Occam Notions: Collaboration and the Performer’s Perspective in Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean

My article on the fabulous collaborative compositions of Eliane Radigue has been published in the January 2016 version of TEMPO new music journal. Abstract and link below:

After nearly 40 years of creating recorded electronic music, for the last 10 years Éliane Radigue has created music exclusively in collaboration with performers, using solely oral and aural transmission. Focusing on the details of this ‘scoreless’ working method, this article considers the performer’s perspective on Radigue’s Occam Ocean (2011–), a series of 22 infinitely combinable solos and over 20 chamber pieces. Through interviews with the performers and Radigue, a composite understanding of their collaboration is reached, focusing on the emergent ideas of virtuosity, memory, images, scores, hospitality and non-hierarchy. A typical transmission and collaboration is described, and a new lens for viewing this method is proposed, the living score. The article concludes with a brief discussion of how Radigue and her collaborators’ non-hierarchical model of collaboration may offer an alternative compositional framework.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0040298215000601

 

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