SOUNDS OF NOW: ÉLIANE RADIGUE FOR ORGAN

RADIGUE – Occam XXV (45′) 

OCCAM XXI – Angharad Davies (16mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XVIII – Rhodri Davies & Dominic Lash (15mins) 

OCCAM XVII – Dominic Lash  (13mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XVII – Angharad Davies & Rhodri Davies (16mins) 

OCCAM I – Rhodri Davies (28mins) 

OCCAM RIVER XV – Angharad Davies & Dominic Lash (15mins) 

OCCAM DELTA XIV – Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies & Dominic Lash (17mins) 

 

The tenth piece in Claude Debussy’s first book of Préludes for piano is titled La cathédrale engloutie, the Sunken Cathedral. It’s a dreamy, pictorial piece, depicting a mythical Breton city swallowed by the ocean, a kind of Gallic Atlantis. What makes this short piece stick in the memory is not necessarily its vocabulary—of church bells, and watery organs—or its musical vernacular—borrowing pentatonic scales from Javanese gamelan—but its aura of sunkenness: it’s the dunking in a deep, quietly fizzing pool, in which everything moves in a new, collectively dislocated time. 

 

Water, sound, and sunkenness are ideas that the celebrated French experimental composer Eliane Radigue has returned to time and again, especially in the post-millenium creative spurt of this now 93-year-old composer. Waves form the obvious meeting point between these ideas: “We live in a universe filled with waves”, Radigue said in an interview given during the construction of Occam XXV, her piece with Frédéric Blondy: from the tiniest microwaves, to the point where our ears perceive sound, and extending to wavelengths found in the ocean. “We also come into contact with [the ocean] physically, mentally and spiritually”, she added. 

 

As well as working on a perceptual and sensual level, the link between sound and water also informs a key philosophical concept. Just as water flows seeking the path of least resistance, so the guiding mantra of Radigue’s constructions for instrumentalists—that of Occam’s Razor, the so-called parsimonious principle—is that the simplest route available is invariably the best. And so, the selection of pieces heard in this Radigue Weekend chart courses that, on paper, seem fairly simple: from deep to shallow, deep to high, broad to thin, dense to sparse, absent to present to absent again.  

 

Where the challenge comes is in what Radigue calls the “virtuosity of speed”. It’s like Paganini, but in reverse: performers require “a virtuosity of absolute control of the instrument, an extreme, subtle and delicate kind of virtuosity” when performing music that’s achingly restrained. Kate Molleson, in her book Sound Within Sound—a title which itself references Radigue’s sonic burrowing—tells of performers, so engrossed in the progression of one of Radigue’s pieces, that they’ve ‘woken up’ mid-performance, unaware as to how much time has elapsed, where they are, or who has been watching. 

 

Radigue’s music requires a certain virtuosity from the listener too: How to listen to music without event, in a musical space—and a digitised society—in which events are more abundant than ever? One key way into this unusual appreciative realm is by opening not just our ears to sound, but our bodies too. In 1974, Radigue visited her son in New York, and realised that she could no longer put a sound to the movement of her daughter-in-law’s lips. It turned out that she had lived almost fifty years with an unknown hearing impairment, something which she later realised had had a huge impact on how she sought out and shaped these slow-moving sounds. Sound, for Radigue, is something fundamentally bodily, as well as aural. And, when guiding newcomers in how to listen to Radigue, the writer Louise Gray channels Pauline Oliveros, pioneer of Deep Listening. In one of her exercises, Oliveros asks participants to “walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears”. Feel the sound, as much as you hear it. 

 

Opening the weekend is Occam XXV, for organ, premiered by Blondy at Islington’s Union Chapel in 2018. These Occam works are organic forms from their conception. Radigue, who received no formal compositional training, prefers to work with performers individually and in person. Whatever seeds they come up with germinate, and are tended to by Radigue, the constant gardener. Though these works have no score, save for some pictorial guides, this is no free improvisation either. “The difference is that you are following the vision of another person”, trumpeter (and fellow “chevalier d’Occam”—knight of Occam) Nate Woolley writes. “The vision is very clear—the water, the razor, the idea that you never return, that you are always moving forward. These are things that Éliane shapes”. 

 

Over the course of forty-five minutes, Occam XXV rumbles from the deepest reaches of the organ—from the bass sounds you feel more than hear—through to the shrillest edges of perceivable sound. To describe these pieces in reference to structural milestones is futile, though it’s amazing how much these small, quivering forms morph and contort amid a perception that nothing is moving. To listen to Occam XXV is to climb a steep, never-ending mountain facing forward, occasionally allowing yourself an about turn to marvel at just how far you’re come. 

 

The following concert features a selection of works, mostly of around the same length, for violin, harp, and double bass, in various combinations, which continue this steadfast mode of work. All these works begin with thoughts of bodies of water, though the exact sources (and any representations) are kept hidden. In Occam XXI, written with violinist Angharad Davies, a line from Woyzeck springs to mind: “You’re running around like an open razor blade. You might cut someone”. Where other Occam works have a mellower quality, the various sheer overtones of the violin—coupled with the absence of a bass register—give XXI a feeling like stacked sheets of roughly cut glass: related, separate, dangerously sharp when in contact. 

 

OCCAM XVII, with bassist Dominic Lash, features slower, less abrasive material, though these harmonic clouds blacken from their previous light grey shade. The Davies siblings join for River XVII, then split for the longest piece in this concert: the first Occam piece of the series, for solo harp, featuring the unusual technique of bowing the harp with both hands. Two bodies of water flow past each other occasionally meeting in the duo piece River XV, and Delta XIV concludes with the trio altogether. This final piece premiered in 2019; the Delta tributary series is now up to XXIII. For all their steady restraint, Radigue’s riverworks flow ever onwards, and might even be accelerating. 

 

Hugh Morris, 2025