Bernard Parmegiani

There are artistic fields in which it's hard to gauge the reach of a given author's influence on those who followed. In twentieth-century music, a similar case was made for John Cage, whose legacy is measured less in concrete facts than in a body of thought with boundless potential. When it comes to electroacoustic music, however, we think instead of a group of founding fathers who were the first to discover the possibility of creating abstract music (or rather "concrete" music, to use the technical term) starting from natural sound elements. History has handed down, alongside their recordings, countless images of these sound manipulators, who literally got their hands on valves, samplers and synthesizers to give life to the sounds of the future — forerunners of a discipline that still keeps evolving today, and that we can hear as much in concert halls as, above all, in clubs.

Beyond the factions that wanted to keep the electronic branch (with Stockhausen as its figurehead) firmly separate from Pierre Schaeffer's concretist one, contemporary music would certainly not be so multifaceted and inexhaustible without the contribution of masters like the Frenchman Bernard Parmegiani, who passed away just a few days ago at the respectable age of 86.

A few years ago, together with some friends, I met him thanks to the Bologna festival Angelica, where the by-then elderly composer directed the spatialization of two of his most significant works, through a vast array of speakers arranged in a circle in the Aula Magna of the former church of Santa Lucia. It was not only my first encounter with his fervent imagination, but also one of my very first with electroacoustic sound altogether. And such an initiation could not have been better: certainly, I was quite struck by the celebrated "De Natura Sonorum" (1976), one of the masterpieces that astonishingly anticipate certain non-musical drifts still traceable today in both EAI and the most introspective noise; but I was even more intensely swept away and disoriented by the richness of sounds — and their visionary assemblage — contained in "La Création du Monde" (1996), capable of painting in space lush concretions of particles, whose dispersal through the hall's arches gave it an almost expressionistic quality, in front of which all I could do, quite simply, was close my eyes and let it germinate in my mind.

Fortunately, I soon had the chance to explore the rest of Parmegiani's output as well, since it has only recently been reissued in any substantial way: first through the all-encompassing box set released by the original INA-GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), founded by Schaeffer himself, where Parmegiani carried out studies that would prove decisive for his artistic path; and more recently in the reissues curated by the esteemed Editions Mego, whose catalogue today includes the titles "L'œil écoute / Dedans-Dehors" and the aforementioned "De Natura Sonorum". Even so, I certainly can't claim to know Parmegiani's music in depth, just as I don't believe anyone has yet fully plumbed the complexity that belongs to an innovator of his stature. All I know is that from the day that octogenarian experimenter, just a few feet away from me, brought back to life the astonishing density of his work, my curiosity for musical avant-gardes — of every kind and era — has never stopped feeding itself.

Returning to where we started, the branches of such a legacy are today so numerous and unpredictable that, indeed, no one can determine the full extent of the spiritual progeny of this master or others like him. But even if it isn't easy — or at least not immediately obvious — to discern which artists have truly "founded a school," it is far less difficult to single out those who were the first to reveal the wonders that new electronic instruments are capable of producing, when handled with skill and creativity — in a word, vision. Bernard Parmegiani was one of them, and it is only right that we remember him.

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