Éliane Radigue
Asymptote Versatile
UK AMGEN 012 CD (2025)
Rhodri Davies production of a world premiere of this particular composition by the great Éliane Radigue, and it took place at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 20213.
It would be nice to think the music of Éliane Radigue is beginning to gain wider understanding and acceptance, though I have no idea why I say this. She died in February 2026, and it’s often the doom of many an innovator that recognition starts to come their way after their death. Maybe Radigue’s association with “minimalism” of the New York school ticks a few boxes with some; maybe others see her story as a feminist struggle, given her early start in the 1950s with the then male-dominated world of French musique concrète. Other listeners may find a way in through her powerful spiritualism; in the 1970s this French catholic turned to Buddhism, which in turn influenced Trilogie de la Mort, a monumental work fit for meditational uses, which is also highly regarded as a major ARP synthesizer work, plus it’s got the touching emotional dimension of “last words of a mother to her son”.
Today we’ve got another aspect of the work of this major compositional figure, an aspect wholly unknown to myself. Asymptote Versatile dates from 1963-64, from a time when Radigue was still quite young and living in New York, and possibly exchanging ideas with the “big Kahunas” of the minimalism school. (If you ask me, she clobbers all of them, including La Monte Young, with this piece alone.) It’s her oldest surviving piece; I think other early works may be lost, or even destroyed by herself. Radigue was interested in mathematics when she composed this Fibonacci suite, of which I suppose Asymptote Versatile is one part. Actually it’s not even quite accurate to call it a “composition”; her work at this time was more by way of a “suggestion”, a proposal indicating possibilities – not just possibilities for music, but also for ideas. What seems to inform her mind was something about “questioning…scientific systems”, according to the booklet notes here by Julia Eckhardt.
We seem to be getting down to cases now, so I’d better mention that the score for this piece is pretty unconventional. Rather than sheet music, there are multiple transparent sheets of acetate, which have to be layered together and read in a certain way. It maps out the shape of a spiral, a logarithmic spiral. If there are underlying mathematical rules here, Radigue proposes to play with them. My head is spinning already, but I think it might mean that Asymptote Versatile can somehow trace a pathway into infinity, if the parameters are right. As Eckhardt indicates, this is quite a different way to processing mathematics than the philosophy of Tony Conrad, for instance, with his number-based tuning systems and attempts to carve micro-seconds of time into sub-atomic particles. If it’s true that La Monte Young used numbers and duration as part of his musical system, the work was still based on acquiescence with scientific principles and acceptance of facts. Conversely, Éliane Radigue challenges what might appear to be hard truths, and in finding even the smallest deviation from the expected path of a number string, she can discover and open up a new perspective.
Well, it takes some bold and inventive musicians to approach this challenging task of interpreting and performing an unheard score using these acetate sheets; step forward Rhodri Davies, the outstanding Welsh harpist, improviser, and composer of new music, plus a highly talented team of players: Xavier Charles, Bernard Gauguet, Dominic Lash, Angharad Davies, and many more, who created this beautiful realisation through 100% acoustic means in their chamber ensemble of woodwinds, strings, and brass. If it’s true that the Fibonacci sequence is indeed echoed in natural forms that contain spirals – everything from pine cones to seashells and the proportions of the human body – then I think we can hear these natural truths in the simplicity of the playing, revealing the spiral shape as honestly and clearly as possible. There’s transparency in the acetate, and transparency in the performance. Who better than Rhodri Davies to realise this; he met Éliane Radigue in Paris, conversed with her, corresponded with her, understood her ideas, took note of her intentions and wishes and has applied these lessons with maximum sympathy and truthfulness to this situation. What may at first appear like rhetoric or wishful thinking from the mouth of the composer – “It is important to remain free. With this music you should always live your freedom in the first place.” – has been transformed into a life lesson as well as a very successful framework in which the players can operate. And, I would say, a very intuitive and liberating framework; we’re some way now from Stockhausen, who with his Aus Den Sieben Tagen, imagined he could control these forces with the power of his intellect and issue his strict prose instructions to the musicians. Well, there is another way; listen in to find out more.
Rhodri Davies can take pride in his part in realising this accomplishment; few improvisers would be open-minded enough to even consider it, especially when we think of the 1970s and narrow-minded purists such as Derek Bailey. It is my guess that this record is very attuned to Radigue’s wishes; she surely would have approved. From 29th August 2025.