Éliane Radigue: Occam XIII, Occam River XI, Occam V
Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history.
The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail.
Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood.
Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.
Éliane Radigue (1932–2026) was a pioneering French composer of undulating continuous music marked by patient, virtually imperceptible transformations that purposively unfold to reveal the intangible, radiant contents of minimal sound—its partials, harmonics, subharmonics and inherent distortions. As a student and assistant to musique concrète pioneers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the ’50s and ’60s, Radigue mastered tape splicing techniques, but preferred the creation of fluid, delicately balanced feedback works to the spasmodic dissonance of her teachers’ music. Finding peers among minimalist composers in America, Radigue began working with synthesis in 1970, eventually discovering the ARP 2500 synthesizer, which she would use exclusively for her celebrated electronic works to come. With remarkable restraint, Radigue spent years on each piece, painstakingly assembling series of subtle, pulsating ARP recordings to be later mixed meticulously into hourlong suites of precise, perpetual mutation, including masterpieces Trilogie de la mort and Adnos I-III. In 2001, Radigue adapted an early feedback work to live performance on electric bass, Elemental II, and in 2004, with the encouragement of ongoing collaborator Charles Curtis, she permanently abandoned electronics for acoustic composition, beginning with Naldjorlak for solo cello, composed for Curtis. As within each individual work, Radigue maintained an obstinate focus throughout the flow of her career, her dedication to the materiality of sound earning her numerous accolades and ensuring her place as one of the most important composers of our time.
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval is a bassoon player who explores sound through contemporary music interpretation and electroacoustic performance. Her work engages the volatility of materials and the fragile interface with the human performer, inhabiting the threshold between instability and control. Her long-term collaborations with a handful of composers engaged in music that demands a high degree of critical interpretation have led to the creation of a significant body of solo pieces including compositions by Éliane Radigue, Jakob Ullmann, Peter Ablinger, and Alvin Lucier.
Acknowledged internationally as a performer of new and experimental music, cellist Charles Curtis has been associated with minimalist pioneer La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela since 1987, their intimate working relationship having yielded retroactive recalibrations of pieces like Young’s 1958 Trio for Strings. Curtis is also the first performer to collaborate with Éliane Radigue on a work for an unamplified, acoustic instrument without electronic support or accompaniment. This work, Naldjorlak, composed in 2004 and premiered in December 2005, is an hour-long, exhaustive enquiry into the inherent resonating properties of the cello.