Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez
The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.
Doctoral Colloquium: Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez
TITLE:
Through Time and Space: Éliane Radigue’s Relationship to Sound
ABSTRACT:
Composer Éliane Radigue is the only French composer of her generation who is regularly cited as a pioneer of synthesizer-based electronic music. Over the six decades of her career, Radigue has been dedicated to building a body of work in which natural microbeats between frequencies replace rhythmic, or other more traditional forms of, sound organization. A significant component of my dissertation consists in documenting the electronic phase of Radigue’s career as well as her more recent collaborations with instrumentalists. However, in this presentation I show how, in my research, the record of Radigue’s life as a composer is part of a larger argument that reconsiders canonical events in the history of contemporary music through Radigue’s perspective. Analyzing the history of contemporary music through the frame offered by Radigue’s six-decade-long career offers many advantages. First, it is an opportunity to highlight the very different meanings that the notion of “composer” has taken on since the post-World War II era and, most importantly, it calls for an analysis of these conceptual shifts in terms of the gender conventions of the time. Second, I argue that Radigue’s sound, and particularly the listening mode embedded within her compositional method, continues to open a space that enables different artistic approaches.
BIOGRAPHY:
Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez is a PhD candidate in Musicologywith option in Gender and Women’s Studies atSM, where she is supervised by David Brackett.Her research focuses on the electronic phase of Éliane Radigue's career as well as on the composer's present collaborations with instrumentalists. Among other publications, Emanuelle is the author of the thematic dossier on Éliane Radigue, published on the Ircam's documentation database B.R.A.H.M.S. She is a member of the editorial board ofCircuit, musiques contemporainesand she participates in the MICA (Musical Improvisation and Collective Action, Ircam) and ACTOR (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration) research projects.