The French composer who carried the GRM's musique-concrète tradition to one of its summits in De Natura Sonorum · a master of electroacoustic sound whose catalogue runs deep beneath later electronic music.
Bernard Parmegiani is filed as a Forms figure because he carried the GRM's line, the tape-and-acousmatic tradition begun by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, to one of its summits, and because his catalogue is one of the sound-worlds the industrial and noise traditions draw on. Born in 1927, he came to composition by an unusual route: trained as a mime under Jacques Lecoq, then a sound engineer for French television, before Schaeffer noticed him and brought him into the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.
At the GRM, the epicentre of European electronic music, he worked alongside Iannis Xenakis and the other early experimentalists. He stayed faithful to concrète and acousmatic method, building works from recorded sound objects, while mastering the synthesiser, his music literally electroacoustic in mixing electronic sources with microphone-recorded ones. L'œil écoute (1970) marked the first use of an analogue synthesiser at the GRM.
His masterwork is De Natura Sonorum (1975), twelve movements that juxtapose natural and synthetic sound with a clarity and economy that divide his catalogue into a before and after. It is widely held to be among the most important pieces in the entire history of electroacoustic music, and around it sit Dedans-Dehors, the vast La Création du Monde, the Exercismes and a string of computer works, much of it collected in INA's comprehensive twelve-disc edition.
The Bureau files Bernard Parmegiani as a Forms figure: the GRM master whose electroacoustic depth runs beneath the electronic and noise music this archive documents, and whose influence is openly acknowledged by Aphex Twin, Autechre and a generation of electronic composers. He left the GRM for his own studio in 1992 and died in 2013, leaving one of the richest catalogues in the tradition.