Luc Ferrari (1929-2005)

Luc Ferrari, a French composer who practiced his piano skills from a very young age.  He was struck with a case of tuberculosis that lead him to concentrating on more of the composition aspect of music, rather than becoming a pianist, which is what he originally dreamt of. I did a little research on him and some of his influences were: an American composer Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, an Austrian composer and conductor. Listening to a few of his pieces was actually not bad at all, compared to some of the others that I heard earlier on. For example a piece by Reese Williams that included a mixture of laughter and bird noises, which by the way, totally scared the living daylights out of me. I noticed that Luc Ferrari’s pieces are more pleasant and have some sort of rhythm to them. It was a mixture of soft piano and abrupt pauses. Another thing that I found really interesting, there was French commentary in the foreground and to me that just sounded like a part of the piece itself, seeing as I don’t understand French (I know, it’s a shame). That may not have been the whole concept of the piece but then again, the whole point of the sound piece is to have no meaning behind it, to not be able to understand it. French is a language that involves many harsh pronunciations such as, “bonjour” [bawn-zhoor] or “legume” [leg-yoom, li-gyoom]. By combining the soft playing of the piano with the French commentary, to me it sounded quite odd, yet fascinating. Luc Ferrari is similar to other pianist such as Josef Hoffman, and Ludwig Van Beethoven who experiemented with the different sounds of the piano and composed pieces with freedom of expression.

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