Some music should be as boring as posible

Éliane Radigue - seen above - has died at the age of 94. Writing in 2014 I explained how her Trilogie de la Mort is an intense exploration of the ragged edge of classical music that questions spatial conventions with its immersive sound, and which reaches beyond music into infrasound. At almost three hours duration and with extended periods of virtual stasis, Trilogie de la Mort challenges accepted concepts of musical development. 

The huge influence of Éliane Radigue is shown by the breadth of the tributes, from DJ Mag, through the Guardian, to the usual lazy and accentless Slipped Disc acknowledgement. Éliane Radigue's transcendent, unique and fearless music means a lot to me. So, as my tribute, I am republishing some of the Overgrown Path posts that over the years featured this fearless music innovator.  

                                  Some music should be as boring as possible: May 2014

I began to understand that night, for the first time, the inner usefulness, the psychological value, of the Terrible Deities painted for meditation purposes on the walls of the gompas. I saw that in their frank portrayal of the horror of anger, desire, greed, and lust for power, they do not merely terrify the onlooker, they give him an opportunity to confront those parts of his energies which he is repressing, to confront, understand and master them, to turn them [...] into a power to heal.

That extract is from Andrew Harvey's Journey in Ladakh. The sixteenth or seventeenth century thangka seen above shows a heruka, a wrathful male deity, and comes from a temple in Ladakh. Éliane Radique's electronic masterpiece Trilogie of Mort is inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Kyema, the first part, represents the six stages of the intermediate state of bardo between life and death. The second part, Kailasha, evokes an imaginary pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy mountain of Kailash, and the third, Koumé, is a syncretic exploration of reincarnation. Trilogie de la Mort is an intense exploration of the ragged edge of classical music that questions spatial conventions with its immersive sound, and which reaches beyond music into infrasound At almost three hours duration and with extended periods of virtual stasis, it challenges accepted concepts of development. This follows the approach of the Tibetan Master, Trungpa, who taught that some meditation should be as boring as possible, because in intense boredom all our habitual responses and concepts are dissolved.

                                             All kinds of musical magic: August 2017

Only within can you find the answer. The Divine is what we call the macro, and we are the micro. The goal is to merge the two into one. That is the goal and the answer.

This quote is paraphrased from Piers Moore Ede's All Kinds of Magic: A Quest For Meaning In A Material World. My photo shows Éliane Radique; as the sleeve note for the Imprec label CR release of her Triptych explains, after the premiere of Adnos I in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Éliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned to Paris, she began to explore this spirituality in depth, which slowed her musical production up until 1978. Triptych marks her return to composition, and draws its inspiration from "the spirit of the fundamental elements", water, air, fire, earth....Éliane Radigue likes to add that this has often been useful to her in her moments of research and transitions.

Éliane Radique is one of many women musicians who are still shamefully overlooked. Much more work is needed to give them their rightful place in the musical pantheon. But advocacy based on the context and merit of their music and not based solely on their gender is needed to achieve this. 

                                                    Awakening the inner analogue: March 2012

Digital culture's hatred of ambiguity was the theme of a post in March last year and since then the search for my inner analogue has led me to the realm between the known and unknown recognised in Sufism as barzakh or the intermediate world, and on to that celebrated guide to the intermediate states the Bardo Thödol Chenmo, aka the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Trilogie de la Mort (Trilogy of the Dead) is a three part work created by French composer, wife of maverick sculptor Arman and Buddhist practitioner Éliane Radique, seen above. The trilogy was created between 1985 and 1983 using an analogue ARP 2500 synthesizer. Part one, 'Kyema', is inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead and invokes "the six intermediate states that constitute the existential continuity of the being". This is followed by 'Kailasha' which portrays an imaginary pilgrimage around Mt. Kailash, the sacred mountain in Tibet. The concluding section 'Koumé' evokes reincarnation but extends it beyond Buddhism in an apocalyptic climax akin to Messiaen's L'Ascension without smells and bells.

In a comment on my post 'If you dig Led Zeppelin try this Janáček' music therapist Lyle Sanford recalled the "amazing organ part that was as mind bending as anything in the pop/rock world of the time - or before or after for that matter" of the Glagolitic Mass heard on a 60s LP and the Trilogie de la Mort inhabits the same stomach churning bass registers. With extended drones and pulses this three hour epic is more sonic experience than music - but isn't the ultimate goal of music to be a sonic as well as emotional experience? We are fortunate to have a CD release of the trilogy and a powerful amplifier and extended range speakers produce a truly out of body experience - low frequencies are omnidirectional so the speakers no longer seem to be the sound source, but instead the very walls and ceiling emanate cosmic vibrations. The Arab philosopher and astronomer al-Kindi believed objects and beings in the universe possessed radiations that affected other beings, and before dismissing cosmic vibrations as mystical babbling remember that in empirical science Bell's theorem tells how one subatomic 'object' can instantly affect another particle no matter how physically distant the two particles are.

All credit to independent label Experimental Intermedia for releasing Trilogie de la Mort as a 3 CD set in 1998. The endearingly titled Arcane Candy declared Éliane Radigue's trilogy "a beautiful, moving and perfectly rendered minimal epic" to which I can only say amen, or rather om.

                                                        Taking the one seat: July 2019

In the note for his CD transfer of Éliane Radigue's Transamorem-Transmortem the composer and sound artist Emmanuel Holterbach explains the importance of media formats in the evolution of new music.

In their original form, Éliane Radigue's works are magnetic tapes. After being played a few times in public, the tape disappears to its case until a release proposal makes it available again through a disc.
During this period Éliane Radigue's compositions became fairly long, some lasting over an hour. Because the tracks could not be edited for some obvious reasons, a vinyl release was unthinkable. It was only in the 90s, with the advent of the CD format, that the long compositions of Éliane Radigue were made available (with the exception of the Song of Milarepa LP on Lovely Music, a work already divided into multiple movements and thus able to be fit onto two sides of an LP). For these reasons, the work of Éliane Radigue remained virtually unknown for twenty years - from the 70s to the 90s.

That note was written in 2010 and it is a tragedy that in the subsequent years the arrival of open-ended music delivery by streaming has not been exploited to bring unorthodox compositions such as those of Éliane Radigue to a wider audience. In fact the opposite has happened, with cut and paste mixtapes and playlists becoming the preferred mode of music consumption. The 67 minute Transamorem-Transmortem could have been conceived for surround sound home cinema systems, with Éliane Radigue explains the role of the Doppler effect in it as follows:

This monophonic tape should be played on 4 speakers placed in the four corners of an empty room. Carpet on the floor. The impression of different points of origin of the sound is produced by the localization of the various zones of frequencies, and by the displacements produced by simple movements of the head within the acoustic space of the room.

As explained in previous posts, Éliane Radigue's music is heavily influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. Her vision for Transamorem-Transmortem resonates with this teaching called 'taking the one seat' from the great teacher of the South Asian Theravada Buddhist tradition Ajahn Chah:

Just go into the room and put one chair in the centre. Take the one seat in the room and put one chair in the centre. Take the one seat in the centre of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.

Ajahn Chah's teaching applies far beyond Éliane Radigue's eclectic music. Her compositions are by no means easy listening and they sit far beyond any accepted comfort zones. But today the concept of taking the one seat and just listening as music from beyond accepted comfort zones arises and passes is an alien one. Instead the selective technologies of our binary culture allow infinite personalisation, customisation and filtering. Which is why, despite the immense potential of streaming and other new digital technologies, the abstruse sound worlds of Éliane Radigue and other deserving composers remain virtually unknown. And it is why we are losing the war against digital sleep.

                        More than one way to challenge music's comfort zones: January 2019

Surveying recent commissions for the BBC Proms and elsewhere shows that new classical music is getting shorter. The cynical explanation is that these brief commissions are simply token gestures that avoid challenging music comfort zones for any longer than absolutely necessary. A less cynical view is that shorter durations are a reflection of shortening attention spans. The explanation is probably a combination of both these factors; but whatever the reason the marginalisation of long form contemporary music is a disturbing trend.

John Cage is revered, but, perversely, we do not practise what he preached. He famously declared that “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all”. But in today's online culture, if we find something boring after ten seconds, we simply click away to find something that delivers the holy grail of instant gratification. This preeminence of what Buddhists call the monkey mind means important long form music is being overlooked, because our cultural conditioning now automatically prompts the judgement that short is good and long bad.

Two masters of long form music are seen at work in the two images. The one above is a still from a one hour eleven minute video of a 2014 live performance by Robert Rich broadcast on KFJC 89.7 FM at Foothill College, in Los Altos CA - view the YouTube video via this link. Below is a still from a documentary portrait of Éliane Radigue. Her two hour forty-nine minute composition Trilogie De La Mort can be heard via this link.

The music of both Éliane Radigue and Robert Rich has been influenced by Buddhism. Non-duality is central to both Buddhism and to other perennial wisdom traditions. The difficult to grasp concept of non-duality can be illustrated by the metaphor of a glass that is either half full or half empty. An individual decides which of these descriptions applies to a particular situation and then bases their behaviour on that decision. For instance, when listening to a piece of music a glass half full judgement welcomes the work to the listeners comfort zone, while a half empty judgement consigns it to oblivion in the 'too challenging for comfort' trash bin. But in reality, and this is the non-dualist view, the glass is both half empty and half full. In music terms the work exists both inside and outside the listeners comfort zone. Or in other words, the concept of comfort zones is a profoundly unhelpful illusion.

The teaching that after thirty-two minutes repetitive music is no longer boring can be extended to posit that after thirty-two minutes any challenging music becomes significantly less challenging. On average U.S. adults spend three hours and 48 minutes a day on computers, tablets and smartphones. Devoting 32 minutes of that time - just 14% of total screen time - to exploring long form music via the two links above is a small price to pay for exploring the seductive world of non-duality.