Facsimile scores and documents about the radiophonic work created by Luc Ferrari in 1991.
This publication around "L'escalier des aveugles" features never released before contents; including notes from the editor, full transcription of the dialogs (Spanish/French/English), historical documentation about the project, soundmap, facsimile manuscript from the composer & afterword.
Trough these 101 pages, you will have look behind the scene of this radiophonic piece—from the idea to the result.
Guided in Madrid by 6 different ladies in places they like, Luc Ferrari produces a sensitive sonic portrait of the city. Each one of the 12 movements is constructed around a small event, as part of this collection of short stories.
"At the very beginning, when I was talking about my radio play project, I had used the word "clip" to describe what I was imagining. But once I began working on it, I realized that what I was doing was a sonic metaphor for the literary technique of short story writing.
Short forms that all tell a story, or describe a situation, an atmosphere, but in a sketched-out way only. An indirect, surrealist way of story telling, full of allusions yet using realist material. It's also a way of leaving the listener (I was about to say the viewer) in anticipation, perhaps even frustrated at not getting an ending to each anecdote told.
Each novella is constructed around a small event: a sound, an atmosphere, a soundbite, a random word spoken with feeling by the voice being heard. They offer multiple paths for the audience to go down or abandon, threading in and out of one another across several different languages—the musical, the noisy, the realist, the artificial, and finally Spanish and French.
Speaking of paths, the present one is a staircase that keeps coming back, like a theme. The idea that there's a place in Madrid called The Staircase of the Blind has fascinated me, like a poetic reality, or rather a surreality. But also like a symbol of what I was doing; a composition with sounds, for the radio. And as everyone knows, radio is for those whose heads are bursting with images."
Luc Ferrari
Co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer in 1958, Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) is a pioneer and a major figure of musique concrète and electroacoustic music, soon to pave his own path of individualistic expressions of minimalist music, musical theater, field recordings, orchestral music and soundtracks.
