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“GRM veteran Beatriz Ferreyra is carrying Pierre Schaeffer’s utopian musique concrète into the future... Ferreyra manages to occupy an idiosyncratic position where she almost stands alone. Her pieces are possessed by an almost phantasmagoric intensity.”
– The WIRE
Beatriz Ferreyra has been at the forefront of electroacoustic music composition since 1963 when she joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s research assistants. She is one of very few composers still performing who was instrumental at the beginning of Schaeffer’s theories of sound objects and reduced listening techniques. She has composed commissioned works and performed around the world for some sixty years.
From 1965 until 1997 Beatriz composed tape pieces for multi-speaker performance using three or four Revox reel-to-reel tape machines at each concert. She now works on Pro Tools with GRM plug-ins but still uses the Revoxes for certain tape techniques that can’t be achieved with computer software. Beatriz discusses her music in the Schaefferian way, as a series of impulsions [sharp attacks], iteratives [repetitions], percutés [percussive hits], and trames [sustains] whilst also using her own onomatopoeic descriptions such as ‘schkllang, prrrrwip, ferrrwisssssh, takatak’ communicating sounds freely and directly as she hears them.
Her music is about movement; the movement of sounds around a performance space, or the positioning of sounds as point sources within the illusory stereo field between loudspeakers. It is also about movement within individual sounds, where each one is a composition of different shifting components and a ‘little structure’ in its own right, with its own character. She likens her sounds to a set of wooden dolls: inside each is another one, which contains another, and so on.
During her time at Schaeffer’s studios, Beatriz developed her own research project, Objets Construits, (constructed objects). These are layers of short sounds, chords made of different noises. Each layer is isolated on a separate piece of tape to analyse the relationships between components and the effect of minimal alterations in pitch, dynamics, morphology of sounds or timing on the overall perception of the chord. This was a way of thinking about sound slowly and patiently, of taking time to experiment, analyse and contemplate each manipulation, that is lost in the speedy world of vast ready-made digital sound libraries and the immediacy of save and recall buttons.
In electroacoustic music in France of the 1960s onwards, there were two approaches to the manipulation of sound using tape machines: mixage, the multi-track layering of different sounds across different tape machines; and montage, cutting and splicing recorded sounds into a collage of finely-edited pieces of tape. Beatriz prefers mixage to montage. She records the everyday sounds around her which she finds more ‘alive’ than pure electronic tones, which are ‘a little stiff’ in comparison. She can spend weeks or months recording and crafting new sounds before com-posing starts, or ‘putting-with,’ as she calls it, the articulation of sounds into a whole piece.
In her work, small, playful sounds interact like chattering creatures and merge into vast cavernous and mysterious immersive landscapes. Conventional instruments are slowed down as drones or sped up as squeaks or wails, with various glissandi in between, filtered, layered or cut into small pieces and blended with processed footsteps, engines, animals and other environmental sounds. As soon as an object of recognisable origin occurs, it quickly disintegrates into a thousand fragmented grains, morphing into new sonic shapes. The sounds follow varied rhythmic and multi-directional trajectories, rapid flicking or gentle sliding from left to right, up/down, front/ back across and around the spatial field.
These three signature pieces use snippets of speech which are gradually deconstructed to create abstract textures, interweaving vocals with percussive and sustained noises. La ba-balle du chien-chien à la me-mère [The ball of the old lady’s dog] (2001) is a playful take on the way that we speak in a childlike way to pets. A brief narrative at the start invites the listener into this ‘pet speak’ scene, with the sound of footsteps and chatter. These gradually crescendo and morph into a cacophonous swirling explosion. Deux Dents Dehors [Two teeth sticking out] (2007) is a pun on Bernard Parmegiani’s piece Dedans Dehors [Inside Outside] (1977), composed for his birthday. It takes snippets of lively vernacular and processes these into complex patterns of unintelligible and unrecognisable speech sounds, in sustained or percussive sequences. Heullas Entreveradas [Intertwined footprints] (2018) is a new commission that transforms vocal sounds into choral textures which fragment, granulate and transform into continuous whorls and tidal washes interspersed with her trademark short silences.
Beatriz’ studio is at her home deep in the rural countryside near Rouen. It is a place as quiet and remote as is possible to find. Thousands of books on astrophysics, jazz and philosophy fill the shelves and there is a whole wall full of traditional world instruments. It is her chosen place for composing, an art which she describes as ‘immersing yourself in a sound universe without limitations, free in its movements.. but with thousands of harmonious overlays’.
Notes by Jo Langton"
