Background

Occam Ocean is a series of 22 solos, three of which are written for electronic instruments and 19 of which are written for acoustic instruments,Footnote ⁹ as well as over 20 ensemble pieces comprised of superimpositions of the solo pieces in different combinations.Footnote ¹⁰ The solo pieces are named according to their position in the sequence (Occam I, Occam II, etc.) and the ensemble pieces are grouped by category and followed by their number in the sequence.Footnote ¹¹ According to Radigue, it was essential that there be enough solo pieces that creating all of their possible ensemble combinations could not be achieved within her lifetime.Footnote ¹²

The pieces in Occam Ocean are usually 15–30 minutes long,Footnote ¹³ in contrast with Radigue's earlier compositions, which are typically 60 minutes or more. In a personal interview, she attributed this change in length mostly to her own changing abilities in concentration.Footnote ¹⁴ The length of each work in the Occam Ocean series is not necessarily fixed, and may vary from concert to concert. Radigue comments on this that ‘there is no decision or pre-decision about the duration. It comes by itself’.Footnote ¹⁵ Her collaborators say that the flexible durations of the pieces are influenced by several variables. Dominic Lash, a double-bassist, improviser and performer, says that the piece created with him ‘seems to settle around 12 minutes or so. If anything, it's getting shorter’.Footnote ¹⁶ He goes on to say that the piece contracts and expands depending on how much he has played it. Carol Robinson, a clarinettist, composer and long-time collaborator of Radigue, says that Radigue's pieces ‘depend a lot on the room where they're being played’, and that ‘the acoustical response of a space determines how long the piece is going to be by the way it carries a sound’.Footnote ¹⁷

Radigue has never created a written or recorded score for any piece in the Occam Ocean series.Footnote ¹⁸ All pieces are transmitted orally, and any documentation associated with them serves only to provide rudimentary structural ‘scaffolding’Footnote ¹⁹ or, according to composer and bass-recorder performer Pia Palme, to aid in the recollection of specific performance techniques.Footnote ²⁰

Radigue has commented that three main images drive the Occam Ocean series. Regarding the first, she writes that she was initially inspired by a visit to the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles in 1973. There she saw a mural depicting all known wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum from largest to smallest. She was particularly struck by how few of those frequencies are audible to humans.Footnote ²¹ While Radigue immediately doodled this image onto a concert programme, she did not pursue the idea further for nearly 40 years.

Radigue had a similarly long interlude between inspiration and execution when creating Naldjorlak I, her first piece for any acoustic instrument. As the Naldjorlak series is based on the idea of yoga and the physical body, Radigue felt it was inappropriate to realise the piece solely with electronics,Footnote ²² but not only was she relatively inexperienced with the workings of acoustic instruments, she also lacked collaborators who could help her realise the characteristics that typify her music,Footnote ²³ such as the extremely slow transition between multiple sonic states. The creation of Naldjorlak was thus brought about by both Radigue and her first acoustic collaborator, cellist Charles Curtis. Similarly, before the creation of Occam Ocean, Radigue felt that confronting the complexity and infinite variability of these waves was, at the time, ‘an idea … which has to wait’.Footnote ²⁴

Describing the feeling of looking at the electromagnetic waves, Radigue says the idea felt

Her search for a way to represent the immense scope of the electromagnetic spectrum led to the second image of the series: the ocean. At the beginning of each collaboration, Radigue and her collaborators agree on an image related to the ocean, often associated with a body of water personal to one of them. These images guide the performers, ‘letting descriptive words and evocations establish a system of communication as the piece is being elaborated’.Footnote ²⁶

The third image is Occam's razor, defined in Radigue's words as the maxim of ‘simplest is best’.Footnote ²⁷ Radigue originally connected the idea of Occam's razor with the ocean by way of the science fiction novel Occam's Razor, by David Duncan, a book about which she recalls little beyond the title and the presence of a magical ocean.Footnote ²⁸ The principle of Occam's razor, named for medieval philosopher William of Ockham, states that when evaluating the possible solutions to a problem, simplicity should be preferred over complexity. Radigue states that she uses this principle prescriptively or pre-emptively to guide decisions about the work's structure during her collaboration with performers.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, Occam's razor applies during performance. When faced with the decision of whether or not to depart from the current musical idea, performers are encouraged to choose the simplest option. It should be noted that this principle does not apply to the instrumental techniques employed in the performance of the pieces. To the contrary, these techniques are often quite complex and require intense concentration and physical effort on the part of the performer.

Typical Transmission of an Occam Ocean Piece

This composite summary is based on all 11 interviews with both Radigue and her collaborators. While the details of the transmission may vary slightly from piece to piece, certain consistent themes have emerged. In almost all cases, the creation of an Occam Ocean piece begins when performers reach out to Radigue to initiate a collaboration. After an exchange of physical letters, which generally include a CD-audio sample of the performer's work, and an introductory phone call, performers agree to meet Radigue in her Paris apartment. For the most part, this collaboration does not guarantee the completion of an Occam Ocean piece, except in cases where Radigue knows the performer well and there is a specific opportunity for performance. Some performers choose to make musical preparations, others do not. In general, performers enter the collaboration with some degree of familiarity with Radigue's previous work.

Upon arriving in Paris, most performers spend one to three days with Radigue. She begins the collaboration by explaining the key tenets of the Occam Ocean series and the conceptual background of the series as a whole. Then, Radigue and the performer settle on a water-related image that will guide the work – either a photo or verbal description provided by Radigue, or the performer's own mental image of a body of water that is personally important to them. These images inform the work's structure, mood and concept.

With their images in mind, the performers then improvise on their instruments under Radigue's guidance, often attempting to find novel performance techniques. After this, Radigue often conducts what she likes to call her ‘shopping’: selecting sounds from the improvisations that she deems appropriate for the work.Footnote ³⁰ Generally, once the sound world of the piece is established, performers leave Radigue's apartment and practice individually. When they return, Radigue and the performer refine the work's structural and sonic aspects. This phase of the collaboration sometimes concludes after one meeting; however, the process can also span multiple meetings over the course of several days, months or years.

At some point, Radigue proclaims her part in the collaboration to be finished, and the piece ready for performance. Sometimes, there is an interim stage where the performers demonstrate the piece to small groups of friends or colleagues before the piece's public premiere. Often, performers subsequently work with Radigue in the creation of ensemble pieces, which generally comprise a combination of superimposed sections from solo works. Radigue considers Occam Ocean solo pieces to belong to the performers, and advises them that they can transmit ‘their’ work to another performer, should they choose to do so.Footnote ³¹

The Virtuosity of Forgetting and Remembering

Virtuosity is a subject often associated with the music of Éliane Radigue. It pervades many accounts of her work, from the extreme concentration and duration of listening required of her audiences,Footnote ³² to her intensely focused way of working to create electronic music,Footnote ³³ to the high level of instrumental technique possessed by her collaborators. Regarding Occam Ocean, Radigue comments that this virtuosity is ‘not the virtuosity of the speed of playing, but of special concentration’.Footnote ³⁴ She asks performers to forget traditional instrumental techniques as well as notions of complexity and control over musical material. In their place, she fosters a meditative approach to the continuation of singular ideas and explores new techniques based on controlling the natural properties of the instruments, such as resonance and vibration. Carol Robinson notes that because of ‘the idea of this incredible [instrumental] control, there's really little music that's so difficult. I hadn't done anything quite like it before’.Footnote ³⁵ Julia Eckhardt, a violinist and improviser, says that Radigue is ‘searching for a maximum of concentration and exactitude’.Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, the very nature of the score-less oral transmission requires performers to be solely responsible for the memorization of their pieces to facilitate later performances and further transmission to future performers.

For wind players, the special concentration mentioned by Radigue seems to involve the quality and speed of breath necessary to play Occam Ocean. Pia Palme says that to play Radigue's music she ‘had to totally relax and integrate the breath as an organic movement’. She goes on to say that, while wind players are typically taught to breathe in as efficiently as possible between phrases, ‘it just doesn't work with [Radigue's] pieces. It's from the gesture and the movement, it totally interrupts the flow. I found I had to really not be worried about the silence caused by the “in” breath’.Footnote ³⁷

Nate Wooley, a trumpet player and improviser, says that the challenge involved in playing Radigue's music is both physical and mental. He notes that, on a physical level, it is ‘extremely difficult on the trumpet to come from nothing and go back to nothing’, and on a mental level, ‘understanding “OK, now I move to this next thing, this is the perfect time” is really tricky as well. That's the virtuosity of the piece’.Footnote ³⁸

When working with strings, Radigue is highly concerned with tuning and resonance. In her interview with Bernard Girard, Radigue recounts a specific anecdote about working with violinist Silvia Tarozzi. Radigue says that while working with Tarozzi, she had to convince the violinist not to tune in the same way as when playing traditional Western classical music, and instead to try and find the ‘best threshold of resonance’ of her violin by tuning the strings in accordance with the weather and the acoustics of the surrounding space.Footnote ³⁹

Regarding this departure from fundamental aspects of most Western classical music making, Radigue says that

Robinson echoes these ideas of forgetting technique, saying that Radigue is ‘asking an instrument to do things that it can do but doesn't necessarily [do], and asking a musician to do things that they were often taught not to do’.Footnote ⁴¹ Angharad Davies, a violinist well-versed in both classical and improvisational music, says that playing Radigue's music is ‘very different … compared to [learning] a conventional piece of music’, for the reason that it requires her to ‘unlearn a natural instinct to want to create something or to stick to something’.Footnote ⁴²

What is radical about the idea of forgetting is that many works of Western classical music require performers to add new techniques to their practice, or to improve the facility with which they can switch between traditional techniques. In contrast, Radigue asks each player to investigate deeply one or two fundamental aspects of their instrument, and to achieve a high level of control over the instrument's natural sonic properties. In this way, the instrumental control that she asks of her collaborators mirrors her own slow control of microphones in relation to speakers in her early feedback works.Footnote ⁴³

In a similar way, as audiences we may also employ the act of forgetting while listening to Radigue's music. Because her pieces stretch out over vast lengths of time and contain relatively little traditional musical development, rather than comparing the present musical moment to what has happened previously we begin to sense the past and present of the music as one and the same: a mood or space to inhabit and explore. Radigue says that this is ‘another mystery about music, that … time [is] whole at every moment. I mean, the past, is there in the present, and future is there in the present, all the three times are just one’.Footnote ⁴⁴

It should be noted that for two of the interviewed musicians the idea of resisting traditional performance practices did not arise. Robin Hayward, a tubist who developed and performs on a unique microtonal tuba, says that ‘this wasn't one of those pieces where I had to choose techniques that felt external to what I do in any way’.Footnote ⁴⁵ One might surmise that this feeling of naturalness may come from the fact that Hayward had developed the microtonal tuba shortly before working with Radigue, so there was very little traditional technique to ‘forget’.

Intentionally to forget techniques requires one first to know them intimately. It was for this reason that Ryoko Akama chose not to collaborate with Radigue using the shamisen they had originally discussed, but rather an EMS synthesizer. Akama, a noted composer, improviser and performer on electronic instruments, says that ‘Éliane may have wished it, but I was not confident enough to make a stable texture by bowing that Japanese instrument, the shamisen’.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is important to note in this statement that Akama was aware of the virtuosity required to play Radigue's music, and, feeling that she lacked an advanced level of technique on the shamisen, she instead opted to collaborate with Radigue using her primary instrument, the synthesizer.

Radigue's Occam Ocean necessitates a radical forgetting of previously learned technique, leading players to build new techniques in order to embrace and alter fundamental properties of their instruments. These new techniques often become integrated into the performer's improvisational or compositional practice, profoundly affecting the way they interface with their instrument. But while Radigue's music requires her musicians to forget their training, it simultaneously asks them to remember the musical content of the pieces themselves. According to Robin Hayward, this results in a piece that is ‘never a static thing that's finished in the sense that it's set in stone’, due to the fact that it is ‘residing in [his] memory, when [he's] not playing it, and it's residing in the collective memories of people who've heard it’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Living Scores

Images – either tangible or imagined – form an essential component of Radigue's collaborative working method, which is otherwise based entirely on oral communication. Through the use of images, Radigue and her collaborators share a common starting point for their creative process. Images serve the unique function of allowing them to explore and discuss fundamental aspects of the piece before they begin using musical materials; in a sense, this allows them to model the structure and mood of the piece using metaphor. Images ‘[provide] the essential, letting descriptive words and evocations establish a system of communication as the piece is being elaborated’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In contrast, the performers' notes on specific fingerings and structural details become ephemera or simple aids for memory.

In the earlier parts of the Occam Ocean series it was Radigue, rather than her collaborators, who chose the images that underpin each piece. For these works, Radigue used either descriptions of real places that she had previously visited, or images taken from magazines. Carol Robinson says of the image that inspired Occam III – the first work she performed in the Occam Ocean series – that ‘in this case, [Radigue] chose it. Later on, she let people choose their own’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Radigue began asking collaborators to envision their own, personal images of water as the foundation for the piece. Nate Wooley says that he ‘grew up on the Columbia River, which is between Oregon and Washington, and so I immediately said that's the river I'd like to use’.Footnote ⁵¹ According to Dominic Lash, ‘she wanted me to come up with a particular image related to the sea. Which would be how I make a start, and that was it as far as the score goes'.Footnote ⁵²

For some performers, images serve both as a constant reminder of the structure of the piece and as a mental space that they can inhabit during performance. For others, the image served only as a creative device in the process of making the piece with Radigue and, despite forming an essential ingredient in the collaboration, later faded into abstraction. Robin Hayward says that he ‘did have [a] harbour in mind when [he] was improvising, it was very intuitive’, but when asked if he still uses it to perform the piece, he says it has ‘disappeared completely’.Footnote ⁵³

In contrast, for a few performers, images did not play a significant part in their collaboration with Radigue. Charles Curtis says that he ‘didn't feel a need for [an] image’, going on to explain that he had an idea of the musical material and structure of his collaboration with Radigue before they agreed on an image.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the case of Robinson's collaboration on her second Occam Ocean piece, Occam XVI, she had done ‘so many of them by that point, [she] didn't have to follow the idea of a place as much’, rendering the piece ‘more abstract’Footnote ⁵⁵. For Ryoko Akama's piece, a first trial with an image led to a composition that Radigue deemed external to the Occam Ocean series. Akama says that after discarding the initial image

While other composers have used images as scores, what makes Radigue's image-scores unique is that they are never committed to physical documents and, as such, remain only in the memories of Radigue and her collaborators. Emmanuel Holterbach writes that by working orally and aurally, Radigue and her collaborators bypass any intermediate media (such as written scores in Western classical music) and communicate entirely in sound, which, due to her background in electroacoustic music, is how Radigue has always worked.Footnote ⁵⁷

In the two interviews where performers mentioned Radigue showing them tangible images – a picture from National Geographic Magazine in the case of Angharad Davies and a HokusaiFootnote ⁵⁸ wave for Rhodri Davies – the physical image was not available after it was first shown to them. Thus, despite some performers' initial access to a visible image, all worked primarily from memory during their collaboration with Radigue. This ephemerality allows the images to fade deep into the structure of the works, and prevents them from being interpreted literally. This also speaks to Radigue's opinion that music is the only language that can truly communicate the abstract.Footnote ⁵⁹

Radigue gives her collaborators the option to discuss their images with the general public, and a few, such as Robinson, have done so.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, Radigue feels that, as an audience, we should not listen for a distinct narrative within her music. She says that she does not want to put the images in front of people directly because she does not want ‘people wondering and trying to see the image. It's just like if you would give people the score, to follow when listening to the piece. It's our score’.Footnote ⁶¹

Despite the absence of written scores in Radigue's work, many of her collaborators (as well as the composer herself) make notes and audio recordings during their creative sessions. But both Radigue and the performers with whom she works seem reluctant to call this documentation anything but an aid in collaboration. On the subject of recording the working sessions with Radigue, Rhodri Davies says that

Carol Robinson, who has performed Occam Ocean pieces on both the birbyne and bass clarinet, says that she ‘did sometimes record, because certain elements are so subtle that even if you're writing down fingerings and indicating which note is beating, notation is not sufficient … the musician's receptive state surpasses the impossible complexity needed for a written score’.Footnote ⁶³ This sentiment is shared by Nate Wooley, who comments that

Angharad Davies says that recordings and notes are like ‘tiny little aids’, and that despite their utility she doesn't think one could recreate the pieces from them alone.Footnote ⁶⁵ The lack of a physical trace of the fundamental score-images poses potential problems for the future propagation of the works. In Frieze magazine, Paul Schütz asks what might be left from this ephemeral process in a hundred years. He suggests that it might include any notes taken by the performers and Radigue, as well as recordings and instructions for the series overall.Footnote ⁶⁶ But without the fundamental aspect of the embodied information from the collaborators themselves, it would be impossible to preserve the pieces in a fashion playable to others. Charles Curtis remarks that recordings may even go against the very fabric of Occam Ocean itself, saying that

Because neither the image nor the notes and recordings are sufficient to transmit the piece to new performers, the piece must be said to reside within the performers themselves, rather than in external documents. Rhodri Davies says that the pieces are

Existing pieces in the Occam Ocean series may one day be played by new performers, though as far as is known this has not yet occurred. Radigue states, however, that any future performers must be taught and approved by the original collaborator and not by Radigue, herself, as the performer is ‘the only one who can transmit that piece’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet, these pieces lie, at the present time, outside the framework of Radigue's conception of oral tradition, which she describes as involving the rigorous transmission of musical information between two performers: a teacher and a student. As I described earlier, the creative process for pieces in the Occam Ocean series requires a collaborative, rather than didactic, relationship between Radigue and the performers, and she has said that she does not consider herself a teacher.Footnote ⁷⁰ While Radigue and the performers do collaborate orally on works in the Occam Ocean series, this process does not yet constitute an oral tradition, and will only become so when transmitted from Radigue's collaborators to new performers (and perhaps onward beyond even these new performers). Until that possible transmission, the collaborators embody all aspects of an Occam Ocean piece within themselves and are, in effect, living scores.

Home is Where the Heart Is

Radigue might be describing the dismantling of the traditionally hierarchical roles of composer and performer, allowing for a more cyclical flow of information between her and her collaborators. However, it is also important to discuss the physical location of Radigue's collaborations, her Paris apartment, and the comfort and routine it provides during the collaborative process, since many of the interviewed performers mentioned the domestic situation with Radigue as contributing significantly to the positive atmosphere of their collaboration.

Charles Curtis describes this atmosphere at length in two different publications, writing about how he essentially adopted Radigue's personal schedule during their collaboration on Naldjorlak.Footnote ⁷² While the Occam Ocean collaborations tend to occur in shorter periods (one or two days at a time instead years, in the case of Naldjorlak), performers still enter Radigue's personal space and adopt her schedule. Radigue's collaborators engage in niceties such as a ‘cup of tea, always a cup of tea, and a bit of discussion’Footnote ⁷³ as well as rituals like ‘going to her apartment and playing, having a beer, [taking] a nap on her couch and then [playing] again’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the case of Ryoko Akama, ‘one version [of the piece] made [Radigue] really upset, and then she just said “we'll get out and then get some ice cream and come back”. And then I had a really nice ice cream outside and came back, and [we were] really happy again’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Angharad Davies says that she finds Radigue a ‘welcoming and friendly person, so it's a very relaxed kind of atmosphere’, and that the end goal of these collaborations is ‘not only about music, but [also] about getting to know each other’.Footnote ⁷⁶ With such personal pieces, it is essential that Radigue know the performers as well as they know her and her music.

For Radigue, the primarily appeal of working in her apartment is that it enables her to devote her energy entirely to creating, rather than to traveling. Despite this, she is quick to mention that the way she works is completely natural to her, no matter where she is. In the few cases in which she has created Occam Ocean pieces outside of her home, she does not feel that this has compromised the collaborative process.Footnote ⁷⁷ For some performers, however, Radigue's home now represents a significant part of their mental preparation when rehearsing or performing pieces. To Nate Wooley, Radigue's home is a space to which he can return mentally and emotionally during a performance of his Occam Ocean piece. He comments that

The interactions between Radigue and her collaborators are not only warm and intimate, but also reciprocal, rather than hierarchical. Julia Eckhardt says that ‘hospitality is part of it … there is no hierarchy … it's two way communication, it's not just one way’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Robin Hayward describes the situation as follows:

In both Radigue's concept of ‘heart to heart’ transmission and Hayward's views on composer–performer relationships, the composer and performer are equated to the body and mind. Radigue places the composer and performer on equal levels, speaking the same spiritual language. Hayward instead discusses a relationship where the performer, the ‘body’, is allowed to provide feedback to the ‘head’, the composer.

This equality between composer and performer in Radigue's work is enabled by the fact that she does not have an in-depth technical knowledge of the instruments with which she works.Footnote ⁸¹ According to Charles Curtis, she ‘knows the heart better than she knows the cello’.Footnote ⁸² Traditionally, a composer might ask a performer to demonstrate or experiment with particular instrumental techniques, but this would ultimately result in the manipulation of these techniques by the composer in the formation of a definitive written score. By creating her pieces in a way that allows the performer to be the expert on their own instrument, and even to participate in choosing the structure of their piece via an agreed-upon image, Radigue embraces a working method that relies on equal contributions from both the composer and the performer.

Radigue's and her collaborator's individual processes add vital humanity to the act of creation and contain an alternate model for other composers. Radigue incorporates ‘heart’ into her collaborations by graciously hosting performers in her own home, allowing for the inclusion of daily ritual and hospitality in the compositional process. Radigue's practices erode the hierarchy found in traditional composer–performer relationships, via both her deferral to performers on matters of instrumental technique and her practice of beginning collaborations with conceptual discussions guided by images that bear an emotional significance to both Radigue and the performer. By asking performers to unlearn existing techniques rather than solely adding new ones, she expands the range of what is possible with an instrument. But, most importantly, the resultant music reflects this tireless commitment by Radigue and her collaborators involved in the creation of every performance. The sounds of Occam Ocean contain deep gravitas, untold virtuosity, flights of sonic imagination and, ultimately, a trio of hearts beating together: Radigue's, in her Paris apartment; the performer's on stage, and, gradually synchronizing, the listener's as we sink into the depths of this vast sonic ocean.