Luc Ferrari's Quotes

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.

I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too.

I was born in Paris, and I haven't moved, except until now - I live in the suburbs and I hate it.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

Well, first I studied piano. I wasn't very satisfied because I though my teachers were dumb... and repressive.

You turned on the radio and heard all kinds of things.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character.

With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.