A History of Melancholia

Women, artists and characters ‘[seeking] out solitude’ and ‘[sitting] lost in their own thoughts and fantasies’ have long been associated with melancholia within the Western canon.Footnote ³ Melancholia has likewise maintained a privileged relationship in fantasies of genius. Aristotle made an early link between melancholy and genius, locating an ‘anxiety in Being’ with the ethos of the philosopher.Footnote ⁴ Marsilio Ficino's 1489 De Vita foregrounded the link between ‘melancholy, creativity and intellectual prowess’,Footnote ⁵ and several centuries later Schelling would write of the indestructible melancholy of nature,Footnote ⁶ stating that melancholy was the ‘essence of human freedom’.Footnote ⁷ Robert Burton's 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy provides a more exhaustive examination of what he describes as a universal affliction, a therapeutic guide for the ‘grieving minds’ for whom sorrow is met with exuberance.Footnote ⁸

Across contemporary cultural studies, art history, literary theory and psychoanalysis, theorists have further elaborated the relationship between melancholia, creative practice, artistic formations and the modern.Footnote ⁹ Western modernity involves a series of fractures and lost objects. It involves the loss and mourning of metaphysical certainties: the death of steadfast belief in reason, progress, god and the unified self, as well as the radical restructuring of the nature of labour, time and space in the face of industrialisation, colonisation, urbanisation and technological advancement.Footnote ^10, Footnote ¹¹ The project of modernism mourns and confronts these losses or, as Jonathan Flatly writes, operates as ‘the symbolic space in which what counts as modernity, what modernity is or should be, and for whom, is contested, debated, reevaluated, or otherwise articulated’.Footnote ¹² With the emergence of recorded media and sound we find a particular series of responses to the lost object of the sound source.

In his discussion of recorded sound's radical restructuring of relationships to death, disembodiment, mourning and melancholia, Allen S. Weiss has drawn a compelling link between the advent of recorded sound and broadcasting in the nineteenth century and emerging Western modernist aesthetic formations.Footnote ¹³ With recorded sound's ability to record, reassemble and project the voices of the distant and dead, he writes, a new poetics, music and sound art emerge. As with the ego's split from consciousness in Freudian melancholia, whereby the ego and self become lost, decentred and fragmented, emergent artistic strategies stress multiple, fragmented subject positions and points of view.Footnote ¹⁴ Shock, estrangement, montage, collage and the cut-up come to characterise emerging devices and forms. Within the psychoanalytic lineage established by Freud, Weiss highlights, melancholic mourning is an obsessive variety of nostalgia, a reaction to loss which assumes pathological dimensions. Following a great loss, the ego of the melancholic begins to identify with the object of mourning; not wanting to accept the loss, the newly fragmented ego separates from consciousness such that death, or the lost object, becomes psychically internalised.Footnote ¹⁵ This produces an impossible, incessant mourning and search for the lost object, as well as their associations, resulting in extreme dejection and self-reproach.Footnote ¹⁶

That said, the Freudian theorisation of melancholia, dominant as it may seem, is not the only game in town. In her description of modernist literary responses to the horrors of the world wars and the loss of various metaphysical assurances, theorist Esther Sanchez-Pardo relates these various modernisms to two lineages of melancholy that arise in the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Alongside Freudian melancholic epistemology, with its narcissistic movement turning ‘back upon the ego’, she locates a lineage of melancholia in the work of Melanie Klein, which presents instead ‘a specific mode of object relations’.Footnote ¹⁸ Whereas Freudian melancholy is characterised by the split, fracture, disembodiment and estrangement, Kleinian melancholy opens another space ‘within modernist culture, a troubled interior space that poses a traumatic relationship with exteriority… Space in Kleinian theory is not something that has to be conquered but something that must be experienced in all its complexity. It is also a space that is empty enough to allow the (lost) object to emerge.’Footnote ¹⁹ For Klein, melancholy and loss are always already inscribed, from the outset. Before the object is lost, there is a fundamental mourning that allows for separation and loss with psychic integrity. The actual loss of the object is simply a reactivation of the trace of an originary loss.

Sanchez-Pardo details the ways in which the loss of these metaphysical assurances between the wars resulted in aesthetic attempts to shatter consciousness and the world, to employ techniques of juxtaposition in order to foreground sensations of discontinuous, fragmented time.Footnote ²⁰ Simultaneously, however, we find the rise of a counteracting belief in the power of ‘movement, change, mutability, transformation’,Footnote ²¹ a drive towards Kleinian melancholia's particular ‘mode of object relations’ and phantasmic resistance to binary divisions, ‘essentialism, reification and closure’.Footnote ²² It is my contention that Radigue's feedback works highlight the transitional, the blur, the always already lost, unwanted noise on the plane of audition, with all of the transformation, openness and integration of Kleinian melancholia. Tape recording itself, the precondition for sound separated from source, is not employed as a silent, empty space of reproduction, but instead becomes a noisy, productive voice that emerges from listening across a gap – listening to listening itself. In what follows I will offer brief descriptions of Radigue's early feedback explorations as well as provide further elaboration of the link between her technical and material processes and the work of melancholic memorialisation.

Early Feedback Works

Many of Radigue's works – Transamorem Transmortem and Trilogy of Death – explicitly reference states of transition or passing, and rightly take note of the melancholic and even sombre tone that runs through her work. The gradual, almost imperceptible textural evolution in her pieces draws attention to the fatality inherent to time itself and signals the weirdly buoyant yet relentless decay of the present. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, we find the genesis of a singular melancholic formulation in the technique and raw material of Radigue's earliest feedback works, particularly when explored from within the context and aesthetic purview of musique concrète and acousmatic music. Radigue's early feedback works, I suggest, offer a unique response to the lost, dead object of recorded sound and its silent keepers.

As a woman working largely from the margins of the post-war European musical avant-garde, Radigue's aesthetics of melancholia, I suggest, distinctly internalise the world. We might posit that those operating from the margins have a particular relationship to mourning and loss as a precondition for the very perception of the object. Where early musique concrète employs the forms of montage, cinematographic collage and the reassembly of fragmented objects in response to the separated sound source, Radigue's aesthetics involve the voicing of the recording device's listening and environment, as well as foreground relations, tape superimpositions, and gradually unfolding, complex sonic textures. Her distinct use of feedback – both Larsen effects and tape reinjection feedback – lays aside the question of the ghostly, lost sound sources of the recorded sound object, and instead foregrounds the sonorous materiality of recording itself. The resonant frequencies of the recording device listening to a resonant environment are voiced, and the listening of mechanical reproduction is rendered audible in a new home of endlessly re-combinatory tape loops, in what Radigue called at the time – some time before the development of the term ‘sound art’ – ‘propositions sonores’ (sonic propositions, or endless music).Footnote ²³

In the late 1960s, Radigue joined Pierre Henry at his Studio Apsome 2, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris.Footnote ^24, Footnote ²⁵ It had been over a decade since Radigue had first worked with Henry at the Studio d'Essai.Footnote ²⁶ In 1954 she had met the studio's co-founder, Pierre Schaeffer, whose work she had first encountered on the radio.Footnote ²⁷ In her words, Schaeffer's work resonated with her sense that ‘it is in our way of listening that sounds have their own meaning and their own sense’, that you can hear ‘some pipe with water running and it is music. And so everything can become music depending on the way you listen to it.’Footnote ²⁸ The disregarded sounds of the everyday could be heard in all of their complexity, in their inherent, composite significance. The following year, the 23-year-old mother of three would join the studio as an assistant and, in the process, learn cutting, splicing and musique concrète techniques.Footnote ²⁹

Raising her three young children, however, was her priority in the ensuing years; following an extended musical hiatus, Radigue returned to Paris in 1967 as Henry's assistant at Studio Apsome, working unpaid, as she did during her time at the Studio d'Essai.Footnote ^30, Footnote ³¹ For the following year, she archived his sound recordings, aided with editing and worked closely with him on L'apocalypse de Jean, which was performed at the Sigma Festival in Bordeaux.Footnote ^32, Footnote ³³ Whenever able, however, she continued her sonic exploration. As she described it, Henry was supportive of her pursuits, but the space constraints of the studio hindered her use of it.Footnote ³⁴ However, as Henry became engaged with courting his soon-to-be second wife, the studio was freed up for her experimentations.Footnote ³⁵ Radigue was not unused to sonic exploration from the edges, even in hiding. As a child growing up in a working-class family for whom music was ‘not a way to make a life’ – an ‘unthinkable’ occupation of the saltimbanque, or street performer – Radigue, against the wishes of her mother, was given secret piano lessons for years by a woman living in her building who had noticed her deep interest in the instrument's sonorous fascinations.Footnote ³⁶ In her time working at the Studio d'Essai, in the late 1950s, she once again was sure to camouflage her musical pursuits. As she has described, had she made it evident that she was making ‘[her] own music [she] surely would never have stayed there’; ‘as long as [she] was just a stagiare [trainee or intern], cutting, splicing tape, making … that was quite alright’.Footnote ³⁷ Following this year of assistance and personal study at Henry's Studio Apsome, it was, in fact, her creative deviations from his tape-loop technique, which he sharply criticised, that ended in her resignation.Footnote ³⁸

All the while, however, in this period preceding her move to synthesis in the 1970s, Radigue was developing a keen interest in feedback. Though these pieces were produced in the 1960s, Radigue has dated her feedback experimentations to her time at the Studio d'Essai;Footnote ³⁹ Emmanuel Holterbach has noted that ‘it seems evident the entire creative process in Éliane Radigue's work had begun in the Studio d'Essai in 1955’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Radigue found herself drawn to the electronic sounds of feedback, sounds which would have been considered unwanted noise, or ‘garbage’ sound to the studio technicians.Footnote ⁴¹ She began experimenting with two feedback forms, Larsen effects and tape reinjection feedback, both of which occur in a ‘positive feedback configuration’, a causal relation wherein an increase in input produces an increase in output, ‘typically unstable behaviour [leading] to exponential variations’.Footnote ⁴² Larsens occur in a double loop, in which a microphone is connected to a speaker, which is then reproduced and again captured; what is recorded and played back occurs in a loop with a delay between the input and output, producing variable feedback which can be controlled by moving the microphone closer and further away from the speaker. Tape reinjection feedback involves inputting the reel-to-reel output back into the record input at various speeds and amplitude levels.Footnote ⁴³ The technique, when used as sonic material, involves a study of control, anticipation and movement.

Unlike the recordings, precise tape cuts, raw material reversals, extensions and effective shifts of musique concrète's tape experiments, this technique involves improvisatory, embodied, gestural response. By moving the microphone too close to the loudspeaker, or at an excessive amplitude into the reel-to-reel's record input, you lose control of the feedback; it overwhelms the circuit and becomes painfully ear-piercing. Too far away, or amplified too quietly, and you lose the sound altogether; it disappears into silence. The technique involves a delicate balancing act, a practice of movement that is neither excessively nor inadequately controlled, that anticipates the mercurial directions of the recording device's voice. It involves deep, focused listening and moving to just the right spot. Radigue was drawn both to this practice and to the sounds that would emerge therefrom. ‘By just moving slightly the mic on this right distance [one finds] sustained tones, but slightly changing’ at ‘various speed beats’; by moving just so, a landscape of shimmering, variably pulsing tones manifests.Footnote ⁴⁴

While at Studio Apsome, Radigue began a series of feedback experiments, resulting in her 1967 Jouet électronique.Footnote ⁴⁵ After she left the studio, Henry, as she says, had the ‘elegance’ to leave her two Tolana reel-to-reel tape recorders that he had lent her.Footnote ⁴⁶ In her home studio, she used the two Tolana recorders, a Telefunken tape recorder, a Sennheiser microphone, a small mixer and two speakers. The Tolanas were particularly useful in the production of feedback: with the lightest touch, Radigue was able to produce varied tones and sonorities.Footnote ⁴⁷ She would go on to use them in her 1969–70s works, Σ = a = b = a + b (1969), In Memoriam-Ostinato (1969), Usral (1969), Omnht (1970), Stress Osaka (1970) and Vice-versa, etc. (1970).

Within the broader historical context, the substantial attention paid by Radigue to feedback stands out within musique concrète, whose origins in broadcasting, radiophonics and cinematographic montage and whose emphasis on the manipulation of pre-recorded sound, on typomorphology – on sonic type, behaviour in time and spectral distribution – produce a split between real and imagined source recognition.Footnote ⁴⁸ Musique concrète, particularly in its early years, yielded various montage assemblages of disparate, collaged sonic events. ‘The concrete music film is nothing other than a cinema of sounds,’ writes Pierre Schaeffer in In Search of a Concrete Music; it is ‘made up of pre-existing elements, taken from any sound material, noise, or musical sound, then composed experimentally by direct montage’; here, the artist uses ‘concrete means to fragment musical matter into new volumes’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Allen S. Weiss’ ‘melancholic epistemology’ explicitly links such aesthetic formations – the split, shattered and fragmentary, similarly described by Sanchez-Pardo – with the advent of recorded sound and the process of melancholic internalisation of the lost object. With the advent of recorded and broadcast sound, Weiss suggests, we find new relationships to death, disembodiment and mourning: in what Whitehead described as the ‘ghostland boneyard’ of radio, death and life become blurred; the invisible voices of the departed become ‘free-floating entities’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Addressing the haunted nature of the arts of mechanical reproduction, and the question of how to confront the echoing, transformed, lost objects of recorded media, posed a central problematic for the Studio d'Essai and acousmatic sound, which turned to the object's ghost, or phantasm, and the listening experience itself, rather than fixating on its origin. ‘For the “concrete” musician, there is no difference between the cut bell and the piece of train: they are “sound fragments”.’Footnote ⁵¹ The lost, internalised object, as Julia Kristeva puts it, is ‘better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested’ than lost entirely.Footnote ⁵² Musique concrète, in its centring of acousmatic sound – sound separated from source – and in its emphasis on and plastic recombination of these sonic memories, or disembodied, lost, fragmentary sound-objects, might be said to exact this sonic loss, a loss that is invoked in Schaeffer's title choice for his 1952 In Search of a Concrete Music text, a reference to Marcel Proust's great modernist tome, In Search of Lost Time.

In Radigue's feedback works, we find a distinct engagement with this search for the lost sonic object. Some of the works, such as Elemental (1967) and Opus 17 (1970), feature recorded sound with feedback acting as either a slow, decaying force of electronified erosion or as a timbral counterpoint to the source material. The majority of these works, however – everything Radigue produced from the time she began working alone in her studio – feature no pre-recorded sounds of the world. Much like early video art experimentation, the technology of capture becomes the medium. The act of recording sounds itself voices an already haunted listening on the plane of audition. The mourning conveyed in Radigue's work does not so much express the ‘phantasmic projection of an impossible presence seeking psychic disintegration’ that Weiss relates to the ‘amplification, reversal, dubbing, projections, broadcast, and disembodiment’ of recorded sound;Footnote ⁵³ instead, Radigue's use of feedback engenders a concept of listening which includes the resonances of unknown internal and external co-existent murmuring voices, silently inscribing, guiding and distributing the act of listening itself. In this listening, the notion of a singular listener capturing, confronting and reconstructing a static world is upended; instead, a Kleinian, melancholic listener emerges, for whom inside and outside – both known and unknown – are noisily blurred, and a gap allows for a new mutability and transformation in a distributed, vibrant listening.

Beyond Radigue's feedback technique and choice of raw materials, we can locate an emphasis on mournful reintegration of loss in the works’ remarkable wielding of gesture (the hand's touch is often lost in electronic and concrete music) in their slow, timbrally rich crossfades and durations and in the contexts in which they were presented. The feedback works do not include sonic splits and shocks, nor do they adhere to the structure of cinematographic montage integral to musique concrète. Her sonic propositions, or endless music, are much more akin to contemporary definitions of sound art, or immersive sound installation, and produce what would, in her 1970 Omnht, be called an ‘environmental space’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Omnht, a piece using three long loops of different durations that slowly de-synchronise, was diffused through three transducers placed behind the walls of artist Tania Mouraud's installation One More Night, at the Galerie Rive Droite. Mouraud described the work as a ‘fausse-cercueil’, a speculative, imaginary ‘fake coffin’ in which ‘l'oeuvre c'est le vid’, ‘the work is the void’, whereby Radigue's sound encouraged ‘s'accoutumer à la mort’, a ‘getting used to death’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The walls became topographical, a vibratory transducer, creating an architectural installation of vibrating membranes and resonant, variable relations as the listeners moved through and rested in the space.

Radigue's early works were often presented as an environment of related objects, creating interactions between sound, visual elements, sculpture, architecture and the listener-participants themselves. Her 1970 Vice-versa, etc., created for a Lara Vincy group exhibit, plays with sonic layering and durational malleability while incorporating the compositional collaboration of the listener.Footnote ⁵⁶ The installation invites listeners to play the left and right channels in either direction at different speeds, creating shifting soundscapes depending on the listener's choice: each variation opens into different textures, different sonic worlds. This endless music could, in theory, provide an infinite, emergent soundscape in which the listener can explore embodied, improvisatory gestures, wherein each movement generates a new sonic environment. The final works resist fixture, inviting listeners to mould the sonic environment through the manipulation of tape lengths, encouraging modulation of the record's rpm speed (as with Σ = a = b = a + b.), or through the body's very movement through the sonic space (Labyrinth sonore). Each mediation, format or listening provides a kaleidoscopic angle or sonic fragment of an unrepresentable whole, rather than offering a total or final composition.

Radigue's works are less concerned with shock or the ‘cut’ of splicing than with mutating sonic mixtures and interactions, tape superimpositions, gradually shifting soundscapes and the endless possibilities of layered, durationally malleable combinations of sound. Origin and ground, inside and outside, are blurred. The lost object is not fractured and then reassembled. Instead, the voiced object is located in the act of listening, within a transmuting environment. The material sounds only via this tenuous capture. An empty but vibrant space is laid open in which lost, typically silent objects manifest in variable, navigable complexities.

The works, at least in my listening, offer submergence in a deep, trance-like state, between wakefulness and sleep. There are no harsh breaks or caesuras; the shock of modernity and the juxtapositions of montage are met with a calm, dreamlike opening, a horizon of sonorous pulsations which seem to summon mournful processing and psychic reintegration. Delicate feedback voices slowly surface and dissipate in haunting animate breaths, cries and murmurs, and we, the listeners, are left, in the words of Radigue, freely ‘immersed in the ambivalence of continuous modulation with the uncertainty of being and/or not being’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Closure is never achieved, but this ‘failure’ is imbued with the endless possibilities of voicing lost objects that were misplaced, yet co-existent from the outset, in listening itself.