(Room40)Splicing and manipulating speech, urban noise and more, this collection shows how strangely beautiful the 84-year-old Argentinian composer’s musique concrète can be
Beatriz Ferreyra turned 84 this year and is still composing
music – dense, immersive sound sculptures – as the last surviving member from the field of mid-20th-century pioneers that included the likes of Edgard Varèse and Pierre Henry. She was born in
Argentina but has spent the last six decades in
France, where she relocated in 1961 to study with Nadia Boulanger and György Ligeti. Like many émigré composers based in
Paris at that time – among them Stockhausen and Xenakis – Ferreyra was drawn into the orbit of Pierre Schaeffer, who was creating experimental montages of found sound using tape manipulation and calling it musique concrète.