Do you notice a mistake?
François Bayle was born in Madagascar and grew up in the Comoro Islands. When he was 14, he went to Bordeaux to pursue his studies. Musically self-taught, he worked as a schoolteacher while studying with Olivier Messiaen, then attended the Darmstadt Summer Course every year from 1959 to 1962, where he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen.
In 1960, Pierre Schaeffer hired him to the general secretariat of the newly created Service de la Recherche de la RTF, a public institution dedicated to fundamental research in radio and television. He unofficially took charge of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1962, of which he was made the official director in 1966. What he called his “first true creations” date from this same year, starting with Espaces inhabitables (1966) — although in 1962 he had already composed the score for Trois Portraits d’un Oiseau-Qui-N’existe-Pas, a noted short film by Robert Lapoujade, who also worked at the Service de la Recherche. When the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF), the public institution that succeeded the RTF, broke apart in 1975, and the Institut national de l’Audiovisuel (INA) was created, the GRM was brought under its aegis, and François Bayle was named the head of the INA-GRM.
During his time at the GRM, he spearheaded the design of the Acousmonium in 1974 as well as the launch of the INA-GRM record label in 1976. He also produced concerts, notably the “Cycle acousmatique,” as well as regular broadcasts on the France Musique radio station (among others, Acousmathèque, starting in 1985) and supported the development of advanced-technology musical instruments such as the Syter, GRM Tools, and the MIDI Formers computer programs.
As a composer, François Bayle often referred to his works as “utopias,” constructed in the form of suites, trajectories, initiations — such as L’Expérience Acoustique (1972), Erosphère (1980), Son Vitesse-Lumière (1983), Aéroformes (1986), Fabulae (1992), La Main vide (1994) — which, as they were renewed over the years, investigate “like writing” the texts and textures of sounds, formal techniques, material for ideas, meta-forms and metaphors.
The Acousmonium, as Bayle wrote, was “Another utopia, devoted to pure “listening” … as a penetrable “projection area”, arranged with a view to immersion in sound, to spatialised polyphony, which is articulated and directed.”
Do you notice a mistake?