffer, whose own Etude aux Chemins de Fer, the opening section of his Etudes de Bruits, the foundation work of musique concrete, took its sound sources from recordings of trains made at the Batignolles station in Paris. Chronos was one of two LPs of Parmegiani’s music released in the Philips Prospective 21e Siecle series, the other containing Violostries alongside Bidule en Ré and Capture Éphemère, pieces from the late 60s. In their reflective silver foil covers with eye-dazzling op-art designs, these are highly desirable objects for the record collector, and Parmegiani’s work sits in proudly shimmering glory alongside that of his GRM colleagues Iannis Xenakis, François Bayle, Pierre Henry and the father figure Pierre Schaeffer.
This openness on Parmegiani’s part led to all kinds of collaborations. In this, he was similar to his GRM colleague Pierre Henry, and as a result, both composers have reached a far wider modern audience than many of their contemporaries. He worked with the Third Ear Band on a performance at the Round House in 1970, and with a quartet of French free jazz musicians on the piece Jazzex in 1966. This was a kind of feedback loop which involved him recording and transforming their sounds, the resultant tape of which they would further improvise over. Et Après, from 1973, is another meeting with an improvising jazz musician, this time Michel Portal, who plays over Parmegiani’s tape of treated bandoneon sounds.
This collaborative spirit extended into the sphere of the screen arts. He produced a number of soundtracks for TV and cinema over the years, including A, a short 1965 film by the Polish animator Jan Lenica, and his fellow countryman Piotr Kamler’s remarkable 1969 animation Le Labyrinth. For this, Parmegiani produced a study in vocal sounds, ranging from Tibetan and football terrace chants to cries and whispers. It’s completely sympathetic to the images it accompanies, and adds greatly to the nightmarishly claustrophobic quality of the film, the sense of being watched and commented upon at all times. He also provided the soundtrack for a film by another Polish animator, Walerian Borowczyk. His Jeux des Anges (1964) is a chill, bleak piece of surrealism which clearly evokes the spirit of the concentration camps set up in Poland by the Nazis. Parmegiani’s music draws on chants sung in those dark places, and begins with more train sounds, which in this context take on a terribly ominous cast. He worked again with Walerian Borowczyk on his early 80s movie Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes.
Parmegiani also made a few films of his own, perhaps drawing on his own performance art background (he was even a mime for a while, the progression from that to composer/constructor of musique concrète something which probably only a Frenchman or woman could pull off). The dual-language title of his 1973 short Das Augehort /L’Ecran Transparent reflects the fact that this was a joint venture between the German WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) radio station and RTF. WDR had its own Studio for Electronic Music, set up in 1951, the same year that the GRM had come into being. Their had been significant hostility between the two in the early days, when they were passionately advocating different approaches to this new musical art. But by 1973, with electronic sounds widely disseminated across the whole spectrum of music and no longer the purview of small technocratic coteries in state-sponsored laboratories (or maverick musician/engineers in their attics or back garden sheds), such bitter aesthetic and ideological divides seemed retrospectively foolish (must their always be only one way of doing things?) The film marries image with music and experiments with new video techniques, much as Frank Zappa did in the otherwise utterly different 200 Motels. Paul Valjean appears at the start as a sort of proxy Parmegiani (he’s even got the beard), bouncing between the walls of the screen liked a ‘trapped in a box’ mime, talking about the ‘electronic human’ and speaking the word ‘information’, which is then echoed, repeated and layered in the manner of Steve Reich’s tape loop phasing piece Come Out To Show Them. It sounds like something broadcast from the speakers placed around The Village in The Prisoner. It’s a remarkable short film, well worth watching. You can also hear a number of Parmegiani’s pieces, including Violostries and De Natura Sonorum (the opposite poles of apprentice work and mature masterpiece within his oeuvre), and Pop'eclectic over at ubuweb. Lie back, open your ears and let all the sounds of the universe flood in.
Bernard Parmegiani (1927) is a French composer of musique concrete who trained (1959) under Pierre Schaeffer in person.
Originally a sound engineer and a mime, his first major composition was the theater piece Violostries (1964), compiled on the double-disc Violostries (Ina-GRM, 1992), that also contains Pour en Finir Avec le Pouvoir d'Orphee (1972), Exercisme 3 (1986), Le Present Compose' (1991), etc. Violostries is a three-movement suite. The first movement, aiming for a delicate balance between noise and silence, juxtaposes multi-faceted electronic drones and dissonant violin tweets (the violin parts were provided by Devy Erlih). The second movement is the "allegro" of the suite: chaotic and convulsed. The third movement is an agonizing deconstruction of the violin parts.
Pop'eclectic (Earphone, 2001) collects material from 1966-73, in particular the collage of musical snippets Du Pop A l'Ane and the free improvisation of a jazz combo versus electronic tape of Jazzex (1966), a piece conceived with saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps.
La Memoire Des Sons (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains three pieces from three decades: Capture Ephemere (1967), the 21-minute Sons-Jeu (1987), the lyrical and varied 24-minute La Memoire des Sons (2001).
Another ambitious project was the "imaginary concert" La Roue Ferris (1971).
Meanwile, Le Diable a Quatre (1971) was a collaboration with Michel Portal's jazz combo.
After a brief parenthesis in the USA, and three musical videos (L'Oil Ecoute, 1973; Jeux d'Artifices, 1978; L'Ecran Transparent, 1973), Parmegiani began to "jam" with jazz and rock groups, juxtaposing their improvisations to his electronic compositions.
Chants Magnetiques (Fractal, 2007), composed in 1974, consists of nine abstract vignettes that straddle the border between Musique concrete, psychedelic music and Brian Eno's Before And After Science.
La Creation du Monde (Ina-GRM, 1986) contains his masterpiece, La Creation Du Monde (1982-1984), a phantasmagoric mythological suite of electronic collage that evokes an hyper-kinetic version of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The extreme rarefaction of Moins L'Infini, evoking microsounds of quantum lattices, the terrible storms of Instant 0, the contrasting android and organic flows of Premieres Forces, evoking the emergence of form out of chaos, establish a form of art which is interior as much as exterior. Lumiere is a catastrophic composition that creates a highly dynamic soundscape by employing a broad spectrum of timbres. Cellules mimicks the first moves by the first living things, and Polyphonie evokes the way they multiplied and become frantic communities: suddenly the world is filled with angst. The crescendo of tension leads to Expression 2, where the confusing concert of voices self-implodes. The whole "symphony" stands as a powerful statement about the emotional power of musique concrete, equal if not superior to the means of the symphonic orchestra.
The two lengthy suites of De Natura Sonorum (Ina-GRM, 1990), derived from De Natura Sonorum (1975), added live instrumentation to his abstract electronic soundscapes, frequently combining the droning sounds emitted by the instruments with the dense and wild textures spun by the machines. Accidents is just that: a flow of accidental disjointed noises over a layer of dirty drones. More accidents but this time of a percussive nature and with prolonged echoes populate Dynamique De La Resonance. Etude Elastique is a more complex collage of sounds that at the beginning seems to imitate rodents and towards the end mutates into industrial music ante-litteram (music that evokes work in a factory). Natures Ephemeres piles up more of those funny fat fast-moving electronic sounds that work equally well to evoke animals or to parody machines. The elegant Matieres Induites is another "elastic study" whose object morphs from a crackling fire to running water and to wind chimes, and is also his quintessential hybrid of natural and artificial sounds.
The atmospheric fresco of cosmic drones that is Geologie Sonore belongs to a different kind of music. Conjugaison Du Timbre complicates the idea by toying with a deep rumble that first sounds like a trombone, then like harbor's sirens and finally blossoms into the equivalent of a lively didjeridoo improvisation. Ondes Croisees is a duet between a jazz bass and a gritty buzz. Points Contre Champs is the most subliminal and Zen-like piece of the cycle: a majestic crescendo of hissing drones that is disturbed by naive and very un-majestic chirps.
The double-disc Divine Comedie (Magison, 1995) contains a disc with Parmegiani's L'Enfer (1971), another peak of his oeuvre, and Paradis (1974); and a disc for Francois Bayle's music. L'Enfer, that includes a poet reading Dante, is, in turn, made of a number of sub-suites. After the overture of La Decouverte De L'Ombre, whose drones display the threatening quality of a swarm of wasps, The five-movement Les Portes Ou 1ere Contrainte recites Dante (in French) and complements the words with an electronic "soundtrack". The four-movement L'Impouvoir Ou 2eme Contrainte creates a musical background that is much more profound psychological and pathological, almost a sonic representation of a nervous breakdown. The bombastic two-movement Mal Mort Ou 3eme Contrainte is a melodramatic peak. The four-movement Les Monstres Ou 4eme Contrainte toys again with silence, but it still manages to unleash some extreme hissing (Metamorphoses) and rumbling (Cerberes). The three-movement Les Abysses Ou 5eme Contrainte metamorphes from the apoalyptic winds of Le Styx to the flickering mirage of Le Reve Du Reve. The three-movement Ou 7eme Contrainte consists of three narrative vignettes: the shrieks, blows and gallops of Bataille Des Dragons, the galactic flames Le Noeud Ardent, a the starry silence of Le Crepuscule De L'Aube. The "descriptive" use of electronic sounds is not Parmegiani's forte. Too often this sounds like the high-brow equivalent of a Disney cartoon.
The sounds interactor with an actor in pieces like Trio (1973), Des Mots et Des Sons (1978), Mess Media Sans (1979) and Demons et Des Mats (1988).
Sonare (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains the dreamy five-movement suite Sonare (1997), which opens with a few bars from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Other compositions include: L'Echo du Miroir (1980), Rouge Mort (1988), Entre Temps (1992), etc.
JazzEx (Fractal, 2005) collects some of his earliest works: JazzEx (1966), Pop Eclectic (1969), musique concrete with natural sounds, Du Pop a l'Ane (1969), a collage of pop and classical music, Et Apres (1973), a tango for bandoneon.
Bernard Parmegiani, a sound master
Organized by Groupe de Recherches Musicales (G.R.M.) and jointly produced with Radio France, the Présences Électronique festival explores the link between the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer and new experiments in electronic music. One of this event’s special features is that it offers the public and performers a unique “spatialized” broadcasting and listening system in the Acousmonium.
This year, for this fifth event, Présences Electronique has moved out of the Maison de Radio France and spent three days in the various rooms of 104, the new multi-disciplinary cultural centre in Paris’s 19th arrondissement.
We were there and listened in darkness to 'De Natura Sonorum' (1974-1975), one of the best of Parmegiani's works in terms of technics-sound-harmonic-tone.
We were there and listened in darkness to 'De Natura Sonorum' (1974-1975), one of the best of Parmegiani's works in terms of technics-sound-harmonic-tone.
Here you will find our recording of the event made with the Zoom H4 (source: mp3 -128 kBits/s, location: CENTQUATRE - Atelier 4, date: 15th March 2009)
Bernard Parmegiani (1927) met Pierre Schaeffer who encouraged him to attend a training course in electro-acoustic music in 1959. Then he joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales the next year, becoming a full member right up until 1992. Pierre Schaeffer put Bernard Parmegiani in charge of the Music/Image unit of the ORTF's Research Departement, where he went on the compose the music for both full-length and short films. The proved to be a first class training ground for learning how to deal with the problems of musical form as these relate to time, and how to overcome the constraints imposed by the medium of the cinema. He also wrote the music for several jingles, as well as songs and music written for television, the ballet or the theater. There then followed 40 years of uninterrumpted research and musical creations built out of an ongoing fight that led him to regard bodies of sound as living bodies. He took a keen interest in those areas in which the improvisation techniques used by jazz musicians meet with electro-acoustic music. Parmegiani's own output, primarily made up of sounds recordes on tape, includes more than 70 pieces of concert. Except some mixed pièces, his work as a whole take the form of music for « fixed sound », coming within the scope of the large repertoire of electro-acoustic music.
Some excerpts from the interview by Évelyne Gayou, published in full in the book "Portrait Polychromes: Bernard Parmegiani":
Can the Parmegiani's sound be defined? Some people speak of "organic sounds"...
In the past, people used to talk about a "Parmegiani's sound", a little too much to my liking, and it bothered me a lot. People would say: "Oh! Parmé, what beautiful sounds you make!!!" It's good to make nice sounds, but really, we don't compose music to produce nice sounds, but rather to compose from an idea. I'm not trying to seduce anyone with my music; I'm trying to get people interested. That's why I'm obsessed with constantly renewing myself musically. I can only exist by continuosly exploring new territories; otherwise one gets bored with one's own music. The risk is to do 'Parmegiani in the style of Parmegiani' and so on. If I must define what the "Parmegiani sound" is, then it's a kind of movement, a kind of colour, a way of starting and a way of fading the sound, a way of bringing life into it. I do consider sounds as living things. So there's, indeed, something organic, skin deep, but it's always difficult for me to define my music; what we perceive from within isn't always understood by others in the same way. We recognize ourselves in the mirror others hold up for us, to a certain extent; it's a game between the inner and outer realms.
[...] When I start a piece, I create a sound bank; I include new sounds, never used before, that might fit my intention and reworked old sounds. I listen to them and create detailed inventories; it is essential and imposed by my working method. For example, for De Natura Sonorum, I made lists of sounds classified by shape, subject, colour, etc. according to the TOM (Treaty of Musical Objects)'s typology. I like to set the sound material in my ear first, so that I can then work with these sounds to express what I want to say [...]
When performing your music in concerts, how do you see the spatial aspects? Do you want to create a show or is it a mere experience?
I'm not very happy with the word show because of its demonstrative character. I prefer for it to be an "experience" because I never project the sounds in the same way twice. When I'm in a concert, standing at the sound projection desk, I intentionally send the sound to specific speakers, I either pan to the left, to the right, along the sides or behind and I associate pairs of sounds. The sound can follow a pre-defined trajectory; remain static in a speakers area or even in a pair of stereo speakers. Some composers, especially when they start out, turn all the potentiometers up and don't vary the levels of the speakers much, the result is imperceptible. Worse than that, the sound is hindered in all directions because it is everywhere at once. Depending on the acoustics of the concert hall, you might even get reverberation or interference phenomena, and then the audience can't hear any subtlety.
You've gone through the digital revolution, what do you think these new tools have brought to your music?
I was probably the first person at the GRM with a personal digital studio. So I had to learn how to use the digital equipment by myself. By switching from the scissors to the mouse, we've improved a few things, but we've lost out on others. [...] The time it takes to put an idea into practice has shortened and, consequently, we're closer to the compositional act. -
In the past, people used to talk about a "Parmegiani's sound", a little too much to my liking, and it bothered me a lot. People would say: "Oh! Parmé, what beautiful sounds you make!!!" It's good to make nice sounds, but really, we don't compose music to produce nice sounds, but rather to compose from an idea. I'm not trying to seduce anyone with my music; I'm trying to get people interested. That's why I'm obsessed with constantly renewing myself musically. I can only exist by continuosly exploring new territories; otherwise one gets bored with one's own music. The risk is to do 'Parmegiani in the style of Parmegiani' and so on. If I must define what the "Parmegiani sound" is, then it's a kind of movement, a kind of colour, a way of starting and a way of fading the sound, a way of bringing life into it. I do consider sounds as living things. So there's, indeed, something organic, skin deep, but it's always difficult for me to define my music; what we perceive from within isn't always understood by others in the same way. We recognize ourselves in the mirror others hold up for us, to a certain extent; it's a game between the inner and outer realms.
[...] When I start a piece, I create a sound bank; I include new sounds, never used before, that might fit my intention and reworked old sounds. I listen to them and create detailed inventories; it is essential and imposed by my working method. For example, for De Natura Sonorum, I made lists of sounds classified by shape, subject, colour, etc. according to the TOM (Treaty of Musical Objects)'s typology. I like to set the sound material in my ear first, so that I can then work with these sounds to express what I want to say [...]
When performing your music in concerts, how do you see the spatial aspects? Do you want to create a show or is it a mere experience?
I'm not very happy with the word show because of its demonstrative character. I prefer for it to be an "experience" because I never project the sounds in the same way twice. When I'm in a concert, standing at the sound projection desk, I intentionally send the sound to specific speakers, I either pan to the left, to the right, along the sides or behind and I associate pairs of sounds. The sound can follow a pre-defined trajectory; remain static in a speakers area or even in a pair of stereo speakers. Some composers, especially when they start out, turn all the potentiometers up and don't vary the levels of the speakers much, the result is imperceptible. Worse than that, the sound is hindered in all directions because it is everywhere at once. Depending on the acoustics of the concert hall, you might even get reverberation or interference phenomena, and then the audience can't hear any subtlety.
You've gone through the digital revolution, what do you think these new tools have brought to your music?
I was probably the first person at the GRM with a personal digital studio. So I had to learn how to use the digital equipment by myself. By switching from the scissors to the mouse, we've improved a few things, but we've lost out on others. [...] The time it takes to put an idea into practice has shortened and, consequently, we're closer to the compositional act. -
Unidentified Sound Object
From Le Figaro:
The composer Bernard Parmegiani, one of the fathers of electronic music and former member of the INA Groupe de Recherches Musicales, died last night at the age of 85.
Bernard Parmegiani composed 78 opuses, 27 film scores, 14 musical pieces for choreography, and 12 albums… including The Creation of the World and De natura sonorum.
His most famous creation is the public jingle for the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, used from 1971 to 2005. “The world of electroacoustic music is mourning the disappearance of one of its emblematic figures and one of its founders,” read a statement from INA CEO Mathieu Gallet. He expressed his “pride” that the institute has “helped build its memory for future generations ” by posting a 12 CD box set of his works in 2008. “His musical influence has gone through several generations of music lovers and musicians and is now considered a pioneer and master of the electroacoustic genre,” he wrote.
Bernard Parmegiani (1927) is a French composer of musique concrete who trained (1959) under Pierre Schaeffer in person.
Originally a sound engineer and a mime, his first major composition was the theater piece Violostries (1964), compiled on the double-disc Violostries (Ina-GRM, 1992), that also contains Pour en Finir Avec le Pouvoir d'Orphee (1972), Exercisme 3 (1986), Le Present Compose' (1991), etc. Violostries is a three-movement suite. The first movement, aiming for a delicate balance between noise and silence, juxtaposes multi-faceted electronic drones and dissonant violin tweets (the violin parts were provided by Devy Erlih). The second movement is the "allegro" of the suite: chaotic and convulsed. The third movement is an agonizing deconstruction of the violin parts.
Pop'eclectic (Earphone, 2001) collects material from 1966-73, in particular the collage of musical snippets Du Pop A l'Ane and the free improvisation of a jazz combo versus electronic tape of Jazzex (1966), a piece conceived with saxophonist Jean-Louis Chautemps.
La Memoire Des Sons (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains three pieces from three decades: Capture Ephemere (1967), the 21-minute Sons-Jeu (1987), the lyrical and varied 24-minute La Memoire des Sons (2001).
Another ambitious project was the "imaginary concert" La Roue Ferris (1971).
Meanwile, Le Diable a Quatre (1971) was a collaboration with Michel Portal's jazz combo.
After a brief parenthesis in the USA, and three musical videos (L'Oil Ecoute, 1973; Jeux d'Artifices, 1978; L'Ecran Transparent, 1973), Parmegiani began to "jam" with jazz and rock groups, juxtaposing their improvisations to his electronic compositions.
Chants Magnetiques (Fractal, 2007), composed in 1974, consists of nine abstract vignettes that straddle the border between Musique concrete, psychedelic music and Brian Eno's Before And After Science.
La Creation du Monde (Ina-GRM, 1986) contains his masterpiece, La Creation Du Monde (1982-1984), a phantasmagoric mythological suite of electronic collage that evokes an hyper-kinetic version of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The extreme rarefaction of Moins L'Infini, evoking microsounds of quantum lattices, the terrible storms of Instant 0, the contrasting android and organic flows of Premieres Forces, evoking the emergence of form out of chaos, establish a form of art which is interior as much as exterior. Lumiere is a catastrophic composition that creates a highly dynamic soundscape by employing a broad spectrum of timbres. Cellules mimicks the first moves by the first living things, and Polyphonie evokes the way they multiplied and become frantic communities: suddenly the world is filled with angst. The crescendo of tension leads to Expression 2, where the confusing concert of voices self-implodes. The whole "symphony" stands as a powerful statement about the emotional power of musique concrete, equal if not superior to the means of the symphonic orchestra.
The two lengthy suites of De Natura Sonorum (Ina-GRM, 1990), derived from De Natura Sonorum (1975), added live instrumentation to his abstract electronic soundscapes, frequently combining the droning sounds emitted by the instruments with the dense and wild textures spun by the machines. Accidents is just that: a flow of accidental disjointed noises over a layer of dirty drones. More accidents but this time of a percussive nature and with prolonged echoes populate Dynamique De La Resonance. Etude Elastique is a more complex collage of sounds that at the beginning seems to imitate rodents and towards the end mutates into industrial music ante-litteram (music that evokes work in a factory). Natures Ephemeres piles up more of those funny fat fast-moving electronic sounds that work equally well to evoke animals or to parody machines. The elegant Matieres Induites is another "elastic study" whose object morphs from a crackling fire to running water and to wind chimes, and is also his quintessential hybrid of natural and artificial sounds.
The atmospheric fresco of cosmic drones that is Geologie Sonore belongs to a different kind of music. Conjugaison Du Timbre complicates the idea by toying with a deep rumble that first sounds like a trombone, then like harbor's sirens and finally blossoms into the equivalent of a lively didjeridoo improvisation. Ondes Croisees is a duet between a jazz bass and a gritty buzz. Points Contre Champs is the most subliminal and Zen-like piece of the cycle: a majestic crescendo of hissing drones that is disturbed by naive and very un-majestic chirps.
The double-disc Divine Comedie (Magison, 1995) contains a disc with Parmegiani's L'Enfer (1971), another peak of his oeuvre, and Paradis (1974); and a disc for Francois Bayle's music. L'Enfer, that includes a poet reading Dante, is, in turn, made of a number of sub-suites. After the overture of La Decouverte De L'Ombre, whose drones display the threatening quality of a swarm of wasps, The five-movement Les Portes Ou 1ere Contrainte recites Dante (in French) and complements the words with an electronic "soundtrack". The four-movement L'Impouvoir Ou 2eme Contrainte creates a musical background that is much more profound psychological and pathological, almost a sonic representation of a nervous breakdown. The bombastic two-movement Mal Mort Ou 3eme Contrainte is a melodramatic peak. The four-movement Les Monstres Ou 4eme Contrainte toys again with silence, but it still manages to unleash some extreme hissing (Metamorphoses) and rumbling (Cerberes). The three-movement Les Abysses Ou 5eme Contrainte metamorphes from the apoalyptic winds of Le Styx to the flickering mirage of Le Reve Du Reve. The three-movement Ou 7eme Contrainte consists of three narrative vignettes: the shrieks, blows and gallops of Bataille Des Dragons, the galactic flames Le Noeud Ardent, a the starry silence of Le Crepuscule De L'Aube. The "descriptive" use of electronic sounds is not Parmegiani's forte. Too often this sounds like the high-brow equivalent of a Disney cartoon.
The sounds interactor with an actor in pieces like Trio (1973), Des Mots et Des Sons (1978), Mess Media Sans (1979) and Demons et Des Mats (1988).
Sonare (Ina-GRM, 2002) contains the dreamy five-movement suite Sonare (1997), which opens with a few bars from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Other compositions include: L'Echo du Miroir (1980), Rouge Mort (1988), Entre Temps (1992), etc.
JazzEx (Fractal, 2005) collects some of his earliest works: JazzEx (1966), Pop Eclectic (1969), musique concrete with natural sounds, Du Pop a l'Ane (1969), a collage of pop and classical music, Et Apres (1973), a tango for bandoneon. - ww.scaruffi.com/
Read an interview with the late composer Bernard Parmegiani, by Rahma Khazam. First published in The Wire 176, October 1998.
Bernard Parmegiani is not the first name that springs to mind when the talk turns to musique concrète. Yet along with Pierre Henry, Luc Ferrari, Francois Bayle and other courageous pioneers who rallied to Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, in the 1940s and 50s, Parmegiani led the way in transforming the early, crude experiments in sound manipulation into the rich and creative genre now known as acousmatic music.
Ever since those heady early days, Parmegiani has been expanding the limits and possibilities of Schaeffer's revolutionary invention by building bridges to other musical genres and forms of artistic endeavour: his extensive body of work comprises collaborations with jazz musicians, film makers and dance companies, as well as a number of groundbreaking pieces that have gone down in the history of electroacoustic music. Like the work of the other composers making up the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the musique concrète research group founded by Schaeffer), his pieces perpetuate Schaeffer's legacy, a legacy that has become all the more valuable since the latter's death in 1995. As Parmegiani puts it: "Schaeffer and Pierre Henry were the pioneers of musique concrète, and we are discovering its possibilities: we are engaged in the ongoing exploration of [their] invention."
His latest work, Sons/Jeu, carries on that mission: this powerful, superbly crafted piece, which was premiered last June [1998] at the GRM, commemorates the 50th anniversary of musique concrète. Pursuing a brilliant, meteoric course, punctuated by pregnant silences, train noises and dramatic vocal sequences, it shows that Parmegiani's passion for music remains unabated, despite his retirement from the GRM six years ago. For although he now lives in the south of France, he is still a frequent visitor to the sprawling Radio France building in Paris that has been the home of musique concrète since 1975, and in whose studios he composed many of his most important works.
Parmegiani's passion for musique concrète dates back to his early years, even though he grew up in an environment that was dominated by classical music. Born in Paris in 1927, he was exposed to the sound of the piano throughout his childhood. His mother was a piano teacher and taught beginners in one room of the family home, while his stepfather (his own father died when Parmeglani was six months old), who was a piano virtuoso, gave lessons to more advanced pupils in another room. But musique concrète, which emerged at the tail end of the 40s was to have a far greater impact on him. "I worked quite hard at the piano with my mother, but my musical tastes were more oriented towards musique concrète [even though] that type of music was relatively unknown at the time," he explains. "I used to listen to the first pieces by Schaeffer and Henry on the radio every Sunday, and I was very excited by what I heard."
The young Parmegiani was also attracted to the art of photomontage, a leaning that was to stand him in good stead later in life."I used to cut bits of photos out of magazines, faces or arms or whatever, and create collages, which were sometimes very surrealistic," he says. "So I already had a taste. Then there was my musical background and my training as a sound engineer, which meant that I had all the elements I needed for a career in musique concrète."
Parmegiani spent three years working as a television engineer and it was during that period that he acquired his first hands-on experience of musique concrète in a small Paris studio. Pierre Schaeffer came to listen to his work, and in 1959 Parmegiani joined the GRM as a sound engineer, working with Iannis Xenakis, Francois-Bernard Mache and other early musique concrète composers. However, the world of musique concrète had its own hierarchies, which precluded him from taking part. "There was a lot going on," he recalls, "but I couldn't participate because I didn't have experience of musique concrète, apart from which I had a terrible complex with regard to the composers – they knew a lot about music."
For the young and diffident Parmegiani, however, Schaeffer's presence made up for this sense of exclusion, and even now, he breaks out of his usual cautious reserve when the conversation turns to the GRM founder. "He was someone who had a great deal of presence and personality," says Parmegiani. "Whenever he was around he radiated a kind of charm. Some people weren't sensitive to it at all, and could even be hostile, whereas others, like me, were completely taken by him, even though he was a difficult person to work with. He frequently contradicted himself, and sometimes it could be difficult to follow his line of thought. But he was very stimulating, he was definitely a leader."
But Parmegiani's inferiority complex was soon to pass. He went on to attend the GRM training course for two years, alongside fellow student Francois Bayle, and was finally invited by Schaeffer to join the GRM as a composer. It was the early 60s, and although the GRM was sorely under-funded, it was bursting with ideas and creative energy. One of Parmegiani's most vivid memories of that early period is the Concert Collectif, an event organised by Xenakis and Schaeffer, for which eight composers were asked to create a sequence five minutes long. Each of them then prepared a piece based on their own and each other's sequences, and these pieces were presented in public on the day of the concert. The Concert Collectif also gave Parmegiani an opportunity to expand his working methods even further: "A violinist who attended the concert asked me if I would like to do a piece for tape and violin, and although I wasn't particularly keen on working with the violin, I agreed because I was curious to see what the outcome would be: Devy Erlih duly provided the solo violin passages, while Parmegiani created the tape section using violin sounds The result was the haunting Violostries, which took him two years to create and was to launch his career.
During this period Pierre Schaeffer would organise encounters between the composers, painters and film makers who gravitated around him, and Parmegiani soon had the opportunity to create music for films. As time went by he composed scores for feature films and shorts by Vladimir Borowczyck, Rene Lapoujade and a number of others, which enabled him to hone his style and experiment with the sound processing techniques that he was to use in his subsequent works, such as L'lnstant Mobile and Capture Ephemere.
The 60s were a period of all-out exploration and discovery for Parmegiani. He took part in experiments with a number of French free jazz musicians. For his mixed piece Jazzex, he created a piece of tape music for a jazz group using recordings of their music which the group then improvised over to form the final work. A collaboration with the British group Third Ear Band followed. This piece, entitled Pop Secret, was performed In London in 1970. Then there was his highly theatrical adaptation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which dates back to the early 70s. On this occasion, Parmegiani divided up the workload with his long-time colleague Francois Bayle. The episode he chose, entitled Hell, conjured up a supernatural, phantasmagorical universe, rising at times to peaks of melodramatic intensity.
Innovative though these pieces may have been at the time, Parmegiani's masterpiece remains his 1975 work De Natura Sonorum. It took a rigorous, almost scientific approach to sound, associating, in 12 brief movements, different instrumental, electronic and concrete sounds. A simple enough exercise on the face of it, yet in Parmegiani's hands, it's carefully layered textures took on a magical, musical life of their own. As its title suggests, De Natura Sonorum was an attempt to investigate the nature of sound by opposing natural and artificial sounds, and it marked a turning point in Parmeglanl's approach to sound: "In De Natura Sonorum I distanced myself from the power of sound, from what I call the power of Orpheus. Orpheus charmed the plants and animals With his lyre, and in the pieces I composed prior to De Natura Sonorum I was under the spell of the sounds I created. Sounds that evolved and that I found satisfying and I left it at that. People always used to to compliment me on the beauty of my sounds in my first pieces! But beautiful sounds don't necessarily constitute interesting beautiful or interesting pieces of music. Whereas in De Natura Sonorum I set myself many more constraints: I placed the sounds as you do letters, one after the other, so as to create forms and sequences," he says, adding almost apologetically, "That piece has since become a classic of electroacoustlc music."
By the 70s electroacoustic music was drawing larger audiences and the number of composers and studios was on the increase. Parmegiani's career too was entering a more mature phase. Ensconced from 1975 onwards in the Radio France building, where he was to work for the next 17 years, he went on to compose more future classics. His 1977 work, Dedans-Dehon (available on the 2CD set Wolostries), was conceived as a sequel to De Natura Sonorum. It highlighted what he calls "the metamorphosis of sound", which a a preoccupation that recurs in many of his works. In Dedans-Dehors, the sound of waves mutates into the crunch of footsteps or the crackle of fire, while a creaking door is transformed into a chattering insect. But then Parmegiani has always been noted for the sheer range of his sounds: his sound palette covers the entire spectrum, and over rary of sounds, obtained from a wide variety of sources.
"I have a huge collection of sounds, and I'm a little bit like Pierre Henry in that I work a lot with old sounds. I can rework them and transform them into something completely different," he remarks, adding, "Of course, there are sounds that resist all forms of treatment. You can torture them any way you like, but you'll still be able to identify their origin. It's like a fragment of Mozart: you can reverse it, halve its speed, or add echo to it, but it will always be recognisable as Mozart."
The works that followed Dedans-Dehors reflected the trend towards digital technology: as the 80s took their course, Parmegiani began to rely increasingly on computers. "It took me time to move from magnetic tape over to computers, but now I feel very comfortable with them," he observes. The suggestive power of his music remained unchanged, however, as he showed in his 1987 work Rouge-Mort. Commissioned by the Opera de Nice ballet company, its ominous soundscapes recreated the successive episodes of the tragedy of Carmen with terrifying intensity. Other works followed, ranging from Au Vif De La Memoire, a piece composed on Xenakis's UPIC (a computer-based system that transforms graphic shapes into sound), to Exercisme 3. This six-part piece opened wlth the eerie cry of a bird flying over a desert, which set the tone for what was to follow: a rich blend of whistles, gurgles and delicate, ever-shifting textures. Here, preset synthesizer sounds were treated so as to lose all trace of the origin, forming a new sonic language. "The first time it was performed, people said, that's not Parmegiani," the composer explains. "But as far as I was concerned, that meant I had been successful and that I still had something left to say."
Bernard Parmegiani's interests extend beyond music. In the 70s he spent some time in the United States conducting research into video art, and on his return to Paris he made a number of music videos including the memorable L'Ecran Transparent, which was inspired by the writings of Marshall McLuhan and broadcast on German television. More surprisingly, Parmegiani also enjoyed a successful, if short career as a mime artist early in his life: he studied under the celebrated Jacques Lecoq for three years and made several film and television appearances as he had to choose between mime artist still impacts on his approach to sound: "Sometimes, in order to analyse a sound, I act it out by means of gestures before giving it its definitive form. It enables me to diagnose sounds and see if I'm comfortable with them."
Equally fascinating were his incursions into performance art. The most recent of these whimsical and absurdist "actions musicales", as he calls them, dates back to 1988: "These were performances of electroacoustic music with actors. Michel Chion [the noted French electroacoustic composer and writer] took part in one of them: he played a type of flute and did a performance on stage in which he responded to the sounds coming out of the loudspeakers. I also staged another one in which the actors were dressed up in costumes fitted with a loudspeaker. They had a little amplifier and they could make sounds themselves by scratching their microphone. And these sounds [appeared] to emerge from their bodies! I must have done about five of these 'actions musicales'. I found it really interesting."
Musique concrète set out to emphasise the intrinsic value of sounds, effacing their symbolic or musical significance. However, a number of composers have given an added dimension to their work by participating in the intellectual developments of their time. In Parmegiani's case, contemporary philosophical and scientific thinking play an important part in his work. "I am not interested only in music, but also in ideas that can be grafted onto it. These are the influences that nourish my pieces," he observes. For instance, he has used the stylised, poetic writings of the eminent French philosopher Gaston Bachelard as a starting point for several of his pieces: Le Present Compose explores the notion of time in musical terms – its dreamlike atmosphere is punctuated by distant hums, sudden silences, abrupt clicks and dramatic bursts of sound. But his most inspired large-scale piece is La Creation Du Monde, an epic work composed between 1982–84, which tells the story of the creation of the world. Drawing its inspiration from astrophysical phenomena as described in the works of Carl Sagan and Hubert Reeves, this visionary work is divided into three sections, "Black Light", "Metamorphosis Of The Void" and "Sign Of Life". It takes as its starting point the time before the Big Bang, and moves on to the first glimmerings of light and the earliest manifestations of life on earth, conjuring images of fiery comets, distant stars and mysterious galactic phenomena.
Parmegiani's reserved demeanour and cautious, occasionally pedantic conversational style no doubt go some way towards explaining why his name means little to the public at large. However, that hasn't prevented him from influencing a host of younger electroacoustic composers, not to mention several current Electronica producers. He is genuinely surprised when I tell him that his work has had an impact on groups such as Autechre (who summed up their year in the The Wire 167 with the words: "Bernard Parmegiani - fuckin' 'ell!"). "I must admit that I don't listen to Techno or pop music," he replies. "I know that there were a few interesting experiments a while back, by German groups such as Kraftwerk, and at the time of Pink Floyd, but I don't know how these groups have evolved. A certain type of music can be interesting at a certain period in time, but then it can stagnate and three years later it will no longer be of any interest."
He is less dismissive of contemporary classical music: "It is undeniable that it has influenced electroacoustic music and vice versa, because you find composers of instrumental music whose method of writing bears similarities to electroacoustic music, even people like Boulez, or younger composers like Dusapin. I sometimes feel close to classical music, but it's really an entirely different world. Their ideas are different, and so is their very conception of music."
Parmegiani nonetheless borrows freely from these genres. In Du Pop A L'Ane he superimposed or followed up selected extracts from classical composers such as Messiaen with fragments of jazz or pop music. "For instance, I superimposed a fragment of Pink Floyd over an extract from one of Stravinsky's works, and it really worked – you'd have thought they were made for each other!" he enthuses.
His own approach to music is intuitive, in as much as he uses neither sketches nor diagrams: "When I create sounds for a work I am improvising in a way. But it doesn't remain improvisation, because afterwards I go over what I have done and touch it up. Whereas when Michel Portal [the French jazz musician] improvises, that's it, he can't do it over again." Such experimentation nonetheless plays an important part in Parmegiani's work: “It can make you change direction all of a sudden. You set out to do something and then you end up with something [else] which is really interesting but doesn't fit in with your original idea. And that can be a problem because you have to choose [whether] to keep it or set it aside. It happens to me all the time, which means that I end up with sufficient material for another three pieces."
Prolific as ever despite his age, Parmegiani is bursting with novel ideas, but at the same time he has never wavered in his attachment to musique concrète unlike Schaeffer, who subsequently turned away from his momentous discovery, claiming that it was not music. Today, Schaeffer's brilliant, if domineering personality continues to overshadow his disciples at the GRM, Parmegiani among them, but it's no small thanks to their patient, unrelenting labour that musique concrète and electroacoustic music have become the vibrant and powerful musical force that they are today.
Parmegiani now has his own studio in the south of France, in which he composes the greater part of his pieces. He is currently toying with the idea of creating an electroacoustic version of the Faust legend, as well as what he calls an "operap": "It would be an opera with words and texts [as in] rap," he explains. "But it would have to be done creatively and not just be an adaptation of rap, because it's a genre that doesn't evolve." - thewire.co.uk/
Bernard Parmegiani, who passed away on the 21st November, was a major figure in the development of electronic music in the post-war period, working at the GRM (Groupes de Recherches Musicales) studios of RTF (Radiodiffusion-Television Francaises), the French national broadcasting station. He had long been an admirer of GRM’s founder, head and the inventor of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer. After 3 years of working as a sound engineer for television he finally gained entry to the hallowed, tape-bedecked halls when Schaeffer invited him to join in 1959. The hierarchies in place at GRM, plus the two years training course he was obliged to take, meant that it was some time before he could get down to any serious work of his own, however. One of his first significant pieces was Violostries, which he composed in 1962 for the violinist Devy Eplih. It set Eplih’s playing against his own tape manipulations of violins sounds, and set the pattern for his fascination with the electroacoustic blending of natural and synthetic or transformed sounds. This early work shares the stringency of much post-Webern modernist music of the time. But Parmegiani was to develop a more natural and sonically sensual approach as his style matured. Lengthy pieces such as De Natura Sonorum (1975) and La Creation du Monde (1982-4) evoke the sounds of the natural world or of the cosmos, and have passages which create a sensation of rapid movement or kinetic, molecular flux.
De Natura Sonorum is an encylopaedic collection of sounds which are subjected to microscopic study, but the music never becomes dry or clinical. The eleven sections are like a taxonomical division of sounds into distinct compartments. There are the struck sounds of cymbals and bells; echoing sounds and sounds with little reverberant afterlife; high pure pitches and low bass rumbles; whispering, susurrant sounds and squelchy or fiery ones. These sounds are subject to transformations and metamorphoses which highlight hidden connections between seemingly wholly disparate qualities. The division between the natural and the artificial becomes difficult to distinguish, and the nature of the sounds analysed, compared and reconfigured frequently end up resembling the sounds of nature. We hear the sonorities of air, fire, water and rumbling earth. A rich drone is filled with the humming pulse of abundant life and the final section is composed of the descending whistles of electronic tones sounding like birdsong (some birds indeed having the uncanny ability to produce calls which sound electronic).
La Création du Monde sets out with the modest ambition of creating a sound picture of the formation of the universe, the Earth and the emergence of life. It’s a creation story informed by Carl Sagan and his popularisation of cosmology rather than by any religious origin myths. But there is something distinctly mythic about its poetic evocation of cosmic forces and the poetic language used to cue us to the stages of creation we’re witnessing: Lumière Noire (black light), Moins L’infini (before the infinite?). Métamorphose Du Vide (transformation of the void) and Jeux De Configurations (play of forms). This grandly Romantic programmatic narrative makes it clear that Parmegiani saw his music in terms of creating vivid, widescreen pictures in the listener’s head. The section headed Instant 0 (ie the big bang) presumably lent its name to the Instant 0 studio which Stereolab set up in France, where they recorded their Instant 0 in the Universe EP. The music of La Creation du Monde is full of the sounds of rushing, colliding objects and roiling, elemental motion which whirl around and create a sense of space and expanding dimensionality, placing the listener at the very heart of the unfolding cosmic processes. It’s a great headphone experience, and would be amazing with a corresponding planetarium show, or something resembling one of Iannis Xenakis’ Polytope arrangements of light and ritualistic spectacle.
The same could be said for Chronos, which comprises three separate pieces created for the RTF, and which uses a more familiar palette of electronic sounds. The title of the lengthiest piece, L’Oeil Écoute (the eye listens), hints at the synaesthetic effects which the music can induce in the mind’s eye. The train sounds with which it opens could be seen as a tribute to Pierre Schaeffer, whose own Etude aux Chemins de Fer, the opening section of his Etudes de Bruits, the foundation work of musique concrete, took its sound sources from recordings of trains made at the Batignolles station in Paris. Chronos was one of two LPs of Parmegiani’s music released in the Philips Prospective 21e Siecle series, the other containing Violostries alongside Bidule en Ré and Capture Éphemère, pieces from the late 60s. In their reflective silver foil covers with eye-dazzling op-art designs, these are highly desirable objects for the record collector, and Parmegiani’s work sits in proudly shimmering glory alongside that of his GRM colleagues Iannis Xenakis, François Bayle, Pierre Henry and the father figure Pierre Schaeffer.
Parmegiani at GRM with Pierre Schaeffer and Iannis XenakisParmegiani’s portrayal of his music in poetic, narrative and visual terms makes it more approachable than some of the more hardline musical abstractionists of the time. He was also open to collaborations which took him outside of the academy (or the radio studio) and made connections with the currents of experiment and exploration running through various forms of music in the late sixties. His pieces Du Pop À L’Âne (1969) and Pop'ecletic (1968) are musical collages, harking back to his youthful love of making visual collages. They use fragments of the pop and rock music of the day alongside extracts of pieces of classical and modern music, which emerge from merge back into Parmegiani’s electronic soup. In Du Pop À L’Âne, The Doors’ Spanish Caravan and When the Music’s Over are counterpointed by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with Jim Morrison’s climactic yelp also deflated by what sounds like the lengthy uncoiling of a single tone in Stockhausen’s Kontakte. Even earlier electronic sounds are unearthed through Parmegiani’s incorporation of Ondes Martenot glides from Messiaen’s music. Pop'ecletic extracts various elements from Pink Floyd’s Piper At the Gates of Dawn: a bass line fro Lucifer Sam, a one chord guitar thrash from Astronomy Domine, a chordal organ crash from Matilda Mother and indeterminate sounds from Interstellar Overdrive. He also uses the phased organ and guitar from the instrumental intro to the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake as a recurring motif. He evidently liked this sound, since it also crops up in Du Pop À L’Âne and L’Oeil Écoute. The juxtaposition of different musics served to highlight just how much interaction there was between them at this time. Pop and rock musicians were drawing from the ideas of avant garde composers, and the less insular of these composers (Parmegiani amongst them) were also tuning in to these new and innovative collisions of the popular and the experimental. Later musicians filled with a similar border hopping spirit were also inspired by Parmegiani’s refusal to be bounded by musical compartmentalisation. I first heard Pop’eclectic as part of a mix on the old website of the band Broadcast, and the collagist collision and merging of disparate elements was a distinctive part of their style, reaching an experimental peak on their Witch Cults of the Radio Age collaboration with The Focus Group.
This openness on Parmegiani’s part led to all kinds of collaborations. In this, he was similar to his GRM colleague Pierre Henry, and as a result, both composers have reached a far wider modern audience than many of their contemporaries. He worked with the Third Ear Band on a performance at the Round House in 1970, and with a quartet of French free jazz musicians on the piece Jazzex in 1966. This was a kind of feedback loop which involved him recording and transforming their sounds, the resultant tape of which they would further improvise over. Et Après, from 1973, is another meeting with an improvising jazz musician, this time Michel Portal, who plays over Parmegiani’s tape of treated bandoneon sounds.
This collaborative spirit extended into the sphere of the screen arts. He produced a number of soundtracks for TV and cinema over the years, including A, a short 1965 film by the Polish animator Jan Lenica, and his fellow countryman Piotr Kamler’s remarkable 1969 animation Le Labyrinth. For this, Parmegiani produced a study in vocal sounds, ranging from Tibetan and football terrace chants to cries and whispers. It’s completely sympathetic to the images it accompanies, and adds greatly to the nightmarishly claustrophobic quality of the film, the sense of being watched and commented upon at all times. He also provided the soundtrack for a film by another Polish animator, Walerian Borowczyk. His Jeux des Anges (1964) is a chill, bleak piece of surrealism which clearly evokes the spirit of the concentration camps set up in Poland by the Nazis. Parmegiani’s music draws on chants sung in those dark places, and begins with more train sounds, which in this context take on a terribly ominous cast. He worked again with Walerian Borowczyk on his early 80s movie Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes.
Parmegiani also made a few films of his own, perhaps drawing on his own performance art background (he was even a mime for a while, the progression from that to composer/constructor of musique concrète something which probably only a Frenchman or woman could pull off). The dual-language title of his 1973 short Das Augehort /L’Ecran Transparent reflects the fact that this was a joint venture between the German WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) radio station and RTF. WDR had its own Studio for Electronic Music, set up in 1951, the same year that the GRM had come into being. Their had been significant hostility between the two in the early days, when they were passionately advocating different approaches to this new musical art. But by 1973, with electronic sounds widely disseminated across the whole spectrum of music and no longer the purview of small technocratic coteries in state-sponsored laboratories (or maverick musician/engineers in their attics or back garden sheds), such bitter aesthetic and ideological divides seemed retrospectively foolish (must their always be only one way of doing things?) The film marries image with music and experiments with new video techniques, much as Frank Zappa did in the otherwise utterly different 200 Motels. Paul Valjean appears at the start as a sort of proxy Parmegiani (he’s even got the beard), bouncing between the walls of the screen liked a ‘trapped in a box’ mime, talking about the ‘electronic human’ and speaking the word ‘information’, which is then echoed, repeated and layered in the manner of Steve Reich’s tape loop phasing piece Come Out To Show Them. It sounds like something broadcast from the speakers placed around The Village in The Prisoner. It’s a remarkable short film, well worth watching. You can also hear a number of Parmegiani’s pieces, including Violostries and De Natura Sonorum (the opposite poles of apprentice work and mature masterpiece within his oeuvre), and Pop'eclectic over at ubuweb. Lie back, open your ears and let all the sounds of the universe flood in.
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