Luc Ferrari was a French composer and a founding member of RTF’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales or GRMC alongside Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Ferrari was a pioneer of electroacoustic music and musique concrete; he studied music from an incredibly young age and even his first works were freely atonal. The use of ambient recordings was a defining characteristic of his work, he used these recordings mostly by employing the use of magnetic tape; he was apparently inspired in 1954 by Edgard Varese, who used tape in a part of his ‘Deserts’, upon hearing this it had a great effect on the music that Ferrari would produce going forward. Within his work Ferrari was also heavily influenced by the work of John Cage, which can clearly be heard in his ensuing works.
Ferrari was an innovator within musique concrete, which is a type of music which makes use of recorded sounds as raw material, these sounds are obtained from recordings of human voice, musical instruments and the natural environment. Musique concrete was also groundbreaking in employing sounds created with synthesisers and digital signal processing; all of these sounds were usually modified using both tape music techniques and audio signal processing. Musique concrete compositions are notable for not being confined by the usual musical rules used in other genres, there are no restrictions pertaining to harmony, melody, rhythm, etc. It was in the 1950’s that the GRMC was founded, with Luc Ferrari being a key figure; it was also in this time that the work of the GRMC on mystique concrete was directly contrasted with pure elektronische musik which was based entirely on the use of electronically produced sound unlike musique concrete which has a large focus on recorded sounds as well. The GRMC itself was an electro-acoustic music studio which was a culmination of different individuals, including Ferrari’s, research into sound objects and the musical form of musique concrete. The original design of this studio was centred around tape recording, editing and manipulation, this included ‘tape instruments’ being built into the studio setup. This obviously fed into Ferrari’s work, with the use of tape a heavy feature within his compositions.
Ferrari’s best known composition was titled ‘Presque rien No 1, le lever du jour au bord de la mer’ which translated means ‘Almost nothing No 1, daybreak at the seashore’. For this piece Ferrari assembled fragments of daily recordings that he took in the morning in a small village called KorCula, which is a small Dalmation island. He took these recordings every morning, observing the daily repetition that would occur of certain sounds; he then took certain fragments of all of these recordings and wove them together to form this piece. During it you can hear sounds such as footsteps, hushed talking from villagers, a donkey and a truck engine, as the piece goes on you can hear the morning go on, more sounds appear as more people wake up and go about their lives, such as adults calling to playing children. The piece then quiets again, one can assume this was the part of the morning when people had left for work, and a single voice sings a folk tune, with the sound of cicadas playing alongside in the background. It paints a vivid picture of what mornings in this village were like, giving you the sense that you are really experiencing this morning, listening from a window to the sounds of the world around you.
Ferrari himself described this piece as ‘anti music’, this was a quietly revolutionary piece which was undoubtedly inspired by his encounters with John Cage. This piece was clearly influenced by John Cage’s ‘4’33’ which saw a collaborator sit at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing at all, the idea being that the audience would listen to incidental sound, breaking down what differentiates ‘music’ from ‘noise’. This piece was of course more composed than ‘4’33’ but shares the basic tenets of the idea. When Ferrari presented it to his colleagues at GRM he wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, with them stating ‘it wasn’t music’. Overall this piece was telling a story, weaving an intense tapestry of realism. The concept behind it was that everything that surrounds us is music in some way, we just have to learn to appreciate it.