Brunhild Ferrari, a significant – and until recently unsung – pioneer of Musique Concrète, has been gaining recognition in the past decade as a composer in her own right. Brunhild Meyer (b.1937) was drawn in to the realm of cutting edge electronic music experimentation through meeting her husband-to-be, Luc Ferrari, after arriving in Paris from Germany in 1959. Ferrari, along with Pierre Schaeffer, was a founding member of Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM), trailblazing the path for electro-acoustic music in the 1960s and 70s.
Collaborating closely on Luc Ferrari’s projects until his death in 2005, Meyer-Ferrari recalls: ‘He engaged me for work that was really interesting to me; it was research on [the] relationship between sound and image.’ This was to be the foundation for their enduring partnership of 40 years and for her continuing stewardship of her husband’s extensive archive (adopting her husband’s surname only after his death). During the 70s and 80s her own output included many sound works for radio broadcast in France, Germany and the USA.
Which is where Brooklyn-based musician David Grubbs and Glasgow-based film-maker and musician Luke Fowler come in for an evening celebrating the sounds and music of Brunhild Ferrari at Cafe Oto.
Fowler introduced the evening’s programme which began with two short 16mm films he’d made about Brunhild over the course of a year, having met her two years earlier and informed by David Grubbs’ long-term engagement with the composer.
Grubbs and Fowler appeared together in April 2024 at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York for a screening of the first of these films celebrating Brunhild, N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild) (2023) and their first ever duo performance, working with material which she supplied to them.
It was initially planned that Brunhild, at 88 years of age, was to be present at Cafe Oto. However, she was unable to join them in person but supplied sound material for them to work with, as she did for New York a year ago, for their duo entitled J’ai pensé sans paroles (‘I thought without words’) which constituted the evening’s second set.
The films were followed by Brunhild’s most recent sound work, Errant Ear, a compelling and acutely engaging work of resounding clarity and sophisticated complexity, involving a collage of musical statements and sounds recorded in the field, commissioned by Glasgow’s radiophrenia in 2024.
She encapsulates the experience perfectly on the radiophrenia site (link below). ‘I had the pleasure of using sound moments lent to me by Luke Fowler, Chris Watson and Luke Ferrari and I mixed them with my own recent recordings and some of my archives from the 1970s onwards – albeit sometimes with painful joy.’ She describes ‘this feeling of wandering, of strolling in my memories that I was able to capture with my ears, my eyes, my nose, all my sensations, things that my life is made of …[feeling] free to enjoy surprises, to rediscover my memories, to give them new life.’
Fowler’s film-making modus operandi, has parallels to Brunhild’s composing processes, creating fragmented, obliquely viewed images which are combined to form a resoundingly connected audio-visual landscape to open up tangential associations and insights that avoid traditional narrative structures.
In Errant Ear, bird calls and thunderous crashes were conflated with the sounds of the everyday and the industrial – children’s and adult voices, nature’s rushings and rustlings, the noises of passing buses, trams and trains, bells, fragments of piano and flute playing, a kettle drum and much more – all captured and sensitively layered, with every nuance relayed through Cafe Oto’s sound system with absolute precision and clarity, making for an extraordinary listening experience.
J’ai pensé sans paroles extended the premise in the live duo performance, which had Grubbs and Fowler behind laptops, working intuitively with Brunhild’s sound material, to create intentionally collaged collisions and on two occasions, Grubbs at Cafe Oto’s Yamaha grand working with Brunhild’s recorded piano fragments.
We heard footsteps disappearing, church bells, the quotidien sounds of the street, drilling and bird song, flowing water, and finally, a welling industrial hum. Which brought one back to the films where we saw Brunhild, mike in hand, recording ambient sound from the street, bookended by images of her reel-to-reel tapes and analogue recording equipment in her studio.
All disjointed fragments, yet firmly and knowingly connected to create an entirely coherent flow, of which Brunhild would have been proud.
Programme:
Two films by Luke Fowler:
N’Importe Quoi (for Brunhild) (2023, 9min.)
N’Importe Quoi (Extérieur-Jour) (2024, 11min.)
Errant Ear – new piece by Brunhild Ferrari
Duo performance by Luke Fowler and David Grubbs
sound material provided by Brunhild Ferrari
