Luc Ferrari

Luc FerrariLuc Ferrari has produced works that have moved away, more or less, from purely musical preoccupations, some of which could be branches of the same tree – the problem being trying to express passing ideas, sensations and intuitions through different means, observing daily life in all its reality -social, psychological or sentimental – in the form of texts, instrumental scores, electroacoustical compositions, reports, films, stage works, etc.

He was born in Paris in 1929, studied piano, and began composing in 1946. From 1952 onwards he attended the Darmstadt Summer School, where his works were performed (as well as in Paris and Cologne). He joined the Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1958, remaining until 1966, and collaborated with Pierre Schaeffer in setting up the Groupe de Recherchés Musicales (1958). He was Professor of Composition at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne from 1964 to 65. In 1965 and 1966 he produced “Les Grandes Répétitions”, a series of television documentaries with Gérard Patris on the subject of contemporary music, specifically Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hermann Scherchen and Cecil Taylor. In 1967 he was invited by the DAAD to spend a year in Berlin, and was in charge of music at the Maison de la Culture in Amiens from 1968 to 1969.

He won the Karl Sczuka Prize in 1972 for Portrait-Spiel (Production Südwestfunk, Baden-Baden) and again in 1988 for Je me suis perdu, the Prix Italia in 1987 for Et si tout entière maintenant and in 1991 for L’Escalier des aveugles. In 1989 he was awarded the Grand Prix National du Ministère de la Culture, and the following year received the Koussevitzky Foundation Prize for Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation.

In 1982 he founded the electroacoustic/ radiophonic music association La Muse en Circuit, eventually resigning in 1994. “Parcours Confus”, a retrospective of his work, was staged in The Netherlands in 1995. In 1996 he created his home studio, “Atelier post-billig”. In 1997 he undertook a lecture tour in California, returning to the American Southwest in 1998 as a roving sound-hunter for a series of radiophonic compositions for Dutch Radio entitled “Far West News”.