French composer of Romanian birth. He studied the violin privately with Nina Alexandrescu, a pupil of Enescu, and subsequently composition at the Bucharest Academy of Music (MA 1969), where his teachers included Niculescu, Olah and Stroe, some of the leading figures of the newly emerging avant garde.
In 1969 Radulescu moved to Paris (he became a French citizen in 1974); here, initially inspired by Stockhausen, he began to develop his version of Spectral Music. In the early 1970s he attended classes given by Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Xenakis at the Darmstadt summer courses, and by Ferrari and Kagel in Cologne; later, from 1979 to 1981, he studied computer-assisted composition and psycho-acoustics at IRCAM.
From the mid-1970s Radulescu’s works were performed at leading European festivals including La Rochelle, Metz, Royan and Donaueschingen; in 1983 he founded the ensemble European Lucero in Paris to perform his works, and in 1991 the Lucero Festival.
His many awards include a DAAD composer residency in Berlin (1988-9) and a French Villa Medici fellowship (1989-90).
The essentials of Radulescu’s compositional thinking are expounded in the booklet Sound Plasma: Music Of The Future Sign (Munich, 1975). Asserting that the historical categories of monody, homophony, polyphony and heterophony were by then exhausted, Radulescu replaces them with the concept of sounds in a constant state of flux. The resulting ‘sound plasma’ is articulated, above all, by the periodic or aperiodic appearance and disappearance of particular spectral components, in which dynamics and timbre (especially transitions between clear pitch and noise) play a fundamental role; this constitutes a ‘spectrum pulse’. For Radulescu, the notion of ‘sound plasma’ also implies an almost neo-Boethian distinction between ‘planetary’ and ‘cosmic’ music. It is this aspect - in many respects akin to Stockhausen’s outlook - that most clearly distinguishes Radulescu’s music from the ‘instrumental synthesis’ (also spectrally based) pursued by composers like Grisey and Murail from the 1970s onwards. While the latter composers’ work is in some respects scientific and clinical, expounding clear acoustic processes, Radulescu’s aims are essentially spiritual and magical, drawing not only on Catholicism but also on Daoism (in particular, Laozi’s Daode jing).
From the start, Radulescu’s music was extravagant in its conception, duration and means. Its religious aspirations are already evident in early titles such as Flood for the Eternal’s Origins (1970) and Everlasting Longings (1970), and also in use of ‘sound icons’ (grand pianos laid on their side, and played with bows or gold coins). As for duration, his first spectral piece, Credo for nine cellos (1969) lasts 55 minutes, while Wild Incantesimo (1978) lasts nearly two hours. The latter work also calls for enormous resources: nine orchestras, whose music is projected on 19 screens using over 4400 slides.
Other instances of unusual resources include Byzantine Prayer (1988) for 40 flautists playing 72 flutes, and Do Emerge Ultimate Silence (1984) for 34 children’s voices with 34 monochords; in both these works, Radulescu explores large ensembles, whose constituent instruments possess similar basic spectra.
String instruments play a central role in Radulescu’s work. This partly reflects their capacity to make pitch-noise transitions by moving the bow towards and away from the bridge, but above all for their flexibility of tuning. Most of Radulescu’s works for strings call for a ‘spectral scordatura’ in which each string is tuned as an overtone of a low (sometimes sub-audio) fundamental. A particularly spectacular instance is ”infinite to be cannot be infinite, infinite anti-be could be infinite” (String Quartet no.4) (1976-87) for nine string quartets, eight of which may be prerecorded; here each of the 128 strings of the prerecorded quartets has a separate tuning. For many of these works, conventional notation is inadequate, and Radulescu has devised his own forms of graphic or ‘action’ notation, sometimes involving the use of several different colours.
In most of Radulescu’s music, melody per se plays little or no role; form is articulated in terms of changing registers and densities, and evolving spectral and timbral qualities. However, in some works of the 1990s, and especially those for piano (sonatas nos. 2 and 4, and the Piano Concerto), Radulescu has sought, with success, to integrate elements such as Romanian folk melodies into a spectral context.
from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
