Luc Ferrari

Born in Paris in 1929, he studied piano and composition with Alfred Cortot and Arthur Honegger before encountering Edgar Varèse, whose live broadcast of Déserts prompted him to cross the Atlantic and seek the composer out in New York. A founding member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at ORTF, he developed what he called anecdotal music — portable-recorder field recordings woven into quasi-narrative structures — culminating in the landmark 1970 piece Presque rien No. 1. He died in 2005, leaving a body of work that defined the documentary possibilities of electroacoustic composition.