Composer & Synthesist Éliane Radigue Has Demised At The Age Of 94
French composer and synthesist Éliane Radigue has demised at the age of 94.
“Time, silence and space are the main factors constituting my music.”
Radigue was best known as a pioneer of drone music and a proponent of the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer. But her career stretched from the early days of musique concrète to modular music in ’70s, to her more recent collaborative acoustic compositions.
Éliane Radigue (January 24, 1932 – February 23, 2026) studied with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, pioneers of musique concrète, in the mid 1950s. Schaeffer and Henry focused on the practice of using audio tape to treat sound as something you could physically work with to create music.
While Radigue quickly moved on from the tradition of musique concrète, an appreciation that any sound could be music remained with her throughout her career.
In the early ’70s, Radigue was inspired by the generation of American composers that were treating electronics and synthesizers as a new palette for making music, including Terry Riley, Laurie Spiegel and Morton Subotnick. She soon found the ARP 2500, and it became her instrument of focus for the next 25 years. She named it ‘Jules’.
Radigue’s electronic music explores slowly evolving soundscapes, and – while it comes from a different tradition – doesn’t sound that far off from the ambient electronic music that began to emerge in the ’70s.
Here’s Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort, which premiered in 1988. It features sounds of the ARP 2500:
The meditative drones of the piece evolve, almost imperceptibly, shifting you gradually from one soundscape to another. At times, you hear pairs of oscillators, vibrating against each other. At other times, you hear soothing harmonies and shifting harmonics. Next, you may find yourself immersed in filtered noise.
One of her late electronic works, L’Île re-sonante, combines sounds of the ARP 2500 and Serge modular synthesizers with looped audio.
The work is said to be inspired by Radigue seeing her reflection in the still waters of a lake, and gives the effect of haunting vocals emerging from a still drone, and then fading away until they are imperceptible one more.
Starting around 2000, Radigue shifted her focus to acoustic instruments. While her medium changed, the music of her later era still has the same quiet, slowly shifting quality of her electronic works.
Here is Occam XXV, part of a monumental series of collaborations with acoustic musicians. It is performed by organist Frédéric Blondy at Union Chapel, on an organ built in 1877:
Brian Eno‘s definition of ambient music seems to fit these pieces – accommodating many levels of listening attention, without enforcing one over the other.
A video portrait of Éliane Radigue – in French, with subtitles – from 2006. The video captures her at work with her ARP 2500, and offers rare insight into her compositional techniques. She also discusses how she conceives of her work as a ‘musical bath’ for her listeners:
“In an era often seemingly obsessed with velocity and spectacle,” notes composer and sound designer Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), “she taught us the radical power of slowness, of patience, and attention stretched to the threshold of perception.”
