Art & Creativity Quote by Luc Ferrari

Electronic music, for Luc Ferrari, isn’t a genre so much as a new kind of mind. The phrase "pure sounds, completely calibrated" carries the postwar studio fantasy: audio stripped of the messy fingerprints of breath, bow, and room, rebuilt as controllable material. "Pure" here isn’t innocence; it’s purification-by-method, the belief that sound can be engineered with the same certainty as mathematics. Ferrari is pointing to a shift in authorship: the composer stops merely writing for instruments and starts designing the conditions under which sound exists.

The giveaway is "think digitally, as it were". Coming from a mid-century composer, "digital" reads less like laptops and more like discretization: breaking a continuous world into countable steps. That matters because it makes serialism portable. Serial technique began as a way to organize pitch with rigor; Ferrari’s line suggests technology turns that rigor into an expandable operating system. Duration, timbre, dynamics, spatial placement - the whole sensory field can be "serialized" once machines let you measure and reproduce it reliably.

Subtext: excitement with a warning label. Calibration promises freedom (any sound is possible), but it also courts a kind of bureaucratic aesthetics, where control becomes the point. Ferrari, who later gravitated toward more worldly, ambiguous sonic narratives, seems to be describing the lure he both used and outgrew: technology as the bridge between strict modernist ideas and a new reality where the studio itself becomes the instrument, and composition becomes a form of systems-thinking.