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Jean-Claude Risset (1938–2016)

[Editor’s note: We thank Evelyn Gayou of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA-GRM) for writing this obituary and tribute.]

Born in Le Puy-en-Velay, France, in 1938, Jean-Claude Risset (see Figure 1) would become not only a musician recognized by the international artistic community, but also an undisputed theorist of the technological musical adventure of the second half of the 20th century.

As a student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris from 1957 to 1964, he obtained an Aggregation of Physics in 1961 under the direction of Professor Pierre Grivet, on the subject of “Analysis, Synthesis, Perception of Sounds, Studied with the Help of Electronic Computers.” As a sportsman, he participated in student athletics and basketball competitions at ENS, which led him later to compare the playing of the pianist to a sporting act. In parallel with his scientific studies, Jean-Claude Risset took private lessons to train himself in music. From 1961 to 1964 he studied the piano with Robert Trimaille and Huguette Goullon (pupils of Alfred Cortot), harmony and counterpoint with Suzanne Demarquez, and composition with André Jolivet (pupil of Edgard Varèse). In 1962 and 1963, he attended the Jolivet summer course at the French Center of Musical Humanism in Aix-en-Provence where he met Darius Milhaud, Henri Dutilleux, and Lejaren Hiller. Risset was already impassioned by all that was new in music. He also approached Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and met Abraham Moles, Émile Leipp, and Michel Philippot; the latter put him in contact with Pierre Barbaud (an eminent French representative of automatic music composition). From his first steps as a musician, Risset kept a taste for elaborate tones and timbres, but also a rigor in his work, instilled by his various professors. It was also his professor Grivet (an influential advocate of electronics research in France) who encouraged him to join Max Mathews and his team at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey to pursue research in the framework of his thesis. There, after much hesitation about his future, torn between art and science, he finally saw his contribution to the field as undertaking a unique path simply combining art and science on a daily basis. The year was 1964.

Figure 1.

Jean-Claude Risset. (Photo: Rozenn Risset.)

During his first stay at Bell Labs in 1964–1965, he notably met not only Edgard Varèse but also John R. Pierce, Newman Guttman, and, of course, Max Mathews. From then on, the synthesis of sounds by computer would be one of his major centers of interest. Risset began by assisting Mathews in the development of the Music V software and, in 1965, his own research led him to successfully synthesize copper trumpet sounds and various other natural sounds, under the watchful eye and ear of Edgard Varèse. In 1968, Jean-Claude Risset composed his first work that used sounds synthesized by computer: Computer Suite from Little Boy. It was precisely to illustrate the endless fall of the bomb, “Little Boy,” that he began to work on “paradoxical sounds” and acoustic illusions: sounds that rise or fall perpetually, glissandi that go up and down at the same time. In 1968, during his second stay at Bell Labs (1967–1969), Risset attended John Chowning’s demonstration of the results of his first experiments on frequency modulation (FM). Chowning communicated to Risset his synthesis data; the latter would soon use them to animate the sounds in his work Mutations.

All these pioneers of computer music become friends at work but also in life, and forever. A year would not pass without one crossing the Atlantic to find his friends for a colloquium, a symposium, exchanges on their research work, master classes in universities in the four corners of the world, or even a family holiday.

In 1969, the GRM under Schaeffer in Paris, through its research engineer Enrico Chiarucci (in charge of emerging technologies), received from Jean-Claude Risset a copy of Max Mathews’s Music V software. This gift would allow the GRM to bridge...