Editing Luc Ferrari (section)

==Biography==
Ferrari was born in Paris, and was trained in music at a very young age. He studied the piano under [[Alfred Cortot]], [[musical analysis]] under [[Olivier Messiaen]], and [[Musical composition|composition]] under [[Arthur Honegger]]. His first works were freely [[atonal]]. A case of tuberculosis in his youth interrupted his career as a pianist. From then on he mostly concentrated on musical composition. During this illness he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the radio receiver, and with pioneers such as [[Arnold Schoenberg|Schönberg]], [[Alban Berg|Berg]], and [[Anton Webern|Webern]].

In 1954, Ferrari went to the United States to meet [[Edgard Varèse]], whose ''Déserts'' he had heard on the radio, and had impressed him. This seems to have had a great effect on him, with the tape part in ''Déserts'' serving as inspiration for Ferrari to use [[magnetic tape]] in his own music. In 1958 he co-founded the [[Groupe de Recherches Musicales]] with [[Pierre Schaeffer]] and [[François-Bernard Mâche]]. He taught in institutions around the world, and worked for film, theatre and radio. By the early 1960, Ferrari had begun work on his Hétérozygote, a piece for magnetic tape which uses ambient environmental sounds to suggest a dramatic narrative. The use of ambient recordings was to become a distinctive part of Ferrari's musical language.

Ferrari's ''Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer'' (1970) is regarded as a classic of its kind. In it, Ferrari takes a day-long recording of environmental sounds at a [[Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia|Yugoslavia]]n beach and, through editing, makes a piece that lasts just twenty-one minutes. It has been seen as an affirmation of [[John Cage]]'s idea that music is always going on all around us, and if only we were to stop to listen to it, we would realise this. Ferrari continued to write purely instrumental music as well as his tape pieces. He also made a number of documentary films on contemporary composers in rehearsal, including [[Olivier Messiaen]] and [[Karlheinz Stockhausen]].

Ferrari died in [[Arezzo]], Italy on 22 August 2005, at age 76.