Éliane Radigue (January 24, 1932 – February 23, 2026) was a French composer. She began working in the 1950s and her first compositions were presented in the late 1960s. Until 2000 her work was almost exclusively created with the ARP 2500 modular synthesizerand tape. Beginning in 2001 she composed mainly for acoustic instruments.
Radigue was born in a modest family of merchants and raised in Paris at Les Halles. She later married the artist Arman with whom she lived in Nice while raising their three children, before returning to Paris in 1967. She had studied piano and was already composing before hearing a broadcast by the founder of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer. She soon met him, and in the early ’50s became his student, working periodically at the Studio d’Essai during visits to Paris. In the early 1960s, she was assistant to Pierre Henry, creating some of the sounds which appeared in his works.[6] As her own work matured, Schaeffer and Henry felt that her use of microphone feedback and long tape loops (as heard in Vice-Versa and Feedback Works 1969-1970) was moving away from their ideals, though her practice was still related to their methods.