Luc Ferrari

Luc Ferrari was born in Paris in 1929 and died in 2005 in Arezzo, Tuscany. A composer who films and a filmmaker who composes, he created compositions, found pieces, and films inspired by the editing techniques of film and the sequences of images from comics. After studying music analysis with Olivier Messiaen, he established the genre of musique anecdotique with the group of musique concrète, in which he organized sounds from his surroundings and nature in a poetic way. In his soundscapes, he developed unusual sound images in which the fragments of possible stories overlap, cross, and mix.
One of his best known works is the composition Presque rien No. 1 "Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer" (1967/70), in which recordings from a Yugoslavian beach made during the course of one day are spliced together to make a 21-minute brief audio piece. For this piece, the used the then new stereo technology, which allows not only for sounds on right and left but also a sense of depth.
As a highly prolific composer, he studied in his series Tautologos (1961) the principle of repetition and developed numerous compositions for various instruments, including Histoires du plaisir et de la désolation, 1979 -1981. In the 1990s, Luc Ferrari specialized in experimental radio plays and later in group improvisation.
In a series of programs entitled Les grandes répétitions ("The Dress Rehearsals" or literally, the "Big Repetitions"), in the 1960s Ferrari portrayed a series of musicians – Olivier Messiaen, Edgar Varèse, Hermann Scherchen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Cecil Taylor  – in artistic portraits that would write television history. For the recordings of his compositions Les Anecdotiques: Exploitation des concepts N°6 and Archives sauvées des eaux: Exploitation des Concepts N°1 Ferrari was posthumously awarded the Grand Prix Memoriam by the Académie Charles-Cros in 2005.

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